Welcome to NexusFi: the best trading community on the planet, with over 150,000 members Sign Up Now for Free
Genuine reviews from real traders, not fake reviews from stealth vendors
Quality education from leading professional traders
We are a friendly, helpful, and positive community
We do not tolerate rude behavior, trolling, or vendors advertising in posts
We are here to help, just let us know what you need
You'll need to register in order to view the content of the threads and start contributing to our community. It's free for basic access, or support us by becoming an Elite Member -- see if you qualify for a discount below.
-- Big Mike, Site Administrator
(If you already have an account, login at the top of the page)
No. I looked at options a few times, kind of get the basics, but not interested enough in learning what it seemed like was needed to feel effective. Options deal with mathematical advantages and combinations that did not seem to hold my attention. But if you can absorb the strategies, I have read about a lot of succesful options traders.
The problem I have with them is moves like that are not common enough for me to become familiar with them. I have no idea what is going on, where support or resistance may come in, how to read the volume, where to place my stops. I forget what it was, but I believe it was FOMC, maybe 3 years ago? CL spiked wildly back and forth over and over. I tried that and got knocked out a few times in a row, most times seconds after entering the trade. I used to think I wanted to ride that bronco, but today I prefer waiting for everything to get back to normal.
Ended up all 5 days this week, net 228 ticks, but not that good of a profit factor at 1.65. That could be from my experiment on trading upstream one day. I do know I had around 3 or 4 decent equity swings that day. But it was something I was ok with as I wanted the "live" emotion to go along with the experience.
I had mentioned to someone the day before that I believe it is better to drop all indicators and get in touch with the flow. Then I woke up the next day and wanted to see if I was onto something. It was tougher, but winners bigger than losers came through for me.
Looking at that a few days later, I wanted to point this out to myself, because it worked. The market was going nowhere but down, and I saw that, but I INTENTIONALLY bought it the whole way. I am not ready to make that a typical approach, will probably never do it again. Not the easiest way to trade. I am attaching an exported trade summary to show how violent the equity curve was for the day. But, the point was, volume may be the ultimate indicator.
Win/Loss was 64.37%, which is about normal for me. I would like to see it higher, but NT calculates every time I get in and back out, so that hurts me some on that score. For example, I may decide to take an entry, then question myself, step out a -3 ticks, then decide I am actually ok with it, get back in and close uo 30 ticks. NT says I am at 50% profitable trades, but I consider it one trade.
My nickel got dropped in yesterday, but I called back to Orlando and had someone put a penny in my pig for me today. I don't expect anything that could keep me from scoring my first dime next week. It's all about the pig to me right now.
Watched as CL did it's thing for awhile, but still did not feel like messing with it today after that burst. Went to meetings, made it back to my room to retrun emails with ES running in the background on the big screen for entertainment, like some people might have a TV or I-Tunes. Shorts there got pinned in pretty good going into the weekend, nearly solid vertical on a 6-range ES from 10:30am on.
I am glad for someone who had a gr8t week. Mine was ug-o-lllly!!! Was trying out some new indi's on sim and went down 27k. Needless to say those are gone off my charts and next week I go back to worked for ME.
A sim loss is a good loss. Great place to try new things. I experimented live this week, got lucky.
The indicators that work for you may actually be no better than the ones you are getting rid of, but to you they are.
Where I previously tried to hold to hard rules with indicators, lately I have felt they mostly just give a backdrop for price so I can quickly recognize what might be happening. I have noticed more over the past few months that their meaning has changed for me considerably.
I have been reviewing a few trades I took over the past few weeks trying to understand how exactly I made a decision to get in, when the entry on the charts had nothing to do with the way I intended the indicators to work. But they felt right. I am starting to believe that maybe the greatest application of any indicator is just to be incredibly familiar with it.
I see so many cool things here on futures.io (formerly BMT) that I play with, but I keep taking them back off. It may be that I am just done looking. Maybe the same for you?
And we'll KEEP taking them off. I saw a vid once while I was doing my education and the guy laid out why indicators DONT work sooo well. I changed my whole philosophy and found a PA only method that works (FOR MOI) and has very few albeit very important rules. 1. only trade at key entry points and 2. wait for the market TO COME TO ME. and give me what I need. It's really that simple for me. It made me 23k in the last 3 weeks between ES and ZW. I stayed with 1 ZW trade I was in for 8600 on 10 cars. I am by nature a "rule breaker" and always had been. BUT NOW??
1. Patience = MONEY and 2. there are only 2 rules and they = #1. It's that simple for me now and I love it and am finally trading with confidence in knowing that if I wait I get paid.
Now what will be even more fun to be challenged by is to make back the 23k I just lost trying out those indi's using my own method. Didn't need them the first time.