I'm back to trading and posting. I thought of starting a new journal but is there a point? Not really. Is this a fresh start? Nope. But just the continuing journey to trade profitably and consistantly. Alot of personal problems popped up which really affected my trading. For one, I couldn't focus. Secondly, I had to spend continuous time away from the screen which made me rustly and I become out of touch. Fortunately, not all of my trades were in my real account. Thank God! What has happened? Well, if you read the first post of this journal you will see that I had around $12.3k left in my account when I started the journal. Now, about 8 months and 100 trades later I'm at $11.3k. But I am not giving up. I've been working on my errors and received some inspiration from a few books I've read. One thing that I have been focusing on and works is taking trades that have alot of stuff working in its favour. For example, market profile trades with a stochastics (as in many of my trades you may have seen) is not enough. What works is have stochastics, market profile, other support/resistance lines, trendlines, news, other indicators, and basically the kitchen sink all pointing in one direction. Sounds stupidly simple but is true. Now you can be flexible and have 8 out of 10 for example in your favour but the point is, not to get fixed on just 1 thing pointing. I would get caughtup with price action for example, and ignore the rest. Material I read by Martin Pring really got that clicking in my head. Well my goal is to make 5 points on the Eurostoxx 50 (FESX) a day. Monthly goal is to make 100 points.
First pullback short: +5pts Then tried to put on another short but scratched it. If I kept it on it would have worked. Price continued down but I was busy and missed an oppty. Then a big pullback came in. This pullback resulted in a HH ! So possibility for end of downtrend. But still took a short which I scratched. I really should have realized that this HH was a factor against me but stubborn me took another short for -3pts. It hit me and with price action confirmation, trendline break I took a long for a quick +5pts. Result: +5+0+0-3+5 = 8pts Good enough. Reached goal.
Made another 3pt yty off a long. So made 11 pts yty in total. Not bad as it met 2 days of target. But overall wasn't too happy with my trading to be honest. I think I overtraded a bit and took a trade which was too aggressive based on my plan. New day today and europe since the open has been racing down. Plan to take a short off the first pullback.
STOXX has dropped 100 pts from HOD. Spring on the 30min and on the 5min with all indicators oversold and price action hinting that price would pause and start that pullback we were waiting for. Decided I could scalp for a few points. Got in for a countertrend scalp at a good price. Made +4 pts. Was definitely risky but also some luck on my side with the timing...
No more shorts for now. This just doesn't seem like it wants to drop and anymore. Weird. Could be the spring from the higher timeframe. Perhaps opportunistic longs have entered the market. Some down bars but just not convincingly strong down bars.
Took a -5 pt stop on my short after the double top. My mistake was the very tight stop place which was within the previous bar. I should have put the stop at the top of that bar which was 3 pts away and was never hit I didn't like the risk reward and adjusted my stop which was wrong. I should have wait for price to give me an entry that would provide me with the risk reward and probability that I wanted. If I did that then it would have been +5. Anyway, so far for the day: +4 +5 +4 -5 = +8