Only half succeeded in applying yesterday's goals.

Tomorrow - must try harder.

Reduced trading session today, only trading from 11:30 to 15:30 but still enough time to learn from my mistakes.

My main mistakes today were:

a) not actually doing the analysis in the first place at crucial points in the trade plan
It was an unusual situation with a big spike in the middle of a setup so I had a lot more to consider than under normal circumstances, in other words the reason I wasn't doing it was that I was quite confused by some of the price action - so I didn't forget, I just didn't get beyond the initial interpretation.

b) and when I did get beyond 'it looks bullish / bearish", I read the market badly, missing a ton of signs that I should have taken into account.

What conclusions can I draw from this? Probably the best course of action was to stand aside which I considered, violating another rule - only trading when it's obvious what to do.

I think my goal for tomorrow will be to make sure I know when I have done the best analysis I can, and to note down more bullish signs vs bearish signs, and to keep a mental note that I have done the analysis, so that I know I'm not flying blind, like I did today.

9 trades.

Not bad result in terms of pips but a bucket load of mistakes. I think basically I only made 2 good trades, and messed up 7 and missed a few more.

My goals were to make sure I carried out a good analysis of bull vs bear strength and weakness, and to establish my last wholesale price at a setup (aka last good entry point) and the stop and targets before entering.

To a certain extent I did this but I discovered that my estimate of the last wholesale price was giving me last good entry points which I thought were so poor I would never use it. On one trade I also realised that I'd missed the whole push of order flow which I was trying to ride and had entered just as the order flow stopped and a stall set in. That's one of the charts below.

Another issue is with exit management. Up until today I was managing my exits either as "loose stops" or as "tight stops" (or scalping) and I wasn't using any sound basis to decide, I was almost flipping a coin in my head. Today I realised that I need to manage my stops with reference to my expectations of what the market was going to do when I entered. I had literally just entered a trade thinking the market was about to step off a cliff, and in fact it did nothing, and then went the other way. I figured it was going to fall off a cliff because it had just done that twice before in this session, and when suddenly it didn't and I got stopped out, I was the fool thinking "oh I'll use loose stops now because I'm always getting stopped out". Of course that was dumb. If it was going to fall, I wouldn't need any stops, so tight stops would be best just in case it failed.

Later on I did something similar, thinking the price action showed a reversal in process, but I forgot I'd just been managing my last trade on the 3min chart with 3min price action, and the action I was looking at now was on the 1min chart and not nearly as significant - I realised after I'd dived in

I completely missed a bear channel break-out, I didn't even see the channel. I just thought it was something weird and new. I'm talking about the 12:00 to 12:30 swing where it alternated green / red / green / red all the way. I guess it hypnotised me.

Re goals from yesterday, I should have carried out the bull vs bear strength / weakness analysis more often.

I think also a couple of the trades were just unlucky. The second-to-last trade - the only reason I had not to be bearish still was the reversal bar at the S/R level - and generally there's some kind of reversal signal at an S/R level as the market pulls back after the BO - where it's going to continue or fail.

So, goals for tomorrow:

(1) refine my bull vs bear strength/weakness analysis to get quicker at it
(2) improve my 'order flow forecasting' to work out where the last wholesale price is.

PS Big Mike: if I'm taking up too much bandwidth and server space with my swathe of screenshot mark-ups, just let me know

Adamus 

PS Big Mike: if I'm taking up too much bandwidth and server space with my swathe of screenshot mark-ups, just let me know

Not at all. Keep right on going.

Mike

6 trades taken, 7 missed.

1: profitable but messed up entry, going in unprepared
2 & 3: profitable but missed entries
4: B/E
5: profitable but stops too close, only got B/E
6: bad entry, not a valid trade if had waited to see BO & PB action
7, 8 & 9: profitable but missed entries (PBs on way down after 13:30)
10 & 11: valid but failed and missed them anyway (at 14:00 lows)
12: bad entry, would have avoided if I did the prep
13: good profitable.

If I was trading every trade well..... the pigs are taxi-ing to the runway and ready for take-off.

Lessons learnt: I need to be quicker, to have some kind of checklist in mind to run through before each trade - have I got the correct principle? have I got an up-to-the-minute read on the bias? do I know which setup is developing? do I have an idea where the order flow will appear? where is the stop going? is the R:R alright? Then place the order!

Next session: implement that checklist. Don't enter a trade without doing it.

A quiet trending day which offered a new set of challenges.

I was bearish all the way but thought it kept getting too weak at key points to offer any high probability setups.

I took 1 trade and missed 1 good trade, perhaps missed 3 more trades in the same direction.

The 1 trade I did take was a disaster. I skipped a crucial step in my new checklist - falling at the first hurdle.

It was so quiet I'd added a big trend channel line down, just for something to do, and then I invented a plan to trade it. Instead of something simple I made it too complicated, trying to find a setup in each direction and
giving myself too much to keep in mind. So the moral of the story is Keep It Simple - even when it's quiet.

For your range on chart three what if you drew the top of it at the high of the 11:24 candle and the bottom at the low of the swing which was formed at the 11:33 candle. this would have given you a TST (short) where you made your trade. I usually find these difficult when there is a supply or demand line running through the middle of the range like this. Hindsight brings clarity though. Keep it up, your learning is improving!

I really like how you have this chart displayed and marked up.

thewardiknowof 

For your range on chart three what if you drew the top of it at the high of the 11:24 candle and the bottom at the low of the swing which was formed at the 11:33 candle. this would have given you a TST (short) where you made your trade. I usually find these difficult when there is a supply or demand line running through the middle of the range like this. Hindsight brings clarity though. Keep it up, your learning is improving! I really like how you have this chart displayed and marked up.

I see what you mean.

What would you have done when that TST failed though? Would you just move the upper range boundary to the high of the 12:44 candle and do it again?

Adamus 

I see what you mean. What would you have done when that TST failed though? Would you just move the upper range boundary to the high of the 12:44 candle and do it again?

Would 12:44 have been a BOF? If you wen short 1 pip below with a STOP 1 pip above the candle it appears it would have kept the trade short to the bottom of the range which it moved toward with strength at about 13:06, which then (in hindsight) you could have moved T2 to the next level.

thewardiknowof 

Would 12:44 have been a BOF? If you wen short 1 pip below with a STOP 1 pip above the candle it appears it would have kept the trade short to the bottom of the range which it moved toward with strength at about 13:06, which then (in hindsight) you could have moved T2 to the next level.

I'm just imagining what I would have done in real-time and I can only see that move up to 1.3275 as bullish on the way to S/R @1.3281. Then the stall set in so maybe that would have let me think bearish - even more so after the dip down @12:50 and then maybe - just maybe - I would have picked up the break-out down out of what looks like a weak bull channel from 12:50 to 13:00 - which was essentially Principle 2 - weak [bear] trend making CPB.

One of my weak points is spotting narrow ranges. I can pick up on big ranges as a big sideways trend is pretty obvious and the Euro seems to start off the European session inside the Asian session range by default quite a lot.