Ok as long as your good with a bank draft then thats what ill do, you have nothing to lose anyways, it has to be consistent calls though, no screwing the pooch, and sitting on the sidelines if you have 2 good days right off the bat.
And a piece of unsolicited advice on ES trades as I looked at your previous calls - the only way to trade ES is breadth, there is no other way (maybe DOM if you are scalping). If you are gonna look at price and trade ES in ANY shape or form, you will get owned. Stocks yes, you can trade based on PA a bit, even there, you have to look at other things (like options volume) to know how where the base and ceiling are.
Fair enough,i think honestly, id be better off on the ES if i just took a butter knife and used it to remove all of the sell keys from my keyboard. Honestly ES i hit some homeruns once in a while, i make more shorting the TVIX and UVXY on ES dips though, but other than that im always looking to short ES, and i eat alot of small losers, for the very few times i nail it. Thats not my edge, my edge is calling news stocks in the first 20 minutes of the day, with the ES its the hardest market in the world because of the liquidity, all the big boys are playing so im not nearly as good there, like you said im a price action reader, this morning called out FSLR half hour before the open, and there is atleast half a dozen traders on this site who will back me up on it, thats more of my game. Generally speaking the thicker the instrument the harder it is to rely on pure price action because of all the algos running it all over the place.
TWTR was a textbook example yesterday bought 19.05 off the open yesterday watched it go to 19.50 collapse, and then bottom tick me on the stop out at 18.99, only to watch it go to 20.50, it was so painful, but that stock is a real piece of shit, think i lose money on it every time i trade it, algos love running it through the highs through the lows, all over, they just run it to levels it stops people out.
It's not as much about liquidity but about volatility, the more volatile an instrument is, more you can rely on PA. Obvioulsy less liquid instruments will be volatile but look at futures like Hang Seng which are liquid and volatile at the same time. Volatility is the more reliable filter for PA trading. If you insist on trading ES based on PA, filter it with VIX and it will be more reliable. You can even do that with stocks by using Range Ratio but its circular analysis since the info comes from PA itself. Another useful thing you can do to make PA more reliable is to add mini volume profiles on each bar and see how the concentration of volume is shifting. Avoid all that footprint nonsense, simple is best. Long term profiles are pretty much open holy grail, bolter did a thread on that about 10 years ago here, and they still work wonderfully if you have the patience for it.
Biggest mistake was not retaking it when 19 held, it was pretty clear the war was won for the buyers at nineteen, i debated taking twenty dollar calls for ten cents, but i was so bitter watching i trade i thought was a homerun melt all the way down, i just couldnt touch it agsan, but i agree, the shift in opinion is huge here, its missed earnings like literally every single time, after earnings this week, i think it was the first time you could say the tide had shifted. I blew that one, but to my further point, im not very good at trading stuff which is that thick.
Volatility definitely helps increase profitability but generally speaking the thicker (higher volume) the instrument the lower my odds........ down to a point, obviously i need over 500k per day to get involved, but the closer i am to something trading around a million shares a day the better my edge is, im still profitable on the thicker stuff, but not even close to being as accurate as i am if i stick to the bread and butter which is an hour before market open, to an hour after market open, on names that only move 500k-1mill per day on average.......... just way less bullshit on level 2 on those names, so you can still read the tape.
It was not a mistake because you had no way to know otherwise, you can't beat yourself up if you are trading discretionary, it would burn you out pretty fast. For stocks like this, tracking block trades helps because usually someone dumps and then it slides down till it hits another area where there are resting orders - then it bounces back and forth till another block trade clears these levels. There are not more options because the levels are fresh to have any reliable S/R areas. Also if you can look at options volume if they are active, that would be helpful too. Also, I noticed MarkBrown is posting in Journals! He is one of the old time greats or at least I think so. He convinced me holy grail exists and his Oddball system was how I got started with different way of looking at things. There is more info now (mostly useless) but back in the day when internet forums were new, real discussions used to happen (like the Omega Tradestaion mailing lists or the Amibroker mailing lists), there are absolute gems in there that are impossible to find nowdays (because you get trolled by ungrateful punks if you don't give them the exact holy grail formula instead of pointers)