Monday 3/7/11
Quick stats:
6 trades
Trend bias taken from the 5min PSAR (0.03, 0.3)
AGAINST trend weight: 1/10 acct max per leg
WITH trend weight: 2/10 acct max per leg
STRONG confluence weight: 5/10 acct max per leg
2.8114% account change
As of new rules, # emergency stops I can hit and still be net positive for the month: 0
Yep yep I’m still here. Sorry for the hiccup in posting. I actually took a week off due to some personal matters but have been trading like usual for the past week or so. I’ve fallen behind with my daily journaling so I don’t have every day ready to post yet. I hope to get the charts analyzed and put up eventually (I will just prepend them here). In situations like this where I do fall behind, I think it’s important to just pick yourself up and keep moving forward. I won’t dwell too much on the ones I missed, and if I can’t find the time to mark them up I may just skip them altogether.
I did have 1 crazy bad day where I allowed my account to go 25% in the red before cutting it off. That was the week of the personal issues and after that day I decided not to trade any more until after the issues (obviously my mind was not focused on trading). There was 1 other bad day that hit my emergency stop. I have done some analysis on these days and come up with some ideas. It’s extremely difficult to look at failure days but I want to always try to glean some bit of wisdom from them.
As far as today, Monday, it has been a decent trading day. A shortened session for me but still good. The liquidity seemed normal to me but spreads moderately higher on Oanda.
I fixed something on my charts that has been bugging me for awhile… the 15min (yellow) and 1hour (pink) trendlines were “bumping into each other” … because the yellow is so much contrast against the pink, I was having a very hard time trying to update and project the 1hour trendlines correctly from day-to-day. I’ve pretty much determined that there are (potentially) an infinite number of trends going on at any given time on every timeframe. So I simply deleted the trendlines from hourly and re-drew a different non-conflicting set. I’ve gotten in the habit of drawing both uptrend and downtrend (grid)lines for every timeframe I follow: Daily, 3hour, 1hour, 15min, 5min, 30sec. This provides me with plenty of SR levels to trade from. I also draw horizontal levels at .xx00 .xx20 .xx50 and .xx80 and these all work very well.
Hi Rob, thanks for visiting my journal. I’ll make a few comments below…
Please note I try to stay primarily focused on percentages. The reason the daily % has improved is for 2 reasons: 1) I am training myself to add a discretionary “weighting” to each trade, based on my confidence of how well an SR level will hold. You can see the weight I chose in the circled numbers on my charts. There are 3 buckets of weighting that I choose from, according to my rules: AGAINST trend, WITH trend or STRONG confluence.
- The second reason my daily % has increased is because my rules now allow me to take trades both with and against the 5min trend. Previously I would only trade the entire session based on a single trend bias that I would identify before the session. To try to control risk, I use the weight buckets to trade more conservatively against the trend, and more heavily with the trend.
Thanks for putting yourself out there. I have read your thread and have experienced the ups and downs as you have. We know that everyone will trade a little differently, so there isn’t a one size fits all system.
Very very true. I’d like to say more about this, for others who may be reading: you can watch someone else trade and possibly pickup ideas from their method, etc. You can even try to replicate their method and maybe you’ll even manage to match it perfectly. BUT it will not fit you like a glove. There will also be some level of discretion that is not a perfect match for you. For this reason, you should only look for IDEAS from other traders, not to try to mimic them. I believe in this philosophy wholeheartedly after having created several trading methods myself over the years. The best ones are ALWAYS the ones you create yourself, or stumble onto yourself. You become intimate with them in a way that simply cannot be described or taught to others. A trading system can start from an EXTREMELY simple concept and then you build up from there. If you build it this way, you will be intimately connected with it on every level. This is the best way to find the trading method that is right for YOU.
I have no fear in sharing my trading method with the world, down to every last detail. Because no matter what I share, it can never be experienced in exactly the same way I experience it. Sharing forces me to study and analyze at a much deeper level than I might do otherwise, so it has a lot of benefit for me as the executor. For you as the reader, it can give you ideas or start some wheels turning in your head. So it really is a win-win situation. But don’t fall trap to the monkey-see-monkey-do mentality.
(ok sorry for the rant… lol… and not meant to be directed to Rob, just wanted to put my thoughts out there)
I have some ideas I will share here. You could add horizontal S/R to you chart for some good price confluences.
Right now I do use these horizontal SR levels that work GREAT: .xx00, .xx20, .xx50, .xx80 (the 20 and 80 levels have recently been added as part of my official rules).
Try taking trades @ your best S/R confluence areas only and with 1/2 or 1/3 max. lot size. ie. 1,000 units per $100.00 and use a hard stop of say 10 pips.
Yes, I see what you are saying. It is a constant battle for me to sit on my thumbs and not keep trading. Rather than focus on when not to trade, I’d rather focus on training myself to know when a trade idea has gone bad. It’s very easy to jump into trades left and right at every single SR level. I don’t see a problem with this, especially when using the weight-bucket system. But the problem comes when I’m unable to identify a runaway trade. Jumping in at every opportunity means failure is certain at some point (right?) – so I just need to keep practicing how to identify when that storm cloud blows my way.
I always try to exit manually before stop is hit. I feel a 5 pip target fits well in this instance but it is a max. so if the trade becomes questionalble just take whats there +1 or 2 or -1 or -2 pips, no fighting the market.
I wish it was this easy. Maybe it should be this easy? But for me, since I allow scaling, I cannot seem to make a hard pip level stop work. I do follow percentages, such as equity loss during a trade. But if I’ve scaled in good form, then usually only the most extreme circumstances result in a loss. Those are the conditions I would like to be able to identify before they get too far out of control.
Having a set PT sometimes gives you a quick profit when PA jumps through your target and snaps back. Using 1/2 or 1/3 max. lot size enables you to scalp while you are in a trade. Say you are up 2 or 3 pips and it looks strong you can take another trade or if you go down 4 or 5 pips and it starts to recover you can put on a 2nd trade.
I think I understand what you are saying with taking scalps while a bigger trade is playing out. But, I’ve been unable to make this work due to the FIFO rule we have in the US. I rely heavily on the overall position and the average position line. If I try to take scalps while waiting for the original trade to complete, it screws everything up and is basically impossible due to FIFO. The only option I ever considered was scalping in a sub-account, but I’ve decided not to do that based on recommendations from other traders.
I find myself taking better entries and not getting the loosey - goosey additude that averaging against a move can cause. Sometimes I acutally reverse position and go with the flow instead of adding to a loser by averaging.
So far I haven’t found a way to make this style work without scaling. Rather than keep trying, I now just try to put constraints on the scaling. I don’t believe scaling is inherently bad and I don’t have any psychological issues with it. At the same time, I realize it needs to be constrained.
Thanks man!
