No Shoes Trading

Trading Discussion Trade Journals
21

Update: FIXED

$47.26 / 1.83% so far this week. That’s the biggest news and I’m starting with it cause it carries the whole theme of today. Doing good is exciting. Most of that came around 7pm last night and almost half of it came from AUD/CHF and I was kind of winging it. I’m going to dive into this pair and the trades just so looking back I can really understand my mindset and what I was looking at so that I can make more trades like this. Feel free to skip the next couple of paragraphs if you aren’t interested.

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For the sake of clarity I moved to the 1H chart and hid the BollingerBands (BB), but I trade off the 4H charts. The first trade was a trade towards the Daily Pivot (purple ‘P’ line). And it floundered around in obscurity all day. The second trade was my BB strategy, it posted a buy signal so I added a second trade. A little after 5pm when the new Daily Pivot posted price was in between the two and thats when I started making executive decisions. I predicted (guessed) that price would pull back to the most recent pivot before continuing on its way towards yesterdays. Now there is no guarantee that would happen, but my indicators were pointing towards a rising price. Around 6:45ish it looked like price was hitting resistance at the BB midline (20 S.M.A??) so I checked out the 1H chart and Stochastic was overbought.

So I had an Overbought stochastics on a shorter term chart and a rising stochastic on a longer term chart with a price between pivots that it hadn’t touched yet. The price also seemed like it was hitting resistance. The was enough confluence of information (for me at least) to suggest price would bounce. So I closed my trades and set up a limit order slightly above the lower pivot to rebuy and continue holding for the higher pivot point. Here is the only disappointment I had with the whole trade, I closed my whole position. Now I run my trades on top of each other but independent of each other. I shouldn’t have closed the BB trade, I should have closed the Daily Pivot trade. As soon as I closed the trade I thought about that, these are separate strategies, I want them to operate separately. I decided not to reopen the BB trade and just stick with reopening the pivot trade, so the the third trade is the limit trade and then it hitting the higher daily pivot which had a Take Profit order on it.

Okay, thats out of the way. Had to get all that down because I want be able to look back and see what I did, what I was thinking, and why. Leaving the BB trade turned out to be a good deal cause my other BB trades are just dragging along (-$20 between them). But today i’m are in high spirits, because successful days make the goal seem real. I’m going to guess most people here have the same overall goal which is ‘trading to do ‘x’’. My goal is not having to work for someone else. But I also have bigger ambitions than that, and completely selfish ones (Lamborghini…anyone?). I want to help support my family, my mom is 70 and recently retired, my older brother is having health issues (mostly wear and tear from working in the construction field most of his life), I want my girlfriend to not have to work (we are actually looking at the possibility of her going part-time now, but that J.O.B. money doing that) I want her kids set up to be successful, I want my nieces and nephews to be successful. I want to buy my twin brother a Honda CRX every year for Christmas because that bastard took the one I sold him and traded it in to a dealership that sold it for scrap instead of letting me buy it…I never want him to forget that. No one cares if it doesn’t have power steering Laura (sales lady who wouldn’t sale it to me)! It didn’t have power steering when it was new!

More important than just goals and dreams is measuring and making progress. Keeping it all in a ‘when’ not ‘if’ mentality. What I do is my performance is ‘x’ over time. Maintaining that I’ll reach my goal when my account balance is ‘y’. Looking at my stats, its 4.5 years away.

22

Well, this lot isn’t very cooperative.

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23

Better days ahead

24

Have never thought it’s so complicated.

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25

Hey Regan64,

thanks for the encouragement. I appreciate it. I actually dont plan on losing any money on this. If the markets won’t cooperate I’ll just beat my profits out of them…with a stick…while they’re asleep.

Thanks for reading.

26

Losers average losers

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27

Yesterday I said “Losers average losers” with a picture showing that doubled down on my trades (except CAD/CHF that’s the robot’s trade). Its a great quote, I wish I knew who said it, but I don’t. I agree with it, you shouldn’t try to average down your loses, which is rebuying into a losing position to lower your breakeven cost. That’s dumb, its a good way blow up your account. Now I was not averaging my losers, I have bad trades on, but had more signals for trades so I took those trades. If I had signals again I would add more, I have 8 trades on, my limit is 10 so I might be a little stingy especially if I have signals in USD or CAD. I’m going to keep following my signals though, and I feel like that’s different than averaging my losers, each of my trades have their own Take Profit point, just because some of them didn’t hit it, doesn’t mean i’m going to ignore the next trade opportunity.

I missed Wednesday’s update because I was busy making changes to my strategy. BB strategy is officially set side of the time being. I still like it, all of last year’s profits were based off of varying versions of it. And in the future I will be bringing it back and trading with it again. The problem I have to be in front of the chart to make a decision every bar (every 4H). That’s hard with my job right now, I’m a truck driver. No one wants me checking my charts behind the wheel of a 75 foot long, 20 ton truck. And right now we are just going to Chicago and southern Illinois, which isn’t bad, but every 6 months we re-bid routes and come April we might try and get our old route back which was Minneapolis and southern Illinois. (this depends on my partner and what changes they make to the routes) We might even do North Dakota, which is just a ridiculous route (i did it once), but…$$$. Another reason is I’ve barely made any money off of it the last few weeks, most of it has come from trading Daily Pivots. I’m up $66 and maybe $5 came from the BB strategy.

So I’ve been playing with Daily Pivots, and now Weekly Pivots, and what some call Ghost Pivots (tomorrow’s Daily Pivot). And I got to say I really like it. I got rid of MACD and Stochastics so I have a full page of just price, its a lot easier to read off my phone that way. And I can also answer the question of where I think price is going just by price and some Fib levels off the Weekly Pivot (which the Indicator does by some sort of witchcraft). Its a little flexible, I can look at it at 4pm and set up some scalping trades off the Ghost Pivot, I can wait until 9pm and look for pairs that are pulling away from the Daily Pivot and trade those. And its simple, I just set a TP at the Pivot, give the trade a pat on the back, and forget about it. I like it, super simple, don’t have to think about, just do what the chart is telling you to do.

So far its paying off, like I mentioned, I’m up $66.03 / 2.54% its help drive up my profits for the year to $162.95 / 6.42%. That 2.54% is actually a milestone for me. At the beginning of the year I sat down and figured up that if I could average a 2.50% weekly return I could be close to replacing my income by the end of the year. All in all, I can call this a good week, even though my account looks like a mess. Everything looks like its going to come around if I wait it out so I’m not worried about it.

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28

If you can achieve a weekly return of about 2.5% then that would be excellent. Keep up the good work and well done.

29

We will see, it’s hard to say if that was an average week or an outstanding week. Plus I haven’t traded exactly the same way week after week. But it shows that my overall system is capable of 2.5% weekly returns.

30

So…I put the rest of my trading capital on EUR/AUD it was my Loss Leader (the trade most against me money wise) and I’m on the side lines waiting to see if price is going to establish itself above 1.64075 or start falling. TP on the entire trade is set at 1.62621. It will get there…eventually

31

Still waiting… EUR/AUD passed the first level, second is 1.64820. Drawdown on this pair is around 5% of account value. Total drawdown is around 18%. Might be tied up through the end of the month, which is a bummer.

32

Drawdown up to 22% EUR/AUD testing the 820 level. Sitting at only 1/4 margin available, not happy about that. I’ll probably cut positions down to 9. Full post coming tomorrow

33

Well….Whole lot of nothing going on today, still tied up in AUD and NZD trades. Account drawdown is around 23%, EUR/AUD is responsible for around 8%. That being said, Robots have added $8.95. I’ve kept $7.85 / 0.30%, I toyed with the idea of using the robots profits to wash out some of these trades (which is why there is a difference) but ultimately I decided not to. I’m not really worried about anything yet, my stocks are taking a beating this week, my 401ks are taking a beating.

I definitely need to make a few minor changes, I’ve been mulling it over the last few days. I need to just focus on one strategy, I was already starting to do that but I had some straggling BB trades. All strategies will have periods of drawdown, you have to be able to weather that. I see now that with a small account dividing capital like that was just dumb. Since I’m still in a growth phase I should be as concise as possible. In the future, when I start reaching my financial targets and start shifting into a maintenance phase I can start playing with adding different strategies. Another thing I need to do is exercise more patience. I tried to rescue EUR/AUD before it was even done moving against me. I’m still considering what I should do.

Sorry, I have to go on a bit of a rant: Why is everyone freaking out about the Coronavirus? My girlfriend was texting me from work because her son is home sick with me today and she was a little worried. Now he’s 11 and hasn’t been to China…ever. But she was worried so I had to go down a rabbit hole and reassure her. I found a death rate for the new coronavirus; 3.4% Based on media coverage you would think people are dropping like flies. The death rate for the flu is 6.8% Looking at the age groups of us and the kids the death rate is 0.2% I’m pretty sure I have a higher chance of falling off a ladder and dying but my girlfriend isn’t trying to throw away our ladder. Most of deaths are from China that I can find, I did find one article on Italy from yesterday that said they had 374 cases and 12 deaths, no details on who died, but that’s only 3.2%. At least SARS with a rate of 9.6%, and MERS (which I had not heard of) with a rate of 34.4% were above the CDCs pandemic death rate level of 7.8% I don’t understand what is going on, by the numbers it doesn’t look like a problem. I understand that it could spread to developing countries and cause bigger problems, but I just don’t understand the panic of developed countries. The flu is twice as deadly. People are pointing to this thing as the reason stocks are doing poorly, and it just doesn’t make sense to me. I mean I understand the media is saying we should be afraid of it and people are just following that, what i’m saying doesn’t make sense is the numbers don’t support this being a big deal. I don’t understand why, its not anywhere near as deadly as the flu, Italy’s death rate is lower than the average (although they have a very small number of cases so far) and nothing i’ve read this morning has given a solid explanation of why this is a big deal.

I had plan on talking about some other thoughts I had. I responded to a thread about possible returns and I had been thinking about that more and wanted to talk about it. And my confusion on why some traders on here think all indicators are bad. I’m not criticizing anyone, I just don’t understand it. But, I have a dentist appointment today, so I’m out of time.

34

I love it when a trader prepares a plan of action and thinks everything through, it is much more promising than some approximate benchmarks. Your plan looks good at first glance, but if you add a little specificity, it will be even more interesting.

35

Bingo! @The_Baller has taken this approach in his 10K gamble thread. by “paying the bills” without being chained to a screen. I would say he, and some others I am sure have proven it can be done.

Good luck, seems like you have a great handle on your plan!

KC

Edit: @zacj346 a few posts back you had mentioned pivot points and fibs… The video below addresses that exactly. I have no affiliation (and all that other “I don’t benefit crap”! :laughing:) It’s from proact traders and is well worth watching! In fact I will be reviewing it today! There’s no fee, membership, secret code, spambots, credit card or email required! It’s “…gold Jerry! GOLD!”

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36

Well, even intrigued, what’s going to happen next, can you really share something original and effective?

37

Following this thread! I also enjoy reading the side commentary. ; )

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38

Yeah there is that sentiment here. Also that mentors are bad. It’s an interesting discussion when I see it happen. :sweat_smile:

I’m on the same boat where I don’t know what the big deal is (don’t think there are zombie reports just yet lmao) but I try not to say anything as who knows if it will get worse in the coming days.

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39

Hey Everyone,

First and foremost thank you for all the comments, thanks @frandlost for the video, I will have to check that out soon. No Shoes Trading is down something like 60%, I am a little afraid to tally it all up (but I will soon). I got a notice for a margin call and I still tried to hang on longer than I should have. I eventually closed all positions (which probably wasn’t the best decision) but running no stop losses has this risk, and I payed for it. The good news is this thread is NOT OVER.

                   "Under the Bludgeonings of chance
                     My head is bloody, but unbowed" 
                       Invictus - William E Henley

I’ve been hard at work deconstructing my strategy, examing my philosophy, and going back through the books and material that influenced me. I am still doing pivot trades, and I’ll hopefully have time for a break down of whats going on Friday. I’ll talk about what I changed and get back up to speed.

40

I such circumstances has anypne considered applying their stategy in reverse?

1 Like