7.75 is break-even, but it keeps bouncing off that number! I still think a few more ticks down are likely
Yes, agree with Handle123. Do daily recaps instead. It's for your pleasure, not added pressure. A 4 tick avg target and stop is more like 3.5 avg win and 4.5 tick avg loss after transaction fees (or 3.75 / 4.25 with low trans fees for size). That's stone cold expert level to maintain 70%+ winners long-term at that avg win / loss ratio. Not doubting you. Just that I don't see how that could possibly be considered "conservative". Now, having 45-55% winners at 1.5x to 2.0x win/loss ratio on avg...that's conservative (more common to achieve). Anyway, best wishes to you Peter. Interested in checking how I look at the 1 min charts to see where you're taking your risk.
Thanks very much for the good wishes. I agree with your analysis of the P/L on these small trades. It's necessary to have an extremely good entry and a fairly quick resolution to have profitable days. I have found that I can get those good entries when the market is moving more slowly and it usually goes well enough, I call it conservative because I'm taking quick small profits; maybe it's not the right word. I prefer not trading in the first couple of hours for this reason. Of course, today I didn't follow my rules and found myself in a couple of dicey situations. I still had a good enough day. Thanks again.
Market has already decided to go down. The trend was obviously downtrend. down momentum was rather strong. everyone was eager to short the market. Even if you want to earn one tick, don't attempt to go against the flow.
Interestingly, I have the opposite view today. The market TRIED to go down, but crept way back up after the first hour until the last 30 minutes of RTH. To me, that's a market that wants to go up.
I am currently finding ES too hard to trade. I have been focusing on CL with a wider stop and letting the trade take more time to get to a target once I feel strongly I have determined the trend. My risk to reward right now is negative, but my win % is higher. Giving an example, let's say I go long and I believe the trend to be long. However, main support is lower than my entry so I did 1 contact and was willing to add 1 more closer to the support level. Now if my 2nd contract is filled and both contracts get stopped out, I will of course take a bigger loss then my gain for my 1 contract reaching target. If I used a standard stop and target on my current trade tonight this is what would have happened. I went long, trade went my way for a bit but did not reach my target, price then went below my entry and continued down for CL. Now, if I had used a standard stop at this point I would have been stopped out but I was not. ES reached a new high, and started to go down down. Was thinking some bad news came out, so I shorted ES. ES misses my target by 1 tick and goes against me, so I kill the trade for 1 tick loss. CL starts to go back up. ES then went to my target without me. ES then started to go back up, so I went long and took 1 tick of profit to bring myself back to break even. I even wrote in my Trade Setups to stop panic selling ES when I am long CL since the markets are not totally correlated and I just end up taking minor losses in ES which I need to make up in CL. Then my internet cuts out. I do trouble shoot problem on Windows 10. Says dns server can't be found or something like that. I call Spectrum. They say Internet and TV are out in your area. So I close my computer and start to watch a DVD. Suddenly I notice the cable box is starting to finish it's reboot. So, I go back and restart the modem and computer. I then log back into Ninja Trader and see my CL target got hit. I notice that ES spiked below support before going up to make a HH. However, CL never even filled my 2nd contract. My first contract was fine. The thing I do need to try to work on is maybe adding another contract to CL so I have 2 contracts at the start if I am not too far from a support level so that if price were to continue in the direction of the trend I could then do better with my 2nd contract. I have not seen many trades where my 2nd contract gets filled if I am in a winning trade at the start. I used to keep spread sheet for each trade I did, and would write notes on the trade. Now I just keep up to date my Trade Setups document where I write down what rules I am following. Another issue for me sometimes is when I have a winning trade, I don't feel like taking another trade, but if I have a losing trade I look for another trade. I need to be more consistent, either take all setups for the day or limit how many trades I plan to do for the day so that I prevent my main problem which is over trading / revenge trading. Hope this helps.