I was closing a long about the time you were getting short. I don't think luck had anything to do with it. It all unfolded just as you described. I'm sure your stop was no more than 3 points, and you entered where there was, imo, a better than even chance of getting filled on a 5 point profit target on a short. 1) Not every trade will get you 5 points: And that is ok! 2) Even fewer trades will get you the 10 points: And that too is ok! 3) Some trades will stop you for your full loss: And that is ok! 4) You will make mistakes: And that is ok! Luck does not exist. You took the trade. It was according to your plan that you came up with based on a lot of work. Your labor (in itself no small thing considering how few are willing or able to do the work for themsleves): The plan where you look for a potential failure of price to move past a prior trading level, and had a LH trigger. You placed your order. You placed your stop. You placed your target. You cashed your paycheck at 5 points. You kept the other half open until price action, not your fear of losing profits, dictated you close the position. You acted decisively and without hesitation. IT's all YOU, Dude! Gears, a long hard road it has been. Do not feel like anything less than +5 and +10 is a failure. Any outcome, so long as traded by plan and according to what you know about price action is a good fucking trade, dude! If you had done everything you just did and price had instead shot up and snatched 3 points from you, it was still a good fucking trade! And you did it! Man alive ... just keep believing in yourself and forming good trading habits, and you will be fine. You have got to start believing in yourself. I believe in you.
Actually, there was no luck involved. You made a real good trade and are to be commended. The 4448 area was a basing and upside reversal point in oversold conditions. The fact that it hit there 3 times made it even more important. We had oversold conditions with base and reversal on the 1 min chart with the 5 and the 15 both in uptrend mode. Very good trading. Congratulations!
Today was one of those days where patience really came into play. And I'll say that something has clicked for me in the past few weeks about only getting in a) at extremes and b) when I want to (as in "want" to be in the trade). I've kind of had some epiphanies so I'm in a bit of a sharing mood. I've finally figured out that the pain is much worse to get into a trade just because I 'hoped' price might do 'x' compared to NOT being in a trade when price takes off if it isn't near an extreme/according to my plan. I used to be all about FOMO and jump the gun because I couldn't have price taking off without me. Thank goodness I'm no longer seeking out to chase price. I also wish I'd done my observation phase(s) differently. It's definitely true that you don't know what you didn't know until you know it. Not a tongue twister, but the damned truth. I watched price and saw it go up and down and sideways and tried to see that when parabolic moves happened, there'd be a strong retrace, etc., etc., etc. But I didn't pay attention AS much to the extremes and how price behaved there as I should have. I didn't think I'd be a REV trader - whatever... That's one thing I'd suggest to newbies. Whether or not you can find a range, Db is kind enough to post charts on almost a daily basis of the context and ranges. Whether you buy into his approach or not, use his guidance and watch price for the day at those levels. I bet you'll learn something. Time and reading and replay and testing and all of it over and over again has finally led me to be feeling almost peaceful about the market. I'm no longer worried about missing out and that alone is like an anchor has been removed. I'd rather sit and watch than jump in 'just because'. And yes, I do know that I can't trade well or make any money just sitting on the sidelines. Summary: I feel the best about my trading journey today than I have in a long time. Perhaps a little too soft for some, but hey - it's my journal!
Congratulations. And, no, one can't make money just sitting on the sidelines. But I guarantee there were many who lost money today by trying to catch moves that never came. It's a bummer to wait for Monday trading all jazzed up and ready to go and then be faced with what we were faced with today. But I hope the lesson has been learned that these range days are merely a prelude to trend days, and just about the time that those who don't know what's going on get tired of waiting and decide to take the day off, that will be the trend day. I was looking forward to trading today, but I was glad to see that the SLA once again confirmed that I shouldn't be trading. So I didn't. And I didn't get eaten up by chop. So I won.
as well as a few key ET participants (especially @dbphoenix, @fortydraws and @eminiman414) Having good material to read, encouragement and the opportunity to discuss the market has been tremendous. Thank you!
Yes, indeed! Yes he is! Sounds like a lot of work! The key benefit of having a thoroughly tested plan is not that you avoid losses, but that you can zen-trade. Damn straight, and fine journal it is! Just one day at a time, gears, that's all there is to it. I have to say the one thing I was looking forward to today was your journal entry - I don't care win, lose, or draw, so long as it is as according to plan as you can make it. Nicely done!
Exactly! If ever there was a day for Larry Phillip's Rule #1, it was today, and gears played it so well today!
Someone remarked recently that with respect to the NQ, "most seem to be making in the order of 5 to 10 points on a trade here and there, hardly pulling in 50 point trades." I would say, as a generalization, 5 to 20 points is the range of 98% of available NQ Opportunities based on how I understand and use SLA/AMT and what I call Wyckoff Trading Areas ("Wyckoff" because he's the writer who use the term "Trading Area" to = "Range". So let me call the basis for my trading SLA/AMT/WTA. I've posted some larger trades. I know some of you have hit for much larger than 20 point targets because you've called them out to me in private threads. This should be "stating the obvious" to those who have gone back and properly identified past ranges and observed price behavior in and around the extremes of these ranges, but for those who haven't (most of ET): The big trades almost always occur when the hourly trend is configured in one particular direction, and when the entry is being made in the direction of the hourly trend, and price has recently traded at or near a particular limit of its daily trend channel and has not yet reached its mean, let alone the opposite limit. The entry is also usually a breakout of a premarket/globex, prior day WTA. DbPhoenix said yesterday that "Beginning Trader has to define a range. Only after he has done so can he even begin to test various entries, with or without stops, much less begin to test tactics for trading a trend since trends are born of ranges." There are basic definitions & concepts, e.g. trend, range, retrace, reversal, breakout, trend channel, context, etc. that serve as the common framework by which we in SLAworld understand one another. If you do not understand these as we understand them, if you decide to try to decipher a trade opportunity without placing that opportunity in the market context as described by our conceptual framework, then you will almost certainly feel that something is missing or that your understanding is incomplete. That is because it is incomplete. But you must recognize that that "incompleteness" is because you have not understood and adopted the conceptual framework that makes these opportunities visible to the naked eye - the incompleteness is not the one showing, but the one viewing. To steal an analogy from a recent @monoid post - you are not wearing the proper corrective lenses to see as SLA/AMT and/or WTA would have you see. Like learning a language, however, most of us are not going to be able simply to read and know. We will need to read the material, and study the material, and then observe the market (listen to native speakers) and then through back testing and replay (immersion) we come to be able to speak with some degree of fluency. Further practice and experience will help us gain in fluency, and perhaps even improve in accent and pronunciation to the point where we may be mistaken for native speakers. But browsing through the material and expecting to understand the market well enough to immediately profit is as misguided as the person who skims through a conversational Spanish book and heads of the Spain expecting to be able to communicate fluently and free of misunderstandings upon arrival. I use the language analogy here in gears journal because when I started studying his journal posts, I thought here is a guy who knows the letters of the alphabet and he knows how to put them into words and for the most part he knows what those words mean but his grammar is wanting - his syntax - the rules that by which these words are strung together to make intelligible and communicable phrases and sentences - was off. His understanding of the material was incomplete. His incompleteness, imo, was primarily 1) underestimating the importance of range/support/resistance and 2) an under appreciation of price action as continuous flow. These are the areas he's been focused for about three weeks or so (he can say better than I) and I think he would agree that doing so has led to a marked improvement in not only his ability to understand the market, but his ability to understand DbPhoenix
And by these opportunities, I am referring specifically to day trades where the trade is usually opened and closed within the time frame of one NYC trading session (9:30 - 16:00 Eastern). AMT for a trader who's time frame is significantly larger could expect opportunities measured in hundreds of points, ands going back to September through December 2014, a daily time frame AMT trader could have yielded a bonanza. Must beware of the language parsers you know