=================== GoTrader; 7 things which may help you profit in derivatives 1]Jack Schwager 3 top trading books 2]Same as #1 3]Repeat/reread #1 again; I am. I am rereading those again this week also 4]Oscillators dont work well in strong trends;ES/SPY was in a strong downtrend friday am , assume your emini was also. 5]Black preacher was so gifted, said one day it got so good ''started taking notes on myself'' he said Reguardless of your calling ; take notes on yourself, take notes on what youre trading[hi,lo close, pivots.......] 6]Wisdom is profitable to direct; got a business plan??????? , in writing???????.You are welcome ahead of time. You said ''thanks ahead of time''Plan ahead of time. 7]I accidently broke a principle in my trading plan friday, first trade''went from nice profit to loss.''Overall profitable day in ES however .Paul Tudor Jones told Jack Schwager ''By the grace of God i was in the right place at the right time. 7.7]William O Neil told Jack Shwager ,trading is like profession of medicine[paraphrase]; school years, college, medical school years , , medical charts study,years intern , then after all that time, practice/money. 7.77]And now after all these years more than a few profitable Drs left the profession;insurance got to costly
============== PastPrime; You probably have enough discretion to know i like you and your nickname. Agree with he statement ''indicators do not work over the long run'', especially in derivatives, Now i do like moving averages[with discretion]; but you have to work. The indicators dont work at all;you have to do the work. And unfortunately a 200 day moving average DOESNT even show up much on most front month contracts, like it does on stocks. Like the banking rule of 72; try working about 12 hours a day,72 hours a week & dont ever think a moving average will do your work work, you have to do the work. Think the mistaken idea that moving averages do all the work; comes from many system ads, which advertise a system with ma as doing the work.
it's relatively easy to make some cash on futs nowadays...just buy the lows in every session, mkt ticks higher relentlessly. even if u take one trade a day it is enough to make good bucks with leverage [5-10 contracts]. ym is stuck into no mans land, dead ranges, no vola. er2 is much more volatile, r/r more acceptable; nq maybe is the best if u are not yet confident. just take a couple of trades a day on the best opportunities. mkt bounces at the averages more often then not. patience is key and trade by feel not thought.
Bit, Easier said than done. How do you tell it's the "low of the day" or did you imply to swing overnght after a downday ? If that's the case swinging from Thursday to Friday would have hurt a bit, especially in 5-10 cars.
i am talking intraday; look what happened these past couple days; we never took out previous day's low, on both nazzy and er2. once it bounced there it was a buy wasn't it. i dont mean u have necessarly to buy the bounce, if u weren't sure yet u could have waited for h/h h/l and a breakout from the trend...and that's what happened. and when we rally it's all up and up, i mean tough to go wrong there....u can buy a tick above the highs and still make money.
No question about the low VIX and it's dramatic effect on trading strategies....so with the VIX at near all-time lows, and the Russell 2000 near ALL-TIME highs, no wonder the eRL futures trade a bit spastically ! Based on my research and observations: 1) Intraday trend-following strats just don't work well on the eRL futures......too many violent moves that take-out stops or cause a trend reversal. I backtested a few and the results were terrible. 2) Break-out strats are much more promising. However, you must jump-in early and sometimes exit quickly as well. Often-times, a huge swell of volume actually short-circuits the move and it immedately reverses. When volume is more tempered, the move usually continues in the same direction. 3) Reversion-to-mean strats can work, but they are very short-term (1-2 minutes) and the profits are meager. This is best left to the high frequency black-box auto-traders to play with. On Friday, there were few, if any, of these short-circuit breakouts, but they occurred several times during this past week. Very often, these "blow-outs" form intermediate tops and bottoms. These are just my 2 cents after many months of eRL screen time. One thing: you'll never get bored with this beast, and it could really start to rock if we get a sell-off in here to raise the VIX a bit.
gohstrader, here's my two cents: One of the hardest lessons for me to learn was that to make consistent money over long periods of time involved exercising my discipline, not my opinion. (and unfortunatley what you get a lot of here on ET is other peoples opinion....the worse kind!) Another hard lesson for me was to learn to ignore inidicators. I've said in other posts on ET that the only people who make consistent profits with indicators are the vendors that sell them to you. sure, some daytraders make a few bucks on the MA crossovers, and some swing traders make a few more bucks trading the osscillators, but the really big bucks over long periods of time are not made by people watching little squiggly lines on a chart. Finally, the hardest lesson of all, at least for me was the realization that the market is always right, it's our interpretation of it is where the troubles begin. With that, over the years, my thinking has evolved to where I try my hardest not to predict where the market is going, and instead try to anticipate and react. It doesn't always work that well, because as a human being its impossible to not have a emotions and a bias. So, I do enter the market with a bias, but I try to remind myself that its just a bias, nothing more, its not a prediction. predictions lead one down the path of marrying a position, which is never a good thing becasue in reality, anything can happen and will happen. When I daytrade ES, I wait for certain set-ups which involve price hitting a certain level (no indicators!), i watch the order flow and market internals and then place my bet. If I'm wrong, then I have to let my discipline trump my opinion and get out quickly and wait for another set-up. Trading stocks is a bit different for me as I have evolved form swing trading stocks to more of a position trader.... i watch for signs of accumulation and/or distribution using time, price, volume, and trend lines, no indicators looking at my journal it's pretty obvious to me that most of my biggest losers occurred when i became too opinionated and threw my discilpline out the window. i suspect you may have one of the above issues, or maybe your trading the wrong instrument or time frame for your personality......or maybe you're not cut out for trading. there are lots of folks woth high IQs that couldn't trade if their life depended on it, so you if trading is not for you, it doesn't mean you are a failure. you just have to find what your good at.
============= G trader; I am wanting to update something since the market has changed so much this week[below 50 dma,& huge downtrends]; most certainly i did see yesterday, 12 good high probability trades per day.And see more than usual downtrends today, despite buyers. Hope you cut back trading if your equity trends losses, i do, trends are important. Thanks for 12 trades per day comment. Wish you well; plans of the diligent tend only to advantage
gtrdr,draw your trendlines on big chart for your underlying stuff,dow spx,rut. learn about market profile,hand chart it tostart,you can teach yourself if you trade less than 3 things.this will connect you to every tick and before long you will see the ebb and flow intraday for scalping,when the spx narrowed its daily range in last 3 weeks from 12-13 to 7-10 the trading got harder,i moved to mini oil futures,the mrkt profile works in any mrkt and the trend lines give you support and resistance,now even if you dont trade and just watch you will gain confidence in your mrkt knowledge thru osmossis,knowledge is power and it sounds as if your trading like a blindman in a gunfight,those stocks you were trading were easy ,if they didn,t get takeover or lawsuit becuase you watched them everyday and developed a feel,when you use someone elses system u have no feel and are trading in the dark...once u get a feel for the trends and the mrkt profile ,discipline yourself to trade only the setups and forget about the money,never trade the money use stops and you'll be fine,the longer you do it the more setups you'll see,be patient its a job not an adventure