Michael,
Thank you for all of the care and effort you put in to training us on this thread, and thank you for my being a much better trader now than I was a month ago (and also thanks to this great community.) I’m really having fun.
Hello first I must say I really appreciate all the free and good information you are puttin out.thank you it is very useful, however it would be even greater if you could make your “book” videos into.pdfs. Also good work on keeping key komponents into one post. Defragging the thread is smart.
/z
Are you serious?
Michael has handed you a suitcase full of money —
— and you say it would have been “even greater” if he had deposited it in the bank for you?
After Michael transcribes all his videos onto .pdf’s, how about if he sends someone to your house to read them to you?
Give me a break.
[B]My third attempt at breaking my scalping habit…[/B]
EUR/USD, entered at 1.39000 at 02:24 GMT (Asian session entry)
Stop-loss at 1.38800 (20 pips)
Take-profit at 1.39500 (50 pips)
Reasons for entry:
- No EUR or USD news today
- Market flow up on hourly (though this soon reversed), four-hour and daily
- Buy zone (just)
- Price had failed to hold below 1.39000 all session
- Support from GMT-5 pivot at 1.3899 (and GMT+3 pivot at 1.3902)
- Support from round number 1.39
- Support from old daily highs 1.38868, 1.38931, 1.39005
- Market bias upward (I think?) since first week of October, general risk-tolerant environment now
- Falling USDX over the last three weeks
- Mild buy signals from Williams % R, RSI, Stochastics, and MACD
Reasons against entry:
- No OTE
- Not a kill zone
- Trader’s trinity sell zone
Never really sure what to make of these ones:
- SMT: it looks like the Euro and Pound are still highly correlated
- Treasury bond yields: 5- and 10-year fell, 30 rose and 2 stayed the same (so…?)
Reason for SL:
- 20 pips is rather tight, but if price falls below the support lines cited above there is little to hold it up
Reason for TP:
- 1.395 figure has been reached twice in the last 24 hours
- there are only two resistance lines intervening (old weekly highs at 1.39134, 1.39356)
Progress:
- this is much less certain than my GBP trade (301 Moved Permanently) on 20 Oct. I am not sure I should have entered on the round number, as it was meant to be a support line in its own right and is actually below two of my supposed support lines. I thought I maybe should have set my pending entry order a little higher. However…
- a slightly better entry price became evident soon after I entered. Perhaps this was a stop-run below the day’s previous low, but it was only 7 pips.
- 03:17 GMT leaving my desk for a while, with price at 1.39177 (17.7 pips up)
- 03:44 GMT I moved the SL to BE+1 (price had meanwhile pulled back from 1.39226, 22.6 pips up, to 1.39142)
- 03:58 GMT not happy; the old weekly high at 1.39134 first acted as resistance, then as support, but has now given way, and price has fallen back to 1.39072
- 04:04 GMT a sudden unaccountable price spike of 18 pips or more, in less than a minute - in the right direction, just as price was getting to within 4 pips of my SL. I should have taken some profit, but it was too fast.
- 04:16 GMT at this point, with only 6 pips in hand and having twice been over 20 pips in profit, I am frustrated at not scalping the pips when I had them. The day is now looking rather choppy and, dare I suggest, untradeable. Optimism has evaporated.
- 04:35 GMT with price hovering 4-8 pips from my SL, I’ve set an alarm at 1.392 to take off some profit, if it gets there, and I am leaving my desk since watching this now is both boring and torturous.
- 04:47 GMT stopped out for 1 pip. Not sure what I learnt there.
- 06:19 GMT price again hits my 20-pip TP without having touched my original SL, but my position is long closed. A case of too little patience or too much caution?
Pajo,
I have not yet spent time studying the Asian session much, but from what I have learned, the Asian session provides decent scalping opportunities, and you should be happy with 20 pips during this session. If you’re not looking for a scalp,
there may be better trades for you than those arising out of the Asian session, unless you’re looking for a good entry for position trades. This is what I have gathered so far.
Yes, I know. I think yesterday raised my expectations of the session.
In my opinion you shouldn’t be calculating ADR on a platform that uses the Sunday candle. If you play about with ICT’s ADR tool you will see that no matter where you place the start time, the ADR figure does not change. The only thing that changes is the ‘Today’ figure, and this suggests that while the ADR signal lines changes based on the starting point for the day, they are still calculating range based on the data from the Daily candles. Using a Sunday candle that only accounts for a few hours of data will bring down the ADR figure quite considerably, and is not a true reflection of volatility over 5 full trading days.
I agree with Pajo that GMT 21:00 is a logical starting point for calculating your ADR. GMT 21:00 is NY closing time and the very last Friday candle should close at this time. I have now started manually calculating my ADRs around these times because I no longer fully trust the ICT_ADR signals alone. My definition of ADR is the average of the last 5 days’ range. That is high minus low for 5 days added together and divided by 5. By calculating with these methods, and starting at the same point, my manual figures and indicator figures can still be off by up to 20 pips!
Hope this helps.
Well said, if you can’t even so inclined to put forth even the tiniest amount of effort, there’s really no point.
Hey Ali,
Yeah, I managed to figure out the discrepancies by calculating the ADR by hand, so now I just keep track of it using an Excel worksheet. So you’re saying to use Friday’s range instead?
Regards,
Clark
Good spoken Clint.
Ali, I’d be very interested to know how close your projected ADR’s come to actual next-day pip ranges.
I devised my own formula for computing an ADR, which I thought was highly logical. Unfortunately, it has a dismal track-record, when compared to actual ranges.
Here are my projected ADR’s for GBP/USD for the past 12 trading days, compared to actual H-L pip ranges:
Mon, October 10 — 191 pips (actual 163)
Tue, October 11 — 174 pips (actual 95)
Wed, October 12 — 142 pips (actual 256)
Thu, October 13 — 166 pips (actual 119)
Fri, October 14 — 172 pips (actual 131)
Mon, October 17 — 141 pips (actual 117)
Tue, October 18 — 141 pips (actual 191)
Wed, October 19 — 156 pips (actual 153)
Thu, October 20 — 165 pips (actual 123)
Fri, October 21 — 148 pips (actual 220)
Mon, October 24 — 165 pips (actual 108)
Tue, October 25 — 161 pips (actual figures for today have not printed yet)
[B]Note: each trading day begins and ends at 5pm New York time (2100 GMT).[/B]
Thus, “Monday” is defined as 5pm Sunday - 5pm Monday; “Tuesday” is defined as 5pm Monday - 5pm Tuesday; etc.
As you can see, over the 11 days for which comparison figures are available, only one day (Wed, Oct 19) even came close to my projected ADR.
Are your projections any better?
I just absorbed my second consecutive London Open losing trade. Shorted at OTE found on Cable near round figure resistance of 1.6000 with confluence of MR1. Stopped out.
Not sure if I entered prematurely in a potential turtle soup pattern, or if resistance has in fact been broken. Hope you guys had better luck.
That should have not been a loss… Your stop was too tight, a 30 pip SL would have served you well, there was smt bearish divergence, Cable higher highs and Fiber failing to make a new high, I would have looked at a better entry,maybe 6010-6015 being that yesterdays high on cable was 6007, I did not trade it but I was watching it real time and If you looked at the USDX it was failing to get lower than 76.00 critical support, should have been at least 30pips in the green, but suck it up and learn from it
I did not see an OTE at this point. What reference points did you use to draw the Fibonacci?
I am a little confused as to your comment ‘only one day come close to projected ADR’ because I don’t see that as being the function of the ADR. Price exceeded your ADR 3 times since Oct 10th, and that means 3 potential LC set-ups. Price also exceeded my ADR 3 times for Cable, and 4 times for Fiber. This is about right when comparing with my historical data. Here are my results for Cable:
Oct 10th — 174 pips (actual 161)
Oct 11th — 173 pips (actual 95)
Oct 12th — 162 pips (actual 255)
Oct 13th — 193 pips (actual 119)
Oct 14th — 171 pips (actual 131)
Oct 17th — 152 pips (actual 117)
Oct 18th — 143 pips (actual 191)
Oct 19th — 163 pips (actual 153)
Oct 20th — 142 pips (actual 122)
Oct 21st — 143 pips (actual 220)
Oct 24th — 161 pips (actual 108)
Oct 25th — 159 pips (actual to be decided)
Same start time, 5pm Sunday.
Regards
Ali
I just closed a really nice trade. Goal for the week already reached!
2011.10.25 04:27 buy 0.04 GBP/USD 1.59748 1.60000 1.60200 2011.10.25 06:40 1.60203 45.5
2011.10.25 04:27 buy 0.02 GBP/USD 1.59748 1.59530 1.60200 2011.10.25 06:05 1.60073 32.5
- 4h and 1d trend up
- prev weekly High acts as support
- daily pivot acts as support
- daily low acts as support
- all within range of the OE (~10pips)
I placed my stop 10 pips under the daily Low and the 100% mark, took 30percent off after reaching a plus of 30 pips, moved my stop later on to 1.60 and reached my TP at 1.60200 - 45 pips, yay!
Calm down… I very much appreciate what he has done here . It was a only a suggestion.
/z
While I was able to call the London Open support that formed at 1.3880. I wasn’t able to call the resistance at 1.3950 and I ended up only netting +10 pips.
I don’t know whether to get back in or not.
Update: I did end up buying in. There was a surge I caught so I moved my stop to +20. Thought we would end up going to 1.40 but we didn’t so I got stopped. +30 for the day. Seeing London Close now I think I’m done with the see saw ride for today.
3 trades so far today with manual closes. First trade was 14:00 GMT NYO off the pivot bounce OTE. Closed it after EU spiked high and didn’t break through (SMT no divergence, GU refused to go higher in range too). 41 pips total.
Scalped GU short from that spike high right after closing my EU for 13 pips, missed the 60 pip drop on that :46:
3rd trade was another OTE zone after EU almost touched S1 (GMT) pivot, entered on the move up in the face of the EU 95 pip fall :26: . Took profit after EU bounced off the DPV and started retracing, thought was it might continue down after retesting the lower range. 24 pips captured.
I used a short swing since I missed my original entry by a few pips (which would have, in hindsight, given me the 30 pips I was looking for). The swing high I used was 1.5993 and the swing low was 1.59627 as pictured below. My entry to sell was at 1.59830.
