I like to trade intraday pullbacks when I think the main trend has resumed. Typically, the market either shoots off in my direction, hovers around my entry, goes slightly against me, or goes hard against me and hits my stop. Sometimes it seems like I would be better off immediately exiting a trade if it doesn't move in my favor ( after 1 minute for example) rather than waiting for my stop to get hit. What are people's thoughts on this issue. Thanks.
A lot of times a time stop is better than a hard stop, especially if you see patterns in your trades that suggest this (like you have)
You have to consider many things. Your objective is to make money by understanding thaat the market is always right AND the market does not keep any secrets. By staying on the "outside of the market", you are sitting and making guesses as to what YOU THINK the market is doing. Perhaps you may be able to monitor the market and what it is doing from a money making viewpoint. Price, as you say, doesn't just sit where you paid admission. The main trend is not important compare to the price movement and the seconds tick by. You are looking at the main trend and you enter when you feel the price is "resuming" this trend. This "test" of yours is only a momentary glitch in the infinite scheme of things. When you "see" this" test, you have narrowed down the possibilities to five possibilities. This is not good enough for anyone considering trading. Consider what it would be like for you if you switched to "reading" the market all of the time and then following the advice of the market. Why not do what the market tells you all of the time? The simple reason is that you do not know how to do this sort of thing. That is not going to happen for you either. To trade, you invest money and time. Money is recoverable and time isn't. After you enter, you have a choice of two things to do: stay in or get out. I do not have the choices that you have. You will have to consider changing the choices that you have after you enter. I can't make you do anything. You can make yourself do something however. After you enter, spend time looking at the market and it representations. You can determine, by order of importance of the representations, whether what you did is getting more favorable or less favorable (and take notes). You will find out what does not matter very soon and put that at the bottome of the list. What does matter will begin to emerge from the market to you. You, then, will take the advice from the market and do what you are told. Stay in is one of the things you will learn. The other is NOT to get out. Traders trade to make money and money is offered all the time by the markets as you have stated above (but from the vantage point of a frequent loser who freezes most of the time). For some reason, your head is not screwed on right at this point. If you get in and see that the market is getting less favorable, you are being told by the market to make money by being on the other side of the market. At some point it may be possible for you to reason that all trades go on for a while and then then become less useful and finally useless for making money. During this slow and inevitable transition, the market is continually telling you what to to. You state that you "see" these periods of time. You call them "doesn't move in my favor" and "hovers around my____" and "goes slightly against me". None of this information that you glean from the market means anything to you from what you say. What if it did simply because you started to make use of it. Step one is NOT using your entry price as a reference. Making money is done by doing what the market tells you and it does not say "make reference to entry prices". The market says "stay on the right side of the market at all times". You are being offered money at all times by the market and you must take it when it is offered by being on the right side of the market. Your display has only one purpose: To tell you which side of the market is the right side. You take a side and you, repeatedly compare the side you took with the side that the market is telling you is right. A trader can look at the markets closely or just from several feet away. By not getting any closer than 10 feet, you get to trade less frequently because the details are not discernable. I trade more rapidly because I have multiple screens and my glasses are tuned to 68cms, the distance to the vertical pivot of my super seat. What I get to see is all the games being played, who is playing and I simply front run all the strategies at play. I am able to see 20 to 40 segments of profits a day. A segment begins when another ends. It is a series of links for me. What it looks like is a series of trends within trends. There is nothing resuming; all there is is a pathway of profit segments that represents taking what was offered as each part of the day passes. you can do it by adding up the pices to see what a day is like for me when I do as I am told by the market. (Google crayola test.) You are looking for a setup. Too bad, because you do not know what to do before or after the setup , you think, appears. You must choose to do what you do or make the choice to do what the market dictates. The market is always right and you have to do what you are told by the market. I have a display. So do you. My display tells me 100% of the time what is going on. You do not have a display that tells you 100% of the time what is going on. Get a display so you know what is going on.
Just out of curiousity, why 27 minutes? Is it just an arbitrary number or is there any specific reasoning. I understand if the reasoning is "top secret" but thought I would ask anyway . Thanks.
I like to start praying. Hope works too Sorry couldn't resist. For me I have an exit strategy and a Stop Loss. Many times the exit strategy takes me out before the Stop Loss. No questions asked.
Jack As much as I think you're a low-life idiot, I have to agree with some of your comments (no offense intended by the way) jbob, I think if you're timing your stop, as the market moves against you, there will be many times...numerous times that you will bang your head in the wall, as the market barely approaches your stop-loss and then resumes back in your way. I trail my stops. But I place my stops in a strategic place and then my platform takes care of the rest. There's good platforms outhere (Ninja Trader, Transact, etc) that will trail your stop as your setup.