mgin, did you make 15 points on one contract???? are you a market wizard or what? I made 1 dollar today trading real money, heading for fame and fortune! I clearly have a bigger problem with the psychological part now then I had in the beginning. In the beginning I didn´t understand how difficult this was, so real money didn´t make me nervous. Now I chicken out to often at break-even and then the market of course move to my target after I´m out. Anyway, I´m just continuing with the channels and price-volume analysis and formations. I just study the very basics of jacks ideas, cause I´m to much of a newbie to be able to handle more, and I most often stick to the simulator. Good luck to everyone, weekend for me, nothing more to do than to get as much screentime as possible... /Stalker
...comments from stalker Not hardly stalker. These are 2 contract scaleout trades on that PM BO and a few nickels from scalps/washes. Apparently, NT doesn't report scale trades very well. If you're live you're already doing better than me. Read Jack on EQ for what you're experiencing. Its quite common. Regardless, congrats on your progress. Based on your comments, you've come a long way in the thread already. Keep it up.
Whoa - this is insightful! Thanks! Ditto - what I find discouraging though is that other people have posted questions which have gone unanswered. Personally, I don't need "the answer" per se, but a response showing where to look or what to look for is extremely appreciated. Icarus' suggestion has helped me become more organized in finding my own answers, but the going is slow. I guess people don't like posting in what appears to be a vaccum. I sure don't. I haven't. I am much further behind the curve than anyone else here though, so it will be awhile before I can begin to get to "working" on SCT. Would it work for you to trade his equities system until you are capitalized enough to quit your day job? Or, perhaps taking a few weeks off as a leave of absence or vacation? Rearranging your schedule so you work 4 and have 1 day free for trading? I do!!! I just need to figure out how to get on the bike. Then pedal. Oh, and keep balance. (I'm at plateau -1, you are at about 6 ) Anthony
We are all peers among peers. There will always be questions, and often, the answers that are given are ones that we do not want to hear or believe is not answering the actual question. Collectively, there is a common emphasis. But no specific oracle. I have had many iterations of back and forth with several individual on a number of topics scattered all over the place. I answer a question and they are either accept or say that they're answering a different question. Having felt as you do at some point several months ago, I was hit with a very blunt fact of the matter which was that EVERYONE, CAN IN FACT ANSWER THEIR OWN QUESTION. The problem most have with this is that answering one's own question takes time and a modest amount of effort to LEARN and establish where and what exactly is the truth in that which you seek. I struggle with these types of things all the time. I keep pages of detailed Questions that I periodically reread and check off once I have LEARNed the answer to the question. It is slow process for sure. This is self-learning and I have found it to be a superior way of building rock-solid beliefs... Our immediate questions are always deamed to be the "most important" ones. Most of the time, I find that the first question I want to ask is actually the least important. GO FIGURE! MAK!
mgin thank you for your response, and others as well, i have been re-encouraged lol. it appears to me that your only problem at this point is as you say, your EQ, my only problem is my IQ. something interesting, i'm looking at a 133t chart of ES and everything is more fluid than on a 5 min. There appear to be about 1/3 more bars at least...both price and volume. resulting in a smoother flow of data and possibly smoother turns mgin??? wouldn't this have the same effect as having up a fractal pair? i've just been looking at the channels and trading off the pv relationship ...also using macd and stoch for confirmation...seems like i can wash easier and even get out at better than wash. it kinda looks like the 30 minute bar trading and coloring composite bars...you get more information to exit sooner etc... sorry for my poor explanation.
Very true indeed Mak, and point taken. We all get frustrated and much venting is done through the forum so some posts should be viewed in this context (speaking for self). Let's make it plain, you can't hang with the dream team and not expect to put your work in. Thanks for your comments aweiss. In regards to equities, capitalization is my problem. I've attempted spyder's approach using options with some limited success, but a good number of companies in the universe don't have options on them. Leverage is my attraction to futures and the obsession with sct. I expect to be in a position to take some time off very soon with the intention of live trading. I do trade with real money when I take a day off so I'm not a total virgin (and I've lost plenty in the past) but most of my PT is done during work hours. I'm working on your last suggestion as we speak. I'm in management so it isn't as easy as it sounds. Agree Danth about the smoothness of tick charts. That seems to be a bad word around here so I never speak much about it but if you look at some of my prior charts, you'll see the channels annotated on tick or vol charts. I don't annotate the tick/vol charts in isolation. I would highly advise against that. But I do transcribe the traverses and channels from the 5m/2m to the tick and/or volume charts for smoother perspective. However, there's something to be said about the element of time that exists in 5m/2m charts that doesn't exist with tick/vol charts which can skew the channel context on the latter. I too, like Mak, studied with the Proflogic crew, who has the purest approach to tick/vol charts IMO. However, his analysis is one level down on the oscillation level while Jack is one level up where he scopes the oscillations using channels and projects them into the future. I think both chart types and approaches have a unique quality to them so I study Jack's methods on both. Lately, I've added the 5m/30s volume to a tick/vol chart to add the dimension of time to it and it too provides an interesting perspective. There's already an exhausting amount of work with conventional Jack and time-based charts so it's not advisable to fool around too much with anything else if you haven't made a full pass (or 10) of all the layers of Jack methods. I just wanted to acknowledge your comment.
i understand, my only point was it seems to me you get the same effect of a fractal pair by simply using 1 chart with a tick value...rather than 2 charts granted when i'm talking fractal pair here i'm talking about 5min es and 1min es...not 2min ym (which would be a parrallel fractal pair.)
Agreed Mak. I think the biggest challenge is coming up with pertinent questions... from there you have something that can be researched and solved. Looking back to when this thread started I can see I didn't have a clue what I needed to learn to move forward -- thankfully Stalker and others were asking the right questions to get the ball rolling. After you, Jack, and others held our hands through a lot of basics I feel I'm in a much better position to self-learn, which I'm grateful for. The top of my list at the moment is: "how do we determine where we are in the price cycle" back to researching...