No more paper dollars... tried the real McCoy today. Lots of errors, at every stage (Analysis, Decision-making and Action). The profits came from two successful 'rocket' trades (entering on a point 3). Two series of quick, successive reversals out of sync with the market corroded the bottom line. A few trades would have been designated 'wash trades' (out for a nominal amount). Four back-to-back losing reversals in quick succession (very early into the game) almost had the same character as touching a burning stove in quick succession - this kept me from taking some clear opportunities that developed later in the day, including a very well telegraphed last hour move that alone would have captured half the daily range. Also took a while to get my bearings... was flummoxed by the opening gap back into yesterday's red channel, which saw price operate below an intermediate trend line. I'd anticipated the completion of a short sequence that started yesterday, and then a nice bounce up - I mean left - off a longer-term trendline. Regarding the log, should I debrief and then post?...
From now on do not erase any line, ever. Basically, you as a beginner, began to annotate and you got some tapes that built traverses and the traverses built ONE CHANNEL. Boot camp is tough as all the reader can see. Annotating is really mediocre and expected to be that way. I will post a set of clean charts for boot camp and, by printing them and covering them and and sliding the cover to the right one bar at a time two things can be done on the kitchen table: annotation and logging on the new log. We all can repeat each whole day and add the better exercise to the 3 ring binder. For today, it was just an entry opn the BO of the second or third bar because the binary vectors of volume and price dictated the entry. The log would record this by going all the way, in pencil across the second row of the chart where the second or third bar entry was recorded. By hitting T on the trading platform, you find out what the price was. You record it. As a beginner you get to do 1 contract in bootcamp. In bootcamp the account is set up for you and you have capital to trade 1 contract the day you get organized enough to trade. The annotation is poor and expected to be poor. Go to the Iterative Refinement thread and make a print of the correct answer. Compare it to your annotation as you slide the cover off and repeat the entire day. You do not sleep until this is done every day from the first day of boot camp. For annotation today you get point three on the channel by bar 44. Beginners trade channels and they do reversals when the next channel begins it's overlap. Today that did NOT happen so you exit at the near end of the day. Your error on point 1 of the channel made it possible for a miracle later in the day. We can all see from the charts that you made an honest error at the time you got point 3 on bar 44. So the fact that the price later came to the trend line (a point 5 , so to speak) and resumed is just because we called ahead to have yet another example of the power of positive calling ahead. I have fiddled around with my ignore list a little bit today to see what the general misunderstandiong about bootcamp are. They all fit into the "CW cannot be applied to SCT" screwup those kinds of observers make. Let look at page four of the log where the exit is made. Bar 79 is an inside bar on 80,000 contracts for those five minutes. That is good enough to show that there is not much more juice for the day. Call it 909.0 The market is closed so you can count your chips. One trade from 968.0 to 909.0, roughly speaking: 69.0 points. This times 50 is enough to add 1 contract for tomorrow; the point is that from this point on we are adding earned capital to the participation in the market as part of the "growing up" in bootcamp. The last 20 days out of the last 23 the Dow has had a volatility of triple digits. That is why bootcamp is running at this time of life. The whole day the price stayed on the left side of the only channel line drawn for the day. If there had been more channels, more money would have been made. There are some messes to straighten out. It took a long long time to get the messes on the table but now they are here and we can begin.
How dissappointing to read that you do not know how to use a log as yet. I am trying to make a connection with you and I am suggesting that you use the three principles of making money that are the clear and concise and complete foundation of the applications of the pool extraction algorithm. You did not have a channel FTT today. All you did was get a point 3 after you entered WITH the TREND. THERE WERE 5 VOLATILITY EXPANSIONS ON YOUR LOG. LIST ALL OF THE RULES YOU HAVE MADE UP IN THIS POST AND EXPLAIN WHY EACH OF THEM DOES NOT FIT THE THREE PRINCIPLES OF THE ALGORITHM. My request is that for the future in bootcamp that you think during RTH. I will post the clean charts from last Monday onward and you can print each and trade each day using annotation and the new log. As I suggested the best way to begin to trade is to trade PVT stocks until you learn things like the PV relationship. The PV relationship does NOT allow any whipsaw trading. Do NOT debrief on your trading log since it will not be representing the annotations of the day. Do the log over again by filling in C and H on every row, respectively for the MODE and the D columns. Put an entry on bar 2 or 3 where you saw the PV relationship TELLING you what to do. Exit AFTER the last vlatility expansion. This stuff is SO simple and uncomplicated. you follow three principles and DO NOT MAKE UP RULES TO FOLLOW.
The three rules are: You have to be IN the market to make money. You have to be on the RIGHT SIDE of the market to make money Money is made in markets through the MOVEMENT OF PRICE For most of the day, I was NOT IN the market. Some of my entries were on the LEFT/WRONG side of the market. I was rarely in the market for long enough, for PRICE TO make a sizeable MOVE. I'm happy to stop posting here and go learn PVT if that's the recommendation.
We will pick up on preflight checks later. EVERY day begins with the cash and futures index settling in so that the premium is re-established. There are a few glitches out there nowadays that make "making money" a lot more fun. we ended the quant era and they are now flushing down the toilet all the "securitization" that was invented by the C+history majors from the Ivy league saying yes to the quants. Our good luck. Our job is defined as TAKING CAPITAL OUT OF THE MARKETS that these guys giving money to. There is a lot of evaporation going on now so it is easy for a beginner to make money using some principles. We build tapes from bars. It takes two bars at least, maybe three. There are few cases for this. The two we work with mostly are the "long" and the "short" cases. I refer to this as "the long and short of it". when these are not possible then we have "internals". Internals are brief waiting periods (while we are using C for MODE and H of the D columns). If you can "get it", then you can do annotations on the level that is called Level I which stands for the fastest fractal of three fractals for building the foundation of the pool extraction algorithm. WE DO NOT TRADE TAPES. Beginners trade channels. Channel are what is logged in the log AND, for now, we focuse on logging on the channel level. Today, for example a lazy logger could decide to not log a row if there were no changes in the entries above on the prior completed row. So point 1 was on bar 2. We get point 3 on bar 44, over half way through the day. After we have point 3 we write another row out to note in remarks where point 2 was found out to be. All rows so far have C in MODE and H in D after the row for the entry on bar 2 or bar 3. how old does a person have to be to play the C scale. There are no black keys unvolved and the child is only using 5 fingers on 8 of 13 keys in the scale for one octave. In his mind he is using three operators to get several parts of his long term memory differentiated. One of those places there is an arrangement of frequencies (from hearing) that are arranged in a specific never changing order. He has 8 streams of neurons that are connected by synapses that allow him to remember and recognize the sounds. If D flat (C sharp) is sounded, he differentiates it fr0om C or D by reasoning from his differentiated mind that D flat is up scale from C and down scale from D. There are four other black keys in the octave that he learns to fifferentiate for a total of 13 on the "chromatic scale". You are learning to differentiate on the tape level: "long" "short" and internals. If you do this you get to move on to understanding how long a tape may exist and how a prior tape can over lap (meaning one bar can serve two purposes, a tough thing to get straight). You mind at present is still doing a lot of "inventing" simply because you have been given "invention rewards" by someone. Don't get screwed up like Trader28 did in his youth. It is intractable. Read some lilduck and mandel to come to understand how minds can get cross wired. It is intractable. We need to have a place in your mind that is beginning to differentiate by doing a repeated process at great frequency to be able to do Level I annotation. I have reduced your log to two vocabularies. POST THE VOCABULARY FOR VOLUME AND THE VOCABULARY FOR PRICE. HAVE EACH ONE ON A SPEARATE SHEET AND AS YOU FILL IN ROWS, WRITE DOWN THE CORRECT SYMBOL FOR WHAT IS GOING ON IN VOLUME AND WHAT IS GOING ON IN PRICE. All of this is like sitting at a piano where sheet music is open and you are reading the sheet music (the market chart) and you are playing the notes on the piano (you are logging after annotating). We are trying to go up and down the keys according to the two staffs (C and G) on the music sheet. you have two hands and the music sheet is set up for each hand, unfortunately in a vertical orientation. We use VOLUME and PRICE as the two ingredients to make money like a piano player uses two hands to make a music composition come alive for the benefit of his audience. You are playing by your own made up rules. The rules are stupid. That stuff is off the table and you are stuck with it in your mind for the rest of your life. As a tape ends another begins. Internals are there along with tapes. An iternal can be treated as a bar, if you wish to keep it simple. Two opposite tapes make up the price movement necessary to construct a traverse. You are screwing up tapes and traverses so you get to print each day and do it over until it comes out like the answers in the Iterative Refinement thread. This is playing the same scale over and over until you debug the fingering requirements of playing scales. Why do you have to do the correct fingering (just the coarse aspect)? This is because you, later, will be able to play compositions written by guys who separate the men from the boys by the intricacies of their compositions. SCT is not like playing a tuba.
I can't afford that. I must go through a month of bootcamp to get it on the record. You suggested that you wanted some direction. we agreed on this thread. My next scheduled surgery is the 29th. Then I have four weeks of dressings. Do you "get it" that you enter in the early am and stay in the market until near the close? this is a difficult concept. Read lilduck and mandel to come to understand how a crosswired mind cannot get this concept. Try to get this concept. If you are in the market, then you only have to do one thing: you have to stay on the right side of the market. To do this you use a MEASURE of the MARKET. the measure of the market is called MODE. MODE was given to the world by the markets in THE FORM OF THE PV RELATIONSHIP. We did not make it up. The market is always right and it always tells its MODE. Today a beginner made about 70 points per contract using the MODE. From the MODE he could make decisions. The most common decision is to HOLD. You sit there and HOLD...bar after bar ...you HOLD until the MARKET TELLS you a CHANGE is present. As a beginner you ONLY work with channels. Channels are composed of traverses which are composed of tapes which are composed of bars. You use straight lines and geometry to compose parallel lines as required. The sets of parallel lines overlap. This is another miracle. The fact that the pairs of parallel lines overlap takes all the surprises out of trading on any skill level. You screwed away the day today using your own rules and solutions to something that is very simple and VERY elegant. There are people who just trade on automatic using sports memory to catch EVERY nuance of the market. Believe me anyone who is able to think long enough in a critical way can acquire the long term memory to be an expert trader. For a college kid who has no prior experience or screwed up mental preconceptions it would take about a month. One day 1 he sits at a fully equipped computer and does exactly what he is told bar by bar so at the end of the day in 6 1/2 slow hours he has a perfect chart and a perfect log. He also has an account and as he fills in the bar and hits T he finds out the price of the qaction and writes it down. today he made on the 8th day of trading 69 points per contract and simply doubled the number of contracts he will be trading tomorrow. Roughly speaking at the end of a month this kid is going to have a life time's of money available to him on demand for the rest of his life. You do not know the PV relationship or the principles of pool extraction because you are not in bootcamp as yet mentally. I need to post the clean charts.
Basic vocabulary for: Volume B = Increasing Black volume b = Decreasing Black volume R = Increasing Red volume r = Decreasing Red volume B2B = Black to Black R2R = Red to Red Price L = Long S = Short B = Black R = Red FTT = Failure To Traverse BO = Break-Out FBO = Failed Break-Out