FWIW: According to my calculations average H/L range for the period from 11:30 -1:30 for the last 60 days is right at 5.0 ES points.
I agree here is a print. I annotated it to preclude questions. I have a four hour offset on IB. That means 6:40 am for me is 10:40 EST. This is midday 10:40 (S7) to a sideline (S13) because of very slack volume which eliminated signals. I bracketed in (L14) and showed trades up to L16. S17 goes off the chart. The first six trades were before midday and S17 was in the pm trading. This is an account that has 3 days trading in it so far so the trading is not representative. We began with 1 contract and are now trading two. When a tick was lost on S13, we sidelined, recognizing that the noise was too random to fool with. We had a bracket in for starting the pm. By being on the right side of the market continually, a person tends to takeout of the market all that is offered. Because of my viewpoint, I feel midday is the best place to mentor at the beginning. It has to do with keeping the learner at low risk by building pictures devoid of anything but a trend focus. One on one is different than most learning processes. Low risk means that the market is not going anywhere soon. It is sluggish and slow paced. This print like the first posted for real time Friday is a midday print as well. In this one, the spread was twice the other (5 points compared to 2 1/2). So it is logical that this print took out twice the money. That shows a slow learning is going on. Learning slowly is a very good thing. The account was 5K to start. I do not orient to the market by looking for places that are specifically anything. The midday is after a time of profit taking that is fast paced usually, i. e., the am and the open. The afternoon reopens the to the potential of faster paced profit taking as well. It is not a hard or easy thing but more just differing things.
If you try to use the same stragies in the middle of the day that you do at 8:30 - 10:00 CST, and 1:30 to 3:00 CST, IMHO you are playing a losing game, especially in these market conditions. All the professional traders that I know, whether they are floor traders or screen traders, repect the TOD and trade (some don't trade the mid hours at all) accordingly. nitro
I like this description of midday better than your first one vis a vis an extreme part of the range midday.
The trades don't really follow the SCT description you posted before. In particular, there are a few reversals that needed to sit through a loss for a while (S9, L10, S11, S15). So those trades weren't making money all the time. There were plenty of times where the SCT rules you posted "should" have been applied, but weren't. And a few of the trades seem to have no correspondence to the rules at all. While it's great to see the profitable trades, I don't see how to learn from it. It might as well be random as far as it illustrates what you described as SCT. It's all very confusing and getting harder and harder to follow what you are doing. Is that the intended message of your communication? -- Jerome
Dude... Grob is the new and improved Jack Hershey. He appears to be writing much clearer.. but his methods and strategies he has to teach are still crap. --MIKE
We'd better be patient! And tolerant! With our encouragement and interactions, he may stimulate us finding a Holy Grail, one day!
The four points you make are very important: 1. Trades can sit through losses. 2. SCT rules are suspended sometimes. (I did note that the APA was not being used) 3. It looks like some trades were made that have no correspondence to the rules. 4. As you participate, it gets continually harder and harder to follow. Midday trading is tough. This print is a result of using IB with a person who is just in his third day of real time. We used Market Depth as well. With the midday period, you have a market that is not going anywhere. There is nothing to get excited about. When you make entries using SCT it is because you are leaving a prior trade. So trades get connected. It can almost have the feel of random entries. If there were a good game for teaching trading, it might be called "get out of this mess." That is sort of what linked trades are like. The reason for seamless continuous trading is to stay on the right side of the market and see if you make any money. So the game "see if you can get out of his mess" would just be set up to "keep on the right side of the market." SCT put us into the 9, 10, 11 and 15. We worked on understanding the market through 9, 10 , and 11. Our riding through losses to not take them was mainly a factor of the TWS market depth (5 levels) monitoring. We slowed down in late portions of 5 min bars and did not do an IF 2 when we saw we would likely have to do an APA to correct it during market moves that were almost all noise. We treaded the situation as a beginner wash practice. We just decided it was slow and we would get the button pressing as fine tuned as we could to go with the flow. We gleaned 1.0, 1.3 and .1 on the three respectively. We were not up on a slaloming level because the market was mostly noise. There was all kinds of possibilities around the S15 wash. Prv volume was what personally sidetracked me at that time. We went redundant after that instead of dividing responsibilities. Most of those trades during midday were low volume. But we had several blobs of volume charge through for up to a minute at a time. The bottom line was that we knew the market wouldn't go anywhere. That is, get us in trouble. The energy is so easily detectable with prv, that if and when it hit we reversed as required to stay on the right side of the trade. 2 and 3. When IF 2 and an APA is imminent near the end of the 5 min I could suspend them if the call is made during congestion, convergence and centering during midday When I posted the exit to go flat, we were well into centering and IF 2 and APA pairs would have been popping up all the time. These days, we are having summer like sessions. To get any moves is a challenge, so we have been using midday as an opportunity to get out of messes where adjacent bars are formed primarily on very low volume noise conditions. 4. What will make things less difficult is a compendium of graded examples of most possibilities. The collection is getting there using ES exclusively. I have found that any day has at least five segments where several SCT trades may be linked. About 8 APA's come up daily and the volume range of 4500 to 6000 is the minimum volume range that is viable. The two ET midday posts are largely trials to use lower volume periods to cope with very low volume generated price bar sequences. You have had a successful experience in analyzing the posts and you "get it" that "noise" can't be traded with SCT (and maybe other techniques as well). So there is a three-fold payoff here. Midday does deliver profits. Moreso, it provides a source of compilable examples that define the limitations of the approach. Generating prints of midday and having others analyzing them as real time examples of combining the efficiencies of market potential and trader potential, is a terrific way to "get it". SCT has limitations and getting all of them on the table ASAP counts for a lot. This forum is addressing midday stuff on all fronts. Bottomline. The prints make good examples. Anyone using SCT rules can analyze the examples along side their charts. By using all parts of the day, we can build stellar real time traded examples of how SCT is useful. Also, we can provide rich examples of where trading cut offs occur in unmanageable markets. We used the T&S thread while it was open to make the connection between T&S and Market Depth with SCT. There are so many capable approaches; it may be possible that SCT has some utility with most. Since SCT focuses on chart trend monitoring, it can corroborate other TA methods. Integrating T&S and Market depth with SCT, strengthens all three approaches.
Thanks for the reply. One mistake I made: What I meant was that it is continually harder and harder to follow your actions relative to your explanations. This refers to my experience over time. I have no idea how you produced the results you did, based on my understanding of what you've described previously. Is the person you are mentoring getting it? It would be interesting to find out what is missing in my view. Thanks again, -- Jerome