Welcome to my journal. I hope that this will help me to improve my discipline which means following my rules for entry and to help me overcome the various psych issues that I have had to deal with in trading.
I have gone through 3 small accounts without much success and certainly not consistent success. It has been an interesting journey to observe how ones mental state can justify the actions that do nothing but drain the account. I believe my primary fault has been to too quickly stop the bleeding when I have draw down. The fear of loss on a small account strangely colors your view of the indicators. The ones that told me to get in the trade change and laugh at me or so it feels at times. From what I have read, this is a fairly common problem.
What I have learned from my prior record keeping is that price generally (not always) comes back (in the direction that I initially thought it was going, meaning I had the correct direction but could not deal with the drawdown). My job will be to ensure that I am looking ahead at those various structures that would help me to see where price will bounce and potentially rebound. (I know, a very generalized statement, sorry). I would hate to tell you how many lines on my spreadsheet (1 trade/line) show red for loss and the comment line says should have waited X minutes as price reversed and would have filled target or at least gotten to breakeven (X = 1 30 minutes). The comment line also contains other language inappropriate for others
My trading style is best characterized at manual entry/exit, short term trending. Targets typically will be 4 10+ tics. I mainly trade 6E, occasionally ES and I keep threatening to purse the other currencies but as yet have not (6S, 6J, 6B, 6A, etc). For now my ideal time in the market is less than 2 minutes/trade, longer than that usually means I am dealing with larger targets or drawdown (ugh).
Indicators will be 13ema, 20, 50 100, 200 sma (on 1 minute chart), Linear regression lines, pivot lines and fractal lines. MACD of 19, 39 & 9. In addition I will have a 3,5, 15, 30 minute charts for clarification of the trend. I also tend to look back at 8 hour time frame and determine other area of s/r. I'll use the buysellvolume indicator on 1 minute timeframe only.
Preferred entry trigger is based on the 13/20 cross and with a candle touching the 13ema at that point or soon after. To illuminate this, for me, I will be using the MAcrossbuilder indicator to highlight the chart background at the cross. The preferred entry is when the 13 has crossed not only the 20 but also the 50sma. If it has not yet crossed the 50 then I will go for 4 ticks, if it has then I will go for more. I will use an entry on any chart (1, 3 5, 15). The ideal set-up is when the 13 ema is leading all of the others, in the same direction.
Alternate entries are on the first pullback to the 13ema, candle touching in the direction of the trend.
At this point I am looking to capture 12 16 tics a day on a single contract, after I become consistent, I will add more contracts and go for the same number of tics. So hopefully I will only make 3 4 trades a day.
While controversial I will tell you my stop loss will be relatively large, again based on the experience of getting stopped out with too tight a stop loss. If I see that I have no options (structures to bounce off of) I will manually exit before I hit the stop loss.
There of course is a lot more to (all of) this than Ive written but this should be enough to start with. I will post todays trades shortly.
This journal will be difficult for me and I am sure it has been difficult for others to do, so to all you other journalists, tip of the hat to you and to everyone, good trading.