Stalker Dont know much about gaps but there was a nice "setup" this morning. Was waiting to see if you said anything. Four pullbacks from the high but only one had the proper r/r. Could have took a couple of points or still be in it. edit. I drew these in rather quickly. PLease disregard the third one as that was not a new hod.
On a side note IB has a rather nice feature now called market screener which has a statistics page listing adv/dec issues and volume for amex, nas and nyse. Pretty neat. If you were watching this morning you would have gotten a pretty good indication that we were going up.
I was looking at that set-up you show, reason I didn´t take it was that there were a lot of reports at 11 and I never have a clue which one´s are important except for the feds. I took two papertrades on Eur and Nq though to practice, both nice looking retracements to 20 ema, both winners. I used to look at the market scanner, liked it and I heard on the tapes that Jack watches these things in the beginning of the day, but since I upgraded tws the damn page won´t show anything, it´s blank
I think you have something here, but don't forget that nothing is absolute: I mean the majority is not always wrong either. Also, there may be other interpretations of your 1, 2, 3 observations. I.e. mine: 1. use stop orders to enter and / or reverse 2. don't go out, but reverse: think SCT 3. trade one frame (5 min), but fine tune your reversal / entry /exit on a lower frame (2min), with an eye on the bigger picture (30 min, daily)
Only one trade on es, BE, so mostly an excercise in discipline, but I´m very satisfied with the day anyway, managed to read volume and pace very well and exited all three trades right before the market turned against me.
I dont know of any market moving numbers that come out after 10:30 other than fomc. The 11 oclock stuff is bond sales, et.
I took 2 trades today. I didn't get up until 9:45, so I missed the opening and hence didn't take any AM trades. I had originally intended to just follow the market and practice the drills, but I couldn't resist the PM breakout trade. S1 @ 14:31 1294.75 exit @ 15:31 1294.5 +.25 Entered on the BO of previous bar, with rising volume. I should have exited much earlier, but I was expecting the L2R retracement to end sooner than it did and then resume on the downward channel. I really wanted to practice holding, and so I did However, lesson learned - take profits when pt 2 is signaled, re-enter when pt 3 arrives. (I was not anticipating the move up because I thought the eod activities of profs leaving, bottom fishing starting up, etc. was in play.) L2 @ 15:32 1295.0 exit @ 15:39 1295.5 +.5 Entered as soon as I saw the new channel was forming and volume was rising. Exited because there was a sudden intrabar volume burst with price moving down, and I wanted to bank something today. Comments, criticisms, suggestions are welcome. I've got a tough hide, so if you see I'm being stupid don't be afraid to say so.
I think both your trades were good, you read the situations well. One thing I was thinking about is the volume push you wait for. I find it to be a dilemma - if you wait for volume to pick up you enter with the crowd. If the move gets faded you can easily loose a point or two, and your winners are often gonna be small. At the same time volume is a confirmation that there is going to be a substantial move at all. But it´s much easier to take a wash when you enter before volume picks up. I don´t know how the more experienced traders do, but I´ve just realised it´s much easier to enter aggressively and early and then get out fast if nothing happens. This is more of anticipating I guess, don´t know which is "right or wrong".
I also looked at your similar post for Friday and I like how you've organized yourself. I especially like how you are taking notice that your monitoring is not the same while sidelined looking for entry and while in the market looking for exit. Your comments accompanying your actions suggest that you are in your best state of mind and accessing your knowledge and skills on entry but in a less effective state of mind on exit. As a quick exercise I put into a list all your comments accompanying your exit actions and struck a line through those parts that I deemed ineffectual to growing your account. Then I made a clean list of what remained and juxtaposed them with your comments accompanying your entry actions. The result is revealing of where you are at this point. I think you definitely have the right stuff. In any case, you might want to do the exercise yourself, and if you care to, post the result here with what you see. It may be highly instructive for others as well.