Closed at neutral +50, refusal to trend down. MFE +450. It was fine to bet profit on continuation here as I would have been in position to gain massively if so. Observed shitty Chinese macro so there was an idea behind it. Losing 600 earlier night because of putting on an unmonitored heavily correlated trade into session open was more questionable.... And of course that brings grand total tonight to -1200. Going to bed.
New week. No super interesting data this week. Chinese data today (not sure about time), US building permits Tuesday and Philly business index/Jobless claims Thursday are slightly potentially tradable events. Main thing is that new that everything is super positive again I am looking for a bear cataclyst to spark new concerns about trade war. Also HK situation remains interesting for HK33, but I live in wrong area to trade Asia reliably... As usual whenever I lost some money (now in 1.7k draw down from peak) I try to make my trades more selective. Still up by 10.1k YTD but with the recently scaled to bet sizes that kind of profit easily is eaten up on a losing streak. On a wider note I am pondering on whether to continue this journal and "strategy" (yeah, given very flexible rules some traders wouldn't call it such) as is largely unchanged, or with major modifications, or ditch it entirely next year, as it takes quite a lot of time and tends to battle for attention with other important things I'm doing. My passive investing has still done better this year although a) bull regime dependent, b) there are a number of things I could do to address my inconsistent beta exposure on this journal. I'm thinking that putting some narrowing restrictions like "only trade super major US events with NQ, like FOMC, retail sales and PMIs" would make me save most time I spend on journal/strategy and potentially also money. Then I could combine the best of my beta algos into one and leave that running with max 1x-2x leverage rest of time. Only currency risk remaining to worry about then... Either way, once we get back to a period of wild(er) intraday volatility I can make an exception and trade full time. I really need a superbly trendy market to make money, starting to develop scanners and specializing on this type might be useful. I've spent way too much time over the years trying every strategy under the sun in algo backtests, so stopping to dig wide that in favor of digging deeper into this only edge it seems I have in intraday would make sense.
Buy USDSEK x 33000 @ 9.6376 stop 9.4630 Thinking this is a reasonable bet at lower part of channel of long term up trend. I basically don't trust my country's direction much... Besides, as soon as shit hits the fan USDSEK is a good proxy for risk aversion. Small bet since A) I suck a FX trading, B) I've already got USDSEK exposure via base account currency.
Sell US2000USD x -90 @ 1589.28 stop 1603.5 Will add a bit more to this short later at narrower stop mayhaps (expecting some immediate adverse excursion as I entered after some down movement). As for bigger picture, failure to get past 1600 on Russell is pretty indicative of momentum thinning out.