Ultimately I imagine I will go the SC data route for July. Having just read a great thread over at BMT about it, there is really no reason not to, and $40 a month is really nothing compared to it helping get just one good trade a month.
What's tbe ratio of the amount of time you place a resting limit order below or above price vs hit buy or sell?
zero.... I've only been entering market orders lately. Its a shame because once I see what I want to see and I hit the buy button, its usually a couple of points above where it should be, and then of course with a tight stop, there is hardly any room for it to go against me. Plus, because the order is entered once it start moving in my direction, I am not getting in a few points into the buying or selling wave, and often right after entry the first thing price does retrace just a little.
Okay well stop doing that. Once you see price doing what you think it should be doing so do you and 200 others. Unless it's on the absolute last final leg (you should be noticing before this) it WILL retrace. Place a resting limit order at the edge of the most recent support or resistance and just wait. If you don't do this then FOMO is controlling everything. Remember you're not trading a high velocity instrument like CL (and even that has calmed down lately) - nor is this 1999. You want to be positioned before the move and take advantage of larger traders who will take advantage of smaller traders to get positioned. For the next month everytime you go market buy or sell just punch yourself in the face (literally or figuratively).
Agreed 100%. NoDoji first outlined this actually in my journal months ago where she talked about how given whatever stop you want to use, the entry has to be within that stop, so often if you want to go long with a tight stop, it actually means that you would be filled as price is coming down just above the support area of swing low or whatever you're using as your stop. It is such a radical change in thinking to be entering orders not because of what is happening, but because of where you have to get in based on where the stop is going to be to show that the trade might in fact not work. The FOMO for me is huge, and yet, where I should be entering the trade based on what I've seen after looking at hundreds of charts, in real time, to enter there seems scary because there is zero confirmation. But as NoDoji also says, the best trades are the ones that never feel right. Being positioned before the move is a killer tactic, and you have no idea how many times I wanted to get in, right at the hesitation, then I see it drop, just like I thought it would, then I'm stuck going through FOMO and wondering if I can still get a better entry for a short slightly higher and.... etc.... well you know the drill I'm sure! Now I will say this though... that while watching what little I have of the T&S, I do like it when I see big orders coming in, being hit at the bid or ask depending on the direction I'm looking for, so I might still wait for this. I also see that sometimes, when price initially goes against the direction after getting in, if the move in the opposite direction has no size or urgency, even though price might move a few ticks in this direction, its calming. Without the big orders buying at the ask, even if price goes up 2 points, it still now doesn't seem to scare me as much if I'm watching T&S and I'm in a short because this little move up doesn't seem to have strength. If its just a trickle, it sure looks like its more of the big players loading up on shorts. Comments?
Bigger traders don't just hit the market in order to get in before the move. They use small traders to fill their resting orders. So any large orders you see coming through should be taken with skepticism. In fact consider them intentionally misleading within that smaller time window. Your confirmation to entering at an edge is seeing the same thing happen 2000 times in a row. You're way worse off buying or selling immediately after seeing the start of the move happen. The market will continually punish you if you keep doing this.
Agreed... to a point though. I will just have to keep watching this closely going forward. I have noted big orders sometimes in the opposite direction that go nowhere (ie. 300 contracts hit on the ask in a down move, and price then continues to drop some more). So I for sure don't want to think a big order will always point to a direction, but lately I've been having trouble taking any trades, so if my price reading supports a direction, and we are at an extreme, and now the T&S might also give me the green light, perhaps it will be what I need to take the damn trade before I trust myself enough, or at least trust my PA skills enough, to do this without more confirmation. Right now I seem to be just focusing on the entry and the timing. Even if I have the ultimate direction wrong and hence the trade would have been stopped out regardless, its still been quite damaging to be buying at the top of a little spike up, get stopped out. Its even worse when price goes in the intended direction, but regardless of if my direction is right or wrong, the entries still suck. So my entry timing is way off, and I'm just trying to sort this out. Getting in before you know is certainly much better than getting in after the move is obvious, but tricking the brain to do this isn't easy. I often sit there and "will my brain" to make the finger move to click the button as the cursor is hovering over the buy button, but it doesn't click until it sees the spike up. So I'm having to undo some bad habits here for sure, but at least now, its coming from a place of more knowledge rather than just hoping for luck.
When you see the move start to happen and you're mentally playing forward the "future" or what your expectation of the future is, immediately find the most recent local support (we'll use a long case) and place a resting buy order. Then sit and wait while everyone else gets screwed and you get filled. Don't ride the buy/sell buttons - just don't even be using them. Your job is to see where price is most likely headed and where price will go before it ultimately goes where you want it go. That trade window with buy/sell buttons sets up bad habits as it requires you to think too much on setting up an order away from the current price and then waiting until price moves to where your limit order should have been in the first place plus all the mental machinations after the fact. Get rid of it and use the ChartDOM, resting limit entries. Skate to where the puck will be. Buy or sell orders are directly opened right on a price level by directly selecting it. You don't have to show the DOM if you don't want to. The columns on the right are this:
I'm a little confused by this statement because the trade window you talk about I'm just using for market orders to get in right away. When you continue and say that it requires too much thinking about setting the order away from the current price and waiting for it to move to where the limit order is.... isn't this what you are actually saying to do? Not to buy the breakout, but to buy at where the support level is... so if price does break out, you wait for it to come back to support, and hence the idea is to place the limit order below where the current price is to get in a long but wait for it to trigger lower. The problem of course is that price may never come back down again, and if it does come back down again, I start to question why it came down and hence is the long still valid. Also, I'm not sure what you are trying to show me with your chart. I see the ChartDOM, and it should work jsut fine for me as well because usually I used the DOM anyway to enter limit orders, it just I had the seperate DOM, not just the chartDOM. But I'm not sure what all the other stuff is between 4512 and 4521.. but maybe that's ok as I don't want too much on my chart to confuse me.
The reason I recommend the chart Dom is because the price context is right *there* from which to place resting limit orders. To clarify what I meant by the trade window requiring too much thought is that it requires too much thought to set resting limit orders with. Most people who are hitting buy/sell on that window are not going to be typing in a price in the bottom section. Of course, their separate tradeDOM can be used for easier functionality but why bother with all the mental translations of looking at the chart and then entering it on a separate DOM when the chartdom kills two birds with one stone.