I say No, don't understand hedging, surely it reduces your profit aswell and adds confusion and time and expense ?? Swinging maybe but who's got time to day trade and place option. I'd say for a H1 trader your SL's are too tight, 2 options double the SL ( Wouldn't of helped, just cost you more in this case ) or Go M15 maybe ?? Much easier to see the uptrend on M15, M1 and M5 likely too much of a leap from H1 charts.
You are all bassackwards. First of all, S/R on 1 hour and 5 minute charts means very little. So fading S/R is a losing proposition with those timeframes. That is just a shit risk/reward strategy. Second of all, you have a strong up day with intraday price action making higher highs and higher lows - so you should be looking for places to buy. Third, waiting for the most comfortable place for you to enter is an emotional trap that usually gets you burnt. Get into the move early, take your money, and leave for the day. You need to be on the giving side of the pain, not the receiving side of the pain. If your plan is to wait for comfortable places to fade substantial moves - stop right now and save your money. I wish you good fortune !
The premise wasn't terrible, it had a 50/50 shot but your trade management is garbage. Had I taken that trade this is how it probably would have played out on my end.
Yesterday was an Up Day. Generally, on such days it's better to short after the initial morning pop and/or circa 11:00-12:00 for a pullback. Rallying into the close is a common pattern. It happened on Monday, too. And last Thursday. So, careful shorting. So, the problem here wasn't your stop, but your trade idea. Regarding size - why not trade 1 MES instead? Unless you're rich and don't mind paying a solid tuition for learning.
It makes no sense to be long NQ, short MNQ, and peel off MNQ. None. Nothing "hedged" about it TBH. The delta is exactly the same as trading MNQ outright.
Yesterday was an up day and if I may, perhaps trying to short was not the best way to make money. Also, the SP500 is one of the hardest market to trade intraday. Like Bone, I think that S/R on a minute chart means very little: A real intraday S/R is where the most trading activity took place.
To clarify, it was more of a scalp trade, 1 to 1 risk to reward, quickly get in and out. I wasn't looking to short it very long. From past experience with strong support and resistance there is usually at least some little and quick bounce off which I was trying to catch. But the comments regarding the trade idea being flawed are interesting, since it was into the close, which is more volatile. Also, not very familiar with S&P price action, this was more something I noticed in Forex, and something that tends to happen more during normal price action rather than unusual events like news events, or in this case the close of the day, maybe combined with some unusual price action.
I like the idea and think it has merit. For every person that says its a bad idea, then just go long at your resistance level, and that will obviously fail enough times as well. In fact, if you came here saying that going long at resistance has caused you to lose money, people would more than likely be telling you that you are doing something wrong. So shorting at what you perceive is resistance is actually the better trade. I do see that your resistance level was from June 26, which had 4 rejections at 3080, based on a 5 minute chart, so a bounce here made sense. I think though that its not right to say, as your thread title shows, that stop losses are killing you. The action at this level wasn't really just running the stops. Price stayed above 3085 for over 5 minutes. When its just a poke of a level, by my definition, it reverses much faster, if it is indeed just a poke. So now the question is, if this happens to you often, how to fix it? As I mentioned first, going long vs. short isn't the answer, cause this will more than likely also not work half the time. But we can work with the R:R numbers. Clearly, to make this profitable, if we are winning half of these trades, then our win needs to be bigger than our loss. If you want to use 5 points as a stop, look over how many times the trade would hit something like 10 points profit. Perhaps the trick will be to use a 3 point stop, and 5 point target, and this might prove to be profitable. The last idea is scaling in. You can clearly see that price did eventually come back down to your 5 point profit, which would have been around 3075, but not until much later in the evening. The thing though is that if you see that 90% of a time, scaling in will save your trades, then perhaps this is something to look into. You of course need to adjust you max pain threshold, and be prepared to scale in when its going against you, but if it increases your win rate from 50% to 90%, it can work wonders. Granted, a big loss will still happen every now and then, but the lessening of the frustration of being run over all the time might have a positive psychological impact. Once again though, you need to have a firm grasp of where and how to scale in, and when to finally bail, and make sure this loss doesn't cripple you. With scaling in, I like to think along the lines of adding another contract when it goes 10 points against me, and then work on a break even exit, so that I can get out without a loss, even if price doesn't come down to my entry level.
Here's one from today on S&P, also near the end of the day, this time I was long for the breakout, but got stopped out again. Seemed like a high probability trade, what do you think? One conclusion I'm drawing from my trading is that my technical trades aren't working out, be it head and shoulder, break outs, etc. I'm now more interested in momentum trades, like on 1 minute chart, fast execution, things of that nature. Price action like that is real and can't be faked. In other words, there is major emotion or news behind things like that. So maybe I can find those kinds of momentum trades and try to jump on them for quick moves. But my swing trades and orderly day trades aren't working out.