BRrrrrrrrrrrr I'm dying to short the market right now and hold over the week end. Is not that foolish? I can't even justify why I want to do that!!!!! revenge? probably. But I'm not going to do it.
Hi momoNY, Actually, the phrase price action only trader has different meanings from one trader to the next. I don't use indicators like stoch, macd, cci et cetera on my charts. However, I do use market breath info like VIX et cetera during particular trading situations. I do know some price action only traders that only use volume on their charts while others only use price moving averages on their charts. Mark (a.k.a. NihabaAshi) Japanese Candlestick term
Ind, The problem here is when you start to say hourly, daily etc.. you may run to the weekly, add to it MACD, CCI ... I know from manual backtesting that this works just fine. The more timeframes you add, the more distracted and indecisive you will be. Too much information leads to too much contradiction sometimes. You can justify the long as well as the short, depending on what you are looking at. I decided to stick to 2min 5 min and 15 min nothing else. Looking at a daily chart at the beginning of the day is fine, at a risk of being biased.
Ah that VIX, I just started to get some data thru IB. I must have someting like 20 days of intraday. Man, When you look at the 15min you'd swear to get all your trades right. Just take the oposite trend of the VIX (what I'm saying at this level is obviously simplistic). I'll have to get sometime to dig into that.
Mo, I think you can look at the day's trading and thank yourself that you are in a position to be able to change your trading before you have too many losses. I believe that having stops that are equal or greater than your profit target will not keep you in the game forever. Also, what are your commissions on these trades? If one stops out and one wins, isn't there still a negative sum? I would certainly suggest longer term charts like 60 minute charts, so you could trade less and let profits run ie less commissions. Your short at 1289 was a good one--charts suggested the shorting at that point--but you surely could have let it run down for 4 points instead of trying to pick up 2. Lastly, I think you use too much emotion in trading--(comments about being impatient and damn I should have let that one drop farther--paraphrased). While I was reading your post Fri in real time, I was imagining you at work glued to your screen and hanging on every tick especially when it jumped down to 1284.25 just prior to rallying. You were within 1 tick of being stopped out and the loss for the day would have been 2.5 pts instead of 1.5 plus commissions. Yes it could have been a 4 pt day with longer term charts and less tinkering. Good luck to you
Thanks for your input. You are absolutely right, there is a lot of emotion in here. The short trade at 1289 was closed because I went down to one tick near my stop, it was very scary. When it came back I had in mind that shill more than anything else. That's why I'll place a trade and I'll get out of the screen. shorted here at 1288.75 stop 2 points target 3 points. (I don't like this short too much cause there is a lot of resisitance down) Il'' close the trade if I have 2 points gain.
Believe me, it snot easy to post trades and focus on execution. Yesterday, I made a mistake in my orders (the size) and today also cause I saw the short signal while answering you. I'll probably have some delay in posting my trades, up to 5 minutes. For your other questions: I use IB, $4.8 for a round turn. That's Ok. I could save few bucks other options at IB, but right now I'm not consistent in my size. As for the risk/reward ratio it is very difficult to find the best combination. I try to have a max of 1/1 and hope that I'll have more hits that misses. 75% of winners. We will see.
closed the trade at 1289. Don't fight the trend. loss 0.25 pts. Total: 1.5 points, on 3 trades I'm leaving, it is wonderful outside. A beautiful day like this is worth millions. I'll be back around 1 pm. Good trading to all.