ok its been a while to be honest I have not idea where I left off but probably I was lost. Not that I am not lost now, but my advantage is that I know I'm lost lol Anyways not sure where i left off with the price of gold but we hit a high of 1800 or 1900 I consider it still in trend from the past years. but it is on the upper part of the trend that was not touched in a while. last time we saw this 07-08 it was followed by a down move that set the stage for the rate of increase we have become accustomed to today. This time we see that things are developing much faster which is to be expected. Now personally i prefer the way gold was growing before it was always steady. We are still in trend but now we get that feeling that something may happen. what will it be? god knows. hopefully another increase in slope and not a major correction.
So I have been trading since i mentioned that i started at a prop firm. I had days where I would place 100 orders a day. and days where I would have 1 order a day. Chasing 1-3 cent gains proved to be something I cant really do well. It requires fast movements, fast thinking and semi automated trading. All things I am bad at. I'm pretty sure I am one of only a few discretionary traders who does HF. How was it ? Well to get a fare idea lets look at me best day! my best day consisted of 99 trades I think all on the spy. I'm gonna be honest here. The first half o the day I was buying in a downtrend on the tick chart. I swear I caught every up tick. I covered at every micro high and bought at every micro low. What most consider noise was clear as water to me. For this reason I strongly believe that by discretionary trading has a place. Also listening to the squack I see that the big banks tend to buy or sell a few minutes right after me. That being said the rest of the day was crap. How could I have been dead on about 50 trades and dead wrong on the next 50 ? who cares. fact is that it happened. that day represented a truth to me. Even on the day that i am as sharp as a ginzu knife i still f up. It will be that day that will represent a turning point in my trading. now a number of things can be said about what i did wrong. 1. order entry!!! cant tell you how terrible I am at this 2. Order entry !!! 3 buying/selling at market !!!! 4 order entry 5 risk management so the above with a few more can be blamed for this. but fact remains that even with this fixed i would have lost in the second half of the day. This made me pull out all my stats. I did not go too deep in to them but realize that I should take the time to do that. turns out I am I am not that great after all. I let my looser run and take profit to fast. as the nature of discretionary goes one tends to find them selves juggling analyzing charts and proper order entry./ trailing stops, stop losses ect. I decided to pop up some moving average lines on my chart. noticing the watching the 2 lines intersect seemed like it was pretty accurate. Not having a means or the knowledge to back test the moving averages i decided to say that they are equivilant or better then my system. this most basic of systems may be not as good as many. but the beauty is in its simplicity. my old system did not give me the returns i wanted for the amount of effort put in to it. This moving average will allow to free up my mind and study other subjects of trading. I have come to the realization that I am most probably focusing on the wrong subject (entry and exits) decided to think of it like a gamble instead. And i used to play around with numbers with gambling so thought id do the same. this is where i came in to the idea of what is referred to as risk to reward ratios. the idea was that if one was to draw a line through a chart free hand and place buy/ sell orders around the line having good ratios one should be sucessful. further. if i was to use my old Technic and do the exact opposite of my instinct having proper risk to reward ratios I could be profitable. It would be nice to test these ideas out but i just wont. one day i decided to place a 3 cent trailing stop behind my orders and for some reason it did not work out . Hmmm i thought thats odd. Knowing that the 3 cent was not based on anything i tried 2 cents and 4 cents. did not make money. great some sort of calculations will have to be done. wich will be hard to do with discretionary system. so my goal is to get in to this moving average system but it is very hard to let go of what i made. Now i was over trading. I decided to controll my trades to where i felt there would be a turnaround in the markets in the day. So every day I look for this turnaround point. It is still discretionary, but not nearly as much work as it know where to get in before markets open this system seems to do the best. So far I can say that I have not been "wrong" with this system and been right a few times. i have limited experience with it as my tendency is to lean back to over trading. some times i spot the low and then markets dont turn around but go side ways. Often I am expecting that but hopeing im wrong. anyways in this case I tend to get lucky and make just a few cents a share. but if i was too loose i would not let a big loss occure. again this is the discretionary system that is simple as it can be done after hours. I'm basically trying to add some risk management to it and have a way to analyze my results naturally the moving average would be the best way but i would really have to have a good understanding of what risk to reward ratio to use for that and know how to back test. since those are my weak points , i will focus on the "after hour discrtionary system" I'm trading the spy and looking for a mathamatically simple system to use in determining my targets/stop losses. I really have no idea where to start and saving me some trial and error would be really appreciated. so far im looking at the ATR average true range and find it to be something that may need to be in my formulea. the rest i have no idea where to start. Hopefully this revisit to my journal will represent a new stepping stone towards success.
My gold paper trading has been going good. I have posted some buys on the web and hit some nice lows. I now want to trade gold but not sure what avenues are open to me. I have been paper trading gold on think or swim under the symbol /gc I am not familiar with futures but I just look at the price action and make a move. Im not sure what I am actually paper trading but im pretty sure its not the spot price of gold. I would like to use think or swim as my charting but actually have my trades go through a non bank platform. On think or swim the discription of /gc is gold futures eth (apr4 12) I would like to trade this like I trade stocks but would like to hold overnight. A prop firm would give me some leverage and I would need that type of leverage. I would prefer an international platform not based in north america. It is important that the platform represents price based on think or swims /gc chart as it will be used for finding entries and exists. With stocks I used Sterling trader but the cost of 200$ a month will not be good value as the exact cent i enter on will not matter too much. I am looking to risk 20$ per trade rufly and would like to use market stops. Where can I go for good fees, good leverage, good reliability and not with a bank? something that has been around for a while and preferably is backed up with real gold ? In the fx world they have FX trading and such things that are not with a bank and can be easily opened with leverage. What would the equivilant be for gold /gc ?
Funny how similar they look.This last picture is a really bad interpretation of another system Was just playing around but gotta head out
Volume was flat during last 3 tapes (indicated as one large tape on my chart) price changed from down to flat. We were close to a DU but not like last time. Volume is not dictating a down move but the TL to hit is down.
PRice hits the ES RTL. It expands the channel Price stays in envelope As volume increases price continued The part where I got lost a bit is where volume stalled for a bit. Also my YM chart was squished and looked flat. To recap the day after I came back: at 12:30 volume stoped and we had a change in price as price increased we had a continuation of the change in price at 1:35 Volume peaked and then went flat--indicating a change (Volume stayed flat but price went up ?) at 2:35 volume went from flat to increaseing and price continued. It seems clear, Ill have to look at my posts to find out where all the unnecessary confusion came from , maybe even try to fix up a bit and add some notations.
Channels on their own seem to a be a good edge. I will now try to keep track channel touches without regard to volume to have some data to compare with while we try to add in missing details of Jacks system. For jacks we are far from accumulating data. For now we will record channel in one time frame and take entry's on the side that favours the trend line. We may also add in FTT's if they show to be of importance. This is not going to back tested but rather forward tested as I am filling in details of JH. This way it will not take time away from learning JH. 1:30 lets try to get cracking on work and avoid the forum for a while. unless it is productive