Anyone else have major problems trading on these days? I really really have bad days when the market is trending strongly up or down. Any thoughts on dealing with/identifying these days. Gave back about 2 weeks of slow grindy profits this morning by getting caught on the wrong side of a trend. Then getting stubborn then getting out of rhythm.
Used stops and kept them thank god. But just kept seeing buying that wasn't really there!! 3 longs in a row?!?! then a short that barley backfired because of poor impatient entry. So went back to my longs. Pretty sad. 7 longs and one short today. 2 winners. Pathetic. some days you look back on your trading and think... are you f'n kidding me?
Well that's the whole problem... I didn't know it was gonna be a strong trend day. ADX is the only indicator I know of to detect trend but often times it is too much of a lagging indicator and tells you it's trend time at tops/bottoms. Thats why I was asking what people use to detect days like today.
Look at the price..if it's falling, then sell... if it's rising, then buy.. You can't detect anything...you clearly have a long bias...and that's not a bad thing considering the uptrend of the market...but clearly, with the overnight selling, and the heavy volume liquidations...it looked weak to me...
If the market gaps with news and doesn't fill with in the first hour and takes out the hourly low with news and an extreme advance decline line then its trending. It was about 85% down volume pretty much all day. Days like today are rare and better just to skip them if you are inclined to buy dips. John
I find that as a "counter-trend" day-trader, the worse aspect of these big-trend days, is that I often actually trade worse than on normal days. Of course this especially sucks, because the big-trend days are when I most need to be at the top of my game, as they are so dangerous to my style. I think I had an epiphany today though. Last night, I had a feeling that a big-trend day was coming on, and so I looked back through my trading journal and noticed that my worse days tend to be the days when I make the smalelst number of trades. On a normal day, I'll make at least 40 round-trips or so with a good combination of both long and short positions. Then a big-trend day comes along, and I'll make less than a dozen trades...spending most of the day just watching my day-trading position trade against me in one direction. I remembered what I had noticed last night this afternoon as I was sitting watching my screen, having averaged down into a large loss. I realized I was missing a lot of good scalps, and had hardly traded at all today, because I was waiting for the market to come back in favor of my much larger than normal position. So I started trading back and forth again, after freeing up some capital by closing most of my existing position at a loss, and was able to make back most of the loss by the end of the day...trading on overdrive (I made about as many trades as I do on a typical day, in just the last 2 hours or so.)