QM will be traded. I see no possibility of joking in QM. Maybe the 400% increase makes you think I am joking? I remember someone on this forum said: nothing is impossible.
so you quit trading years ago? Today is, just like last Friday, a tricky day. Market dropped overnight, giving hope to sellers. But if you started to sell after pit open, you would get burned. One scratched trade, made $8.
so I was sitting there after pit open, waiting for my setup, nothing happened. so I waited for the equities market to open, again, nothing happened. so I waited for the inventory report. After the report, the usual headless chickens' activites=the stupid oil traders had no idea where they wanted to go. At that point, I lost my patience. I pulled the trigger and faded some stupid oil traders who were buying. As anyone who fades a lot knows, fading is stupid. So I took $20 and got out. I figured there was nothing to gain from the market anymore, at most it would be a choppy afternoon toward the close. So I decided to work on my method. A few minutes later, I looked back at the chart, well, you know what happened. The money-making opportunities just passed me. Who would think of something like that could happen at 11am? We were entering lunch time period. Maybe I should wake up a few hours later tomorrow.
You're trading a small account and it sounds like you're trading scared. You're distracting yourself from focusing on the task at hand, then seeing the moves after the fact and pissed you missed them. Are you new to this contract? It takes a lot of time to study it and find setups you're comfortable trading, then to determine the best entries, stops, and exit strategies under various conditions. I spent 6 months sim trading CL before going live. Then it took me another 9 months or so of trading live to get to where I could stay focused throughout the trading session and trade all my setups. There's a long-running joke on ET that price will make a strong move as soon as I step away from my desk. That came from all the times when price was consolidating and I got bored or I tried trading the narrow range and had several scratch trades or small winners/losers in a row and got frustrated. I'd then take a break, and voila! out of nothing came the Big Something. That's how this contract trades (I'm guessing QM mirrors CL only smaller tick size). It puts on a move, then it pulls back (you can trade both with and against the trend when the moves are strong). After a strong move or a strong trending set of moves, price consolidates. Out of that will come a good move. Consolidation takes 30-60 minutes on average, so take your time waiting for all the scalpers to have fun with each other and shake each other out. You'll eventually see a road sign beginning to form during consolidation. Traders will become antsy and you'll see a pattern to the consolidation by way of slightly higher lows or lower highs (ascending or descending triangle), or maybe a symmetrical triangle will form, with the range narrowing as price prepares to break out. Sometimes there are false breaks out of the range, trapping traders by a tick or two. No big deal, stay patient and calm, the move will come and you want your order in place to catch it! If you aren't experienced with common price action setups, check out this site: http://www.daytradingcoach.com/daytrading-technicalanalysis-course.htm Then study your charts, find out how these setups work in your favorite time frame, and put together a plan
Thanks for sharing, my fellow trader. I am scared before the market opens, during the market and only relieved after the market. I am working on this issue all the time. Actually I am scared of myself, you have no idea how stubborn I am. That has delayed my success for a long time. But in my heart I know I will get there eventually, as long as the market is there (sometimes I pray that SEC and the Wall Street crooks don't impose the trader tax and drive retail traders out of the market).
I spent some time on Skype with a young trader last year and shared with him my tactics for trading CL. He grasped the concepts immediately and began sim trading. He was texting me his sim trades and pretty much trading me under the table. That's a good feeling, when you mentor someone and they just run with it! Because of his incredible progress after just a couple sessions, I invited him to join our Skype group when he decided to trade live. He was trading CL with a very small account, smaller than yours, I believe. When he went live, he simply couldn't handle the heat of survivable stops in CL. He hesitated to trade certain setups, then he micromanaged the trades he took. He was clearly frustrated by the huge disconnect between sim trading and live trading. We encouraged him to get a job, save up some money and once he had a larger account, give it another go. He was clearly a gifted trader who knew exactly what to do, but when real money was on the line, that he had to make a living with, he lost his mojo. It's like the old story about walking along a narrow plank of wood with the ground a foot below you, No problem, you confidently cross the chasm and never lose your balance. Now do the same thing on the same plank 30 stories above the ground. Good luck! Shortly after we gave him the boot he got a bit of funding and although his account was still very small (not much more than yours), it made all the difference and he was able to trade very well with a true trader's mindset. So your first step is to define high probability setups with strict rules for trade management. Second step is to trade them, all of them. If you pick and choose, you will pick the weak trades and pass on the strong trades, because the market rewards what is difficult and at the hard right edge of a chart, the great trades can look quite ugly, and feel quite scary, and the weak trades can feel quite easy (reference Mark Fisher's "The Logical Trader", page 33, for his description of the "retail bus people" to understand this concept; it's a real game-changer). Third step is if you haven't read Mark Douglas's book "Trading in the Zone" at least 3 times, now is the time to do it.
High probability may be something that doesn't exist. Even if it does exist, it may not matter. For example, fading is a high probability setup. Out of ten spike up (down) that you fade, you will get 6 or 7 winners, but the winners are usually small. The 3 or 4 times the spike turns out to be strong trend up (down), a trader without stop or unable to keep the stop or removing stop will get killed. There is some validity in selecting setups. Not all setups are equal, some are high-quality, some are medium-quality, some are low-quality. I often hesitate in taking mid-day setups. Trading in the Zone describes traders' errors very well, but offers no effective solution. I believe the author has no idea how to trade successfully. I used to doubt the statement: A book writer doesn't know how to trade, if he knows how to trade, he would not be writing a book. Now I really believe the statement. It applies in all book writers: from Van Tharp, Mark Douglas to Steenbarger. None of them has come up with an effective solution.
took $20 early in the morning. Last hour activity is beyond my reach due to overnight margin requirement. I have come back to a solution I used before. I believe, for now, it is the right one to solve the problem. If this solution stays for one week, it will probably be the permament one.