...it really could have been better 10:18 L @814 10:23 X @810.50 A disaster from start to finish. The 1M MACD was against me going in, and an âexecutionâ error cost me an additional ¾ of a point. 10:45 S 806.75 11:04 X 802.75 Entered late because the 1M MACD was against me, but when it signaled an entry, I took it. 02:21 S @805.25 02:30 X @807.25 Everything looked right â but it just didnât work. 02:39 S @805.75 02:14 X @805.25 Cheated all the way â thatâs all you need to know  03:35 S @801.25 03:47 X @801.25 The entry was correct â the exit was based on fear. Bottom Line: 2 wins â 2 losses 1 wash â Minus 1 point. As I learn more, and implement additional methods, it becomes difficult to report the âhows and whysâ of each trade. Simply posting time and price really serves no purpose. To keep things (me) honest, I will continue to post an abbreviated bottom line kind of end of day accounting from now on.
11 Mar 03 10:15 L @ 813.50, exit 10:20 @ 812.25, -1.25 10:45 S @ 807.50, exit 11:15 @ 805.00, -2.5 12:00 L @ 809.00, exit 12:05 @ 808.00, -1 14:20 S @ 805.75, exit 14:30 @ 807.25, -1.5 total -6.25
4 trades -3.75 on the day have not been able to post the last couple of days as i am getting ready for vaction. be back next week hopefully with a rested and focused mind. going to completely unplug from the market for first time in two years and recharge the batteries. good luck to everyone. dawg
It is very easy to quarterback after the game has been played. So I will do two things. Review and make some comments about today as well. A couple of thing will come up immediately. One is protection from losses. Another is the general comment that I am operating fairly loosely to make things work better. Each of these two things go together. The situation out there (the world and so on) is sort of suspenseful. Actually on ET we see a lot of folks posting distaff stuff about how hard it is. A kind of Rodney Dangerfield litany. This fertile market ground is where we are. So let me step in to the picture a little bit. Thanks for the person comments coming my way on my email. do appreciate knowing that things are improving for the apporaches many of you are using. Transference is what I shoot for primarily. I'm pushing for people making small amounts of money steadily day after day on one contract. The picture is this: as you accumulate wealth you have more to play with and if you don't get sophisticated, even, things do work out. I want people to ease on down the road doing just easy (fast paced) trades; then I want them to get into washing out regularly and maybe reversing washes to tack over to the next opportunity. Here I am adding something to loosen you up a little as you go along. It involved desensitizing you to the brief quirks that seem to screwup people who are used to driving on dirt roads or something. It's definitely not as bad as driving on the AlCan hiway after the thaw however. (I always carry duct tape to keep the holes in the windshield covered after taking a rock from a passing truck). Lets focus on the trading fractal. I am trying to pull tampa off the 5 min in several ways. He is there on the 1 min and MACD. we could compare te posts of everyone for the last day and we see that not too many were concurrent. They happened at different times for different folks. I want to get tampa on the 5 min. and I am going to "tape" his MACD. Actually i want to push Tampa way back "away" in two ways. Simultaneously I am going to loosen up the Stoc rocket people.
Okay i am doing these in bursts as time premits. Lets set up he MACD for Tampa. Don't use any signals between +1 and -1 on the 5 min. Don't use the 1 min for anything for a while. divide the MACD signals into two groups: "entwined" and combos of convergence, xo (crossover), divergence all outside the +1 to -1 tapeout. "entwined" inside +1/-1 (+/-1) count as congestion, convergence and centing. When centering occurs i will get you in but that comes later. "entwining" outside of +/-1 is an "away" trend. All trends are tradable. The further "away" the stronger the money velocity. Exit on divergence out of "entwining" as long as it is to the +/-1 tape. This makes the fast line "inside" (nearer) 0. If there is just an offset, stay in the trade. Okay now for the sequence : convergence, xo, and divergence. as you see this, reverse. You are AWAY (greater than +/-1 on the 5 min. Youcan choose to reverse as fast line gets most away (peak or trough), next when convergence starts, next when xo, next when divergence. I don't care for now. The rule is wait until you are comfortable. My rule is "make money". NOW. You must go the the slowest fractal to do this. I knoww that you have to recalibrate the Tape and the "away" values. Get with it and do that. Today, march to 15 min and 30 min and just sit in a short from the open. If you look at the 5 min just see the MACD weaving along "away" short in a range. Do not crap out every time it hits-.5. Go back to the15 or 30 min and relax so you can't see it on the 5 min. You aren't even thinking of going to the one min. Now my review. isuggested going to slower fractal several days ago. I showed the "tape" channel on the 15 and 30 min, then the second day we had to go to 30 and 60 to see tape channel. Tape channel means the bars filled the channel. Today we are on a nice 15 min tape channel. Why can't I get tampa off the one min?? If making money is able to intefer with his thoughts, then he will go to the slower fractals and calibrate the MACD. For rocket folk, you are in heaven on the longer bar fractals. All trends look like rockets amd now you can just go there and soak up the money. BUT, you can never start to learn to trade there on the 15, 30 ,and 60. The reasons are clear, you do not have enough capital. You do not know about protective stops. You do not know how to perscieve ends of trends. And the slower fractal trends you see are not fast paced short profitable trades to make money and learn to SIDELINE. On the slower fractals the money velocity is much smaller. It takes more time to make money. It is best to make money fast and wait for another chance as a beginner. My first try with Tamps to boost his money velocity was to make him and "iceberg" intermediate. This present attempt is the same thing using MACD on slower fractals. What I am trying to do is this: He doesn't go for Stoc rockets; he has a hair trigger on MACD 1 min which is exit oriented from loosing in the past. I need to make him back a lot of lost money in the past. This is to get an even keel in the picture. Once we get past hair trigger exits, we make money. See how the point 3 thing worked for some people here. There was a feeling that they could focus on do9ing something that distracted them from hair trigger exits. It was finding the trend. getting points 1,2,3 allow you to see a trend. I showed hoe the volume pick up took you back into making money. I repeated it again to do the "two step" on point 3. THe airplane takeoff axample. Here we are looking at several days of world conditions being a steady drag on the equities markets which reflect into the day trading ranges of the futures indexes. We trade several times a day and we don't care about the world. BUT by looking at the longer duration fractals, we can relax and enjoy the trip. this does bring up protctive stops. and it does bring up calibrating the absolute type indicators and their signals. So be it. we can do what is required anythime something comes up. you will get the picture soon enough that all things lead to a KISS operation through one simple consideration: you know what you are doing and it is simple. It is the "I don't know what he's talking about" that appears just before you do "know what he's talking about" and it is very easy at that point, kind of feeling that you constantly have. I know tough sentence to read. We are just moving up a little in intellectual thought bites. I'm the type of person that people request a continuation of classes after graduation so they can finish up a few things. It turns out you never do get finished. Lets make some money here. hang in there longer on your trades. For beginner rocket traders, you can sneak up to the 15 to not exit quite so soon if you have already doubled your money. For disciplined rocket beginners, who have doubled, you can do 2 contracts now. alian there is little congestion for you to revese and slalom innoa days. make a note of that. Note that the deterioration of world conditions even further is taking a lot of the normal congestion out of the mid day. When you see Bush play the religion card, you can expect the trump card to come from the other side as it did on Monday in Egypt where the scholars operate. The econometric model on all of this is devistating. Not many academic web sites are current on this stuff as yet. (Footnote: I have done econometric modelling for the top ops starting over 40 years ago)
Jack, thanx for all the help - it is much appreciated. Of course you are right about my hair trigger, and so I have taken your advice and packed in my one-minute chart...(sigh)...and replaced it with a 15-minute. It will take awhile to digest all that you have passed along, but I think that I understand, and will study it tonight.
PM follow up. Thanks for your comments. This 800 thing is a "round" number situation. There are a lot of numbers that turn out to be popular. so we can expect to ee some folling arond at these places. Just ingore it basically. The 15 min today on the MACD gave us some good definition type examples. Late yesterday and this am you got to see an "offset" he fast line ran ahead (meaning lower values in the short) by a specific offset during this period. THen you got to see the maximum money velocity occur whne the fast line "troughed". Following this the money velocity was a constant accumulation of capital (See this as "entwined" lines.). finally, the volume crept into the basement (low low volume) the bars altrnated red and black. THen four increasing volume black bars allowed the MACD to diverge back towards 0. Rocket beginners using the 15 min would exit here. The most sophisticated folks would take this div as a signal to reverse. For what I suggested to tampa it is just an exit. All thers would see that the Stoc 14,1,3 hung on the 50% for the 15min. You can glance back along the 50% on the 5 and see that it comes up at times when during these days for position traders, it is "riding the support". You also see that the support dissolves as well.
Don't worry about not understanding. You should consider picking out a few sceptics (not the dumb ones) and just track their comments. what happens to a sceptic is that after a while they decide to make some real money. When they do they cut to the chase with cogent questions. At this time I will do some really sharp interrelating the various principles to their comments. What gets a person to being a sceptic is carrying along attitude in a way that enables hem to replace just making money with being right. Think about it. A person who is a professional in a few fields is used to "fixing" stuff that is busted in a fee based manner. This type of constant money velocity situation is very different than iterative sustantive refinement and growth. About the thridt or fourth time we double our ROI here, it will begin to strike home that the the "fixing" they are focussed upon has slipped outside their operating box. Then there will be an effort to fix the box. I hope everyone enjoyed going over to the 15 min today and relaxing. It is true that a person like me does think of the round number game (800) as a slow swing (parabolic). In equities the sequence of mutual funds mgrs, day traders leaving and bottom fishing is classic. Having it happen around 800, gives us, as we get into the groove, a way to pull down the green through the day on the 15 min. Read the sequencing I am slipping into this as a statement of the P, V relation I posted in the Journal. notice the "long " tape starting up this PM is wide (volatile). I am tuning everyone to significant figures here and statisitcal significance as well. you are going to really be grooving soon too.