This is what I’m doing. I closed my scalp at 1.3600 near the close of the 12:45 ET 15 minute candle. It tested near 1.3610 for about 7 consecutive 15 minute candles and the wicks were getting longer at the top. So I closed my scalp for a 33pip profit.
I immediately went short expecting a range bound slow afternoon and consolidation period. I opened this around 1.3600 and closed at 1.3560 for another 40 pip profit. I am now long expecting a 50% retrace of this range to the 1.3580. But it appears I’m about to get stopped out at 1.3535.
yep…just stopped out.
But I do expect a little ranging here…just need to define the boundries.
The market is odd at the moment - very sensitive to fundamental issues, plus we are poised, on many Pairs, uncertain between trend reversal or continuation, or whether or not to break out of a range. Several Pairs are just stalled for no good reason other than that the market is unclear for so many different reasons. The JPY and CHF Pairs are harder to trade than they have been as both national banks have intervened. So what I am saying it, while the markets are giving setups at the moment, they are not always easy and are not suiting all approaches. I am sure that it will calm down, but do not assume that patchy performance at the moment means that you will struggle when things stabilize. I am taking fewer trades at the moment, and being much more circumspect about holding trades overnight - I do still do it, but not as frequently and only under very specific criteria - as the market is more volatile (not always in a good way!) than it was earlier in the year.
I am not surprised that people are finding it difficult, but do keep your overall optimism. I used to panic a little when I had a bad spell - these days I still don’t enjoy them, but they are not as bad as they were and I know that they will end.
Sorry to ramble, just stick to mechanical execution of your strategy and restrict yourself to particularly clean setups. At the moment, I would strongly recommend a smaller number of higher quality setups, and watch holding trades overnight.
(And sincere apologies if this sounds at all patronizing - I was aiming for supportive!!)
are you incorporating ICT’s techniques into supply/demand trading, or vice versa? I watched the consolidation and move unfold through ICT’s technique (shows it in one of his videos, but I don’t recall which one right now). In this case, price moved below the range, then traded through the upper range, before the move down unfolded. now that you mention the tall wicks, I also see it looks like this may be something straight out of Jay’s thread on supply/demand.
I have been wondering the last couple days, with 3 strong threads up and running from ICT, Pete Fader & Jay, how each trading style could be beneficial to one another. From what little I have read on Pete and Jay’s threads, they all seem to run based on PA & S/R (S/D). I intend to read their threads once I have a stronger command over ICT’s techniques.
I took two trades this week. 1. a loss, yesterday,entered too early,shorted Fiber on NYO.I saw a divergence there but…it wasn`t.Both Fiber and Cable made HH between yesterday and Monday.I lost 0.5% account. 2.win,today,shorted Cable at 1.6101.I found August low there,79% retr on H4,79% on M15…
Are we in a special time in history? There is a lot going on in the world!
What if we are learning to trade in 1929? This brings up a lot of questions…
Though decent swing trading has remained a bit elusive to me, the basics of ICT’s teachings (money management, support and resistance &c) put me on rather solid footing… it was an early video, I think, that said if you master those it is some large fraction of success. And so it has been, so far.
Swing trading is a slooooow thing to verify; it is all too easy to do well or poorly, for all the wrong reasons. It’s been a long time… but I remember there was a sparkling new, highly successful forex trader who made incredible amounts of money a few years back and thought he was an expert. Best I could tell, all his trades were shorts during the financial crisis… and his expertise expired quite coincidentally when the market turned. I wonder, to his own mind, did this person consider himself an expert for the better part of a year? The real thing, of course, must take a fair amount of time to truly know.
As such… even true experts are going to have difficulty ‘proving the fact’ day in and day out. Say you are a true expert with say (I’m making this up) a solid 55%/45% gains/loss ratio for all your trades. Enough of an edge to make you a millionaire many times over. And yet, how apparent is such an edge to the average new person, on a day to day basis? Probably not very apparent. Even backtesting and so forth has its error margins.
It will be difficult to evaluate our own skills in the short run. Safe to say, many of us will ‘get it’ before there is basis or confidence enough to say “Got it!” Likely several months of proving, to ourselves, that we actually learned, applied the lessons consistently and that the ‘edge’ isn’t a lucky gambler’s streak, or happy accident, or illusory. Or even more so ~ for the person who really has it, but happens to be in negative P&L territory… there’s the confidence barrier to overcome.
what a perfect Sell Day on the Cable today, hey!.. right from the text book, Asia Open kill zone provided first OTE, London Open-second, another chance to get in on NY Open and once again on the London Close… I only can feel sorry that didnt catch this phenomenal move of 210+ pips (so far)
I did actually, incidentally got in last night (around NY close time)… was pulling some random Fibs… and if you pull one on 4H TF from London close High on 31 Oct to the Low on Asian Session, 03 Nov you’ll see an fantastic looking OTE last night (GMT), I thought will go in for quick scalp… trade went very well, got 50% out at 36 pips and left the rest run overnight… unfortunately I moved the stop to BE+10 and got stopped on Asian hight for about 7-8 pips… so, got around 40 pips, which is my biggest win so far… not bad for a random shot :34:
still reading the thread, but starting to see the bigger picture from time to time… still lost of pieces missing, but hopefully by the 25th day of ICT Christmas my education will be accomplished… :35:
My biggest problem is the thinking process, it is great difficulty to build a reliable ‘‘scenario’’… I prefer the things to be more mechanical, check all the boxes and execute the trade kinda thing… I desperately need the ‘‘ICT Checklist’’! :45:
well thats enogh from me,
GLGT to all! :57:
The current rant I am about to go on is not in direct response to you. Your post just made me think. Goodjob on getting in on todays action, and ICT’s checklist exists already.
I realize in my short two week existence on this forum that new accounts are constantly being created and many just seem to slip away overtime. People undoubtedly in the dreaming stage, while others fall back to reality.
A post I read earlier referred to our tendencies as humans beings to want indicators and checklists to follow so the onus of our trades could be deflected from ourselves, or at least the failures could be. Know that a systematic approach is not developing your understanding of the market. I believe ICT has went slowly so people could [B]understand[/B] and make sense of concepts.
I can only imagine how long it has taken ICT to develop his current market methodology and even though his release of materials seems slow, I am sure it pales in comparison to how long it actually took him as an individual to put it all together; especially when I hear it mentioned he has over 2000 books. I can see ICT first looking at support and resistance among many other things before realizing that’s what needed to be focused on. Then reading about overbought oversold conditions and realizing ‘hey maybe price is trying to tell me when its OB/OS. HOLY$&*T it is’. That one process was probably months or years while we have benefited from a shortened timeframe.
The reason I say the checklist exists is because ICT has already provided the basis for his knowledge; highs/lows, fibs, fig’, flow, COT, etc. So within that material there does exist a method and ‘checklist’. Undoubtedly when ICT provides us with things like the latest TT video, most, if not all, of us go ‘wow I hadn’t pictured it like that yet’. Mainly because ICT has had time to develop his thoughts.
Nobody knows who of us will be left after a week, month, year, but realize that this is so much more than mechanical even though when you master the concepts I am sure it will feel that way.
I started to edit it and realised i was late for work, deleted it, you were fast, it was only posted for 3 or 4 minutes!
Well, i missed my NYO short on the cable by five pips. Didnt chase it
I hoped price would retrace back to the ADR low & 1.6000 but it only came back to S2.
I was only looking at the London session high to low fib. I didnt see the OTE form that lined up perfectly with S2. Sometimes i cant see for looking
Then i missed my fiber LC entry by 1.5 pips. Didnt chase it
Wasn’t my day. I did see the small OTE form for LC but i didnt think price had retraced enough and i wasn’t sure about the news that came out at 15.30
Took the Plunge on the Cable! One shot, One kill. 6098 to 5905.
Feels great to be in the camp that catches the big move for once. Done trading for the week, proud of my discipline and analysis!
One thing you realize after following the charts for a year, with ICT tools/concepts on hand, is how many opportunities there are EVERY week of the year. There is always a good solid 150pip+ move in a week. and for that reason, I don’t feel bad for anyone that missed the move, and they shouldn’t either! Happy Trading all
Patience is the key, exactly what you said there are plenty of opportunities so dont beat yourself up if you missed this one just prepare for the next one.
Obviously there was a lot going on with top down analysis yesterday, but the entry on Fiber was a retest of the NY CPP at the 1.3800 figure with Asian low and PD (2) Highs as further resistance. I find that when you have a pivot right on top of the figure, it doesn’t cut 25 pips through it without good reason.
Hey Ali, overlay some Weekly pivots on that chart you got there
Weekly Pivots+Daily (NY) pivots is my new favourite template. At one point, I had all the 50/00 levels drawn, but it looked cluttered so now I just mark the pivots that are close to the 50/00 levels.
The accuracy of this tool is just scary, Here is an update on the USDX and as you can see the 161.8 FIB was cleared yesterday, Fiber was also hellbent on trading to the 3520 level which is the 161.8 extension using the TT’s projections. Hats off to ICT for sharing this tool, until now I was only using the TT for range bound markets, this new insight adds a whole new dimension to trading with this tool
After months of writing monthly and weekly pivots manually on my charts I ditched that routine in favor of AutoPivotIndicator as the levels were spot on. I am yet to decide whether I made a grave mistake by lining them up on a Monday and not anticipating that they could in fact be rolling pivots.
I didn’t check the weekly pivot yesterday, but today it is showing 1.3856 and NY MR2 was at 1.3850. Is this what you are referring to? There were also 15M and 1H divergences during Asia which acted as early warning signs.
I just think it’s a nice overlay to have on weeks like this. Nobody in the market wanted to buy above fair value (CPP) and it was all downhill from there
Since I’m only able to focus on LC trades, and sometimes Asian if the kids aren’t too rowdy at night, I’m really starting to love Z days! These days used to be where I struggled the most, but they are now turning into my most profitable. Thank you ICT for everything you have given us!
Since we didn’t have much of an SMT divergence today, I split my trade up and entered and the PWL of cable, and 62% on the fiber. Although I exited a bit prematurely on the cable, I still had a very profitable trade. Looking forward to see if a Turtle Soup forms later today, and maybe if I’m lucky, a trend trade will set up in Asian tonight
On the 1 hour chart above, I drew a fib from the high to the low from yesterday…the big move down. The 38% retrcement level lines up on the pivot for today.
I was away from my computer when the 1600GMT candle reached up and tested the pivot and I had forgotten to setup a sell limit order to get a fill at that price which would have been an ideal OTE in my mind. Daily pivot…38% retracement level from yesterday…and a 78% retracement level for the 1300 candle swing down to the 1500 candle (I didn’t draw that fib so the chart wouldn’t be too busy…but it was a confluence of multiple things…pivot and 2 retracement levels).
I came back from lunch around 12:30ET (1730GMT) and missed the pivot retest which was the initial OTE. After that, I brought up a 15 minute chart to see if I would get a second chance to reenter on a smaller retracement. See 15 minute below.
On this 15 minute chart, I drew 2 fibs. One from a swing high to swing low after the touch of the pivot. I entered at the 61.8 retracement level. When I got to the computer, price had gone into the OTE zone and touched the 78% level and retraced down to the 50%. I waited for price to come back up to the 61.8% nd entered.
I set my stop loss 10 pips above the pivot line. I’m a little anxious about this as the market could move up and gun out stops located above the pivot. But I didn’t want my stop to be too wide and this was a second chance reentry.
For my take profit…I used the original swing that I saw on the 1 hour chart and extended downward. The 50% extension is projecting out to 1.3510. Given the time of day during the NY session, and the fact that the 23% extension is just below the MS1 pivot level, I opted to set my t/p just above the 23% level and MS1.
I sat and watched price go back above the pivot and came with 2 pips of stop out, but it’s reversed in my direction and may turn out to be a good trade.
Good to see we saw the same things Perch…it looks like we may have entered around the same time and used slightly different fibs to enter. I think you used the initial swing, and I used a 2nd chance swing that ICT has shown in some of his videos for what to do if you miss an initial OTE.
UPDATE: Exited half my position for a 26 pip gain. move s/l to b/e. getting late in the day. I may leave it open overnight and just wanted to take a few pips out, and move my risk to 0. Also, took off my t/p and set a trailing stop for 50 pips. See if there’s a big run overnight without any risk.
Oh! and it wasn’t the first one.
