That's great, cause I think I'm on the same path, from scalping for tiny pips I try to pick the trades with the biggest potential lately and give back some for a break-even, but it pays off when catch a run. Scalping works, but exactly as you said... A little bit too much work. You confirmed my thoughts on the matter, which is very good for my confidence in being right about it considering your experience.
And I will "third" that opinion. I too got overly involved in the 1-min chart a while back and it was just too stressful.
Yea, over time excitement of "wow, I can grab so many little swings" steps back and you start thinking of maximizing gains while minimizing efforts.
Donna, I've been meaning to mention this to you for over 2 weeks (been looking at this for 4 weeks all day now alongside of the CL trading), so it's just coincidental that I mention it today. I think you should take a serious look at the GC 5 min. The high margin requirement would lead one to believe that it's too volatile, whipping you out of good signals and not able to trade with stops similar to the CL but this is not the case. You can risk no more than 20 ticks and catch great, smooth rides with a 2 to 1 reward to risk ratio. Plus, lots of 1:1's and 1.5:1's where you get more like 10-15 ticks of heat before settling and moving in your intended direction. The one adjustment I would recommend for you is to sim it with a stop limit order. The bid/ask will spread to 2 ticks a lot and this order will forego the slippage without missing the move most of the time. If $400 is the conservative expectation for a 1 contract CL trader, I would say that GC can give easily give one double that. 4.5 pts is a common scalp move in a multi-leg trend.
Got to get to my other work here, but just wondering Steve how this compares to SI? Do you trade that one too. Both GC and SI sure moved today. I was SIM trading SI one Sunday, just to try and get a feel for it, when it tanked 12% I believe it was in 12 minutes right after it hit 50. Sold off from 48 to 42. Huge move obviously. And I switched to look and see what CL was up to and took it out of SIM mode and into my real account. When CL didn't appeal to me I switched back to SI to play the bounce off the selloff. But I forgot to put it back in SIM and traded 2 contracts. I was up like $2500 I think it was in a few seconds and then it started to pullback to b/e just as I noticed I was trading my real money. Freaked me out, as all of a sudden I was down $1500. Somehow I decided instinctively to let it go. And it bounced slightly and I made $400. But 2 contracts are $50 a tick and $100 for one cent. And it had just sold off $6 in a few minutes = $60,000 for 2 contracts. It just made me realize how highly leveraged this is and if you trade it you better know what you're doing and be super careful. Decided to stick with CL and TF which work just fine for me. Here's the SI chart with my real trades and some SIM trades.
Quickly, I just was looking at today's SI chart and noticed on the Bernanke selloff it made about an $18k per contract move in 90 minutes. Wow. For anyone that doesn't know 1 SI contract is $5k a point.
Yesterday Bernanke provided good trend in nearly all markets. Everything is so correlated nowadays, that it' just a matter of what suits trader's personality better.
Hi I've got to get back to my other work, but I discovered your trading blog earlier and see you made some good money shorting the Euro. Is that right? Good for you. Wish I was a silver trader and caught that move. And gold got creamed today too. Here in California it's 8 PM. I guess in Russia it must be Thursday morning around 8 AM. Is that correct? ADD: Watching the Los Angeles Lakers basketball game on my laptop on and off, looking at charts, looking here, and doing some Excel work. Need to get to bed in a few. My sleeping schedule is messed up. I slept 2 hours this afternoon to catch up as I was up at 3:30 AM.
BTW I agree with you all on the 5 min chart issue. I'm usually too focused on the 1 min. It's good for entries on reversals especially, but I want to focus on looking for the bigger trends which are easier to spot.