Just like price can either go up, or down, or sideways, there is a third option here. He might have blown up!
Thanks db. Unfortunately, the attached charts to his posts are wrong. What I mean is that when you click on the link it shows chart pics that have nothing to do with the text of the message. A pity.
And another: The following is part of the post I made: Note that if one entered by focusing on supply/demand imbalances as we rejected the mean of the trend channel (see "mean" at the top), he would have made one short entry. And that would be it. He would need to make no further exits or re-entrys until he reached the lower limit of the trend channel. If he were reading supply/demand imbalances rather than lines and line breaks. If one doesn't understand how, I suggest he go back and review the first journal. Trying to fix one's trading by fiddling with these lines is like trying to overhaul one's transmission by fiddling with the radio.
I know. Doesn't really matter. It's all "hindsight" after all. Many or most of my charts are gone as well, but new examples appear every day. Charts last about as long as raw fish, if that long. Which is why I started converting everything to pdf as more and more people left TL. Which led to a lot of consolidation.
Exactly how often has this occurred over the last 100 appearances of your valid setups? I'll never forget the time I did a statistical analysis of a setup I thought resulted in a negative result really, really often (my guesstimate was 80% of the time based on how often this setup had screwed me over). I analyzed the outcome over a consecutive series of 50 trades and found that it produced a negative result only 45% of the time. It was the picking and choosing of when to trade the setup that created my negative result and led to my erroneous belief that it was a low expectancy setup.
Excellent catch, and every time I say words life often, you are always on my mind because I know you'd be wondering if I actually quantified this "often". If I ignore the reason for taking the trade (ie. the setup), and just look at every instance of every trade I take and just analyze how wide of a stop I would need for it not to go against me, this could be easily done. But of course the fact that each trade is different would make this not as worthwhile. (ie. taking a a short at expected resistance and getting into the the trade within 1 point from the high can make use of a much tighter stop versus taking a breakout trade as an example 3 or 4 points above the level, and since price can easily retrace those 3 or 4 points as a test of R then S without invalidating the trade, a wider stop here is justified since getting in 4 points above a level and having price go against me just 2 points is not nearly enough of a buffer) So I think I would need to categorize those trades to give this value some merit. But because I am taking the trades without having a firm "setup", the value of this is diminished. When I'm putting on a trade, there is one main thought/theme that is running through my head, and that is that "this is where the trade goes and if I get stopped out with a tight stop, then this trade is clearly not ready to work out yet". The best way to illustrate this would be with my chart from today. Here is a crop of the 5 sec chart. Look at the area where I say that I didn't pull the trigger for a long. Essentially what I'm thinking here is that price turned a few times here (its just below 4366), and with that quick spike up for that one 5 sec bar, if I entered long right there, it isn't so much because of a setup, but because that is where price turned up before, and now traders are buying again, and if a long trade is gonna work, this is where the long is gonna start, this is where the best chance is. If price should happen to drop below this level and trigger a tight stop, then the odds are much better than the buying just isn't going to come. Now I'm not sure if this is the right frame of mind to be in, but its a theme that I've been working on in my head. Since I have no idea what price will do, but I have an idea that if it goes beyond this point then it more than likely means that its not going down, then that is the point at which I make a bet and place a long. So taking this into account, if I keep a tight stop and it gets triggered, then at least I can think I got in at the best possible place, the earliest place, and not have to worry too much if I should have held in longer or not because it went past the danger area that should mean there is no direction now.