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Yes, true, the odds are not in my favor right now, luckily I have lost close to nothing. My mentality is, trading is hard, but life without good trading is even harder.
I guess what you mean is that I should be looking into volume, into why people interact at certain rates. Is it volume/price relationships what I need to be looking at?
This chart demonstrates what gets me a lot. In that case, my auto-stops moved tick above brake even, but I didn't like them and moved them back up, and I got charged.
What gives me some hope is that my psychology and mentality is changing. I no longer am as happy when I have a profit, nor too frustrated when I have a loss. I am also starting to think in terms of probabilities for every trade.
@marketvoyager - Bobwest post is the best advice you can get. His post must be printed out and read multiple times a day. Here is why I am saying it. I failed Combine so many times I don't even want to mention it here.
I've been making every single mistake Bobwest listed in his post to you.
What made me change my trading is Many hours of watching seminars related to trading psychology. The key turn point was @Chipps1983 trading Journal as well @alejo journal they are my favourite. You should read chipps1980 journal where Bob providing good support. This guy displayed incredible discipline and continues improvement.
Can you recommend a journal of a trader that trades the ES, and is heavy on volume profile, volume ladder, and price action, and that is consistent with experience? I think the one you recommended have methods based on sma's and some trade euro and forex.
First, let me just say how hard it is to give anyone else meaningful advice. Everyone finds their own way, or does not, and it really is up to each of us. However, there are some things that can help. The biggest problem is sometimes getting through to the other person, because everyone pretty much lives in their own world of beliefs and their own viewpoints -- which is not in itself bad, but it makes it hard to get their attention.
I will give it one more try. Please see if anything I am offering makes you want to change anything you are doing.
Looking at your charts and at the things you have written, these things stand out for me:
1. You really, really have to stop attempting to scalp, and also get hold of your tendency to overtrading. Scalping is death. Almost no one can do it well, and the very few successful pros at it will just eat you up. This has been said many times, and somehow you haven't gotten it. You have demonstrated that you cannot scalp profitably. If you do not stop the attempt, you will continue as you have been. This is important.
2. You have mentioned a few times that the TST Combine rules require you to scalp. They do not require any such thing. None of the successful Combine traders who have posted here were scalping. Many of those who failed it were. There is a reason for that. Get that idea out of your mind, because it does not work. There are strategies that do not match well with the TST ruleset, and yes, many are longer-term in nature, but the rules do not require nor do they encourage you to scalp, nor to be very short-term -- which is just as well, because there are almost no successful scalpers anywhere, and none of them are just starting out in trading....
3. You are taking too many trades. This is connected with the attempt at scalping, but is another point to understand. Jumping in and out will kill your account quickly. You will get many small losses that will eat up the small profits, and you will be done. You need larger profits to give you a cushion against the losses, and you will not have them with all this over-trading.
4. There is an amazing amount of stuff on your charts, and they keep getting more complicated. You also keep looking everywhere for more techniques, more methods to use, more stuff to look at, one new thing after another. This has not helped you. Look for simplicity. Find something that speaks to you, understand how -- and whether -- it tells you something real about the market, and stick with it until you have really explored its potential. Jumping from method to method, idea to idea, is not working for you. Put a stop to it and get focused.
5. Similarly, the "right" methods, and the "right" indicators, do not exist. There are traders who succeed with methods that seem totally ridiculous to others, but that they can put to use profitably. There are so many different possible approaches to the markets that it sometimes seems that they are each in a totally different reality. Yet, many, many things will work, in the hands of someone who has made them work. But to look for a new thing that will be what you need to break through is a fool's errand. If you don't put a stop to it, you will continue to thrash around with all these new ideas and new questions and new charts, but the same unfortunate results.
I know this is a kind of negative list -- it's all about things you should stop doing. But if you don't stop them, and I mean stop every one of them, you will have no chance of finding anything that will work for you.
Now for the hardest point:
6. I cannot tell you, and no one else can tell you, what you should be doing instead. That is truly a bummer, and I wish I could. There are a lot of books and webinars and forum posts where someone is trying to tell you that, but they do not really work out all that well. There may be a lot of really good ideas in many of them, but it is not that easy to grab them and just put them to use. If you actually do the work of making sense of them, applying them, then maybe they will be helpful. Whether you get ideas from someone else or not, you have to take them into yourself and make them your own, or they are worthless.
7. Which is why your question about a good journal to follow is also barking up the wrong tree. Sure, you can learn from other posters, but mostly you will learn when they are discussing their mistakes, since their mistakes probably will be among your mistakes too -- not from following or copying their methods.
8. As a last point, everything you are experiencing that is not working lies within your own personal psychology, which is why new methods and all that stuff are not working for you. You are still you, when you try the shiny new thing; you still do the same things with it that you did with the last shiny thing. This is also hard to get, and is absolutely something that only you can address. You are the only one who knows what you are doing and what you thinking when you make a good or a bad trade, and you are the only one who can address, or even know, what your issues are. But without the self-awareness to work on them, nothing else is going to work for you.
I'm truly sorry if this has not been pleasant for you to read. Please understand that I mean it well, as do the many others who have tried to tell you similar things. I know that I have not answered your questions, but that's because your questions are wrong. Perhaps I have helped you see that, perhaps not.
If you want to know, I believe that is why @Big Mike said, in his last post to you:
That doesn't mean you have to quit, but it does mean you have to change. Otherwise, quit.
I think I have fulfilled my duty to try to be helpful. I do hope it will be of help. I have also put a lot of energy into this thread, and the questions that have come back are still about what new thing to try. Really, you have got to be kidding.
Good luck, and please start thinking and stop all this spinning around and searching.
Marketvoyager. There's lots of good advice in this thread that I am making a note of myself.
Just in case you need some light relief before the weekend, this is a Big Mike's video titled 'Awesome New Chart' which really made me laugh. It isn't meant as a criticism of you, or not just you, as I would be surprised if there are many traders or aspiring traders, myself included, who won't have identified with it.
@bobwest is far more patient than I when it comes to repeating everything, we are lucky to have him on the site.
Short version: The guy wants to scalp because he thinks scalping will minimize his loss. He can't afford to take "big" losers because he has no money.
Again, should not be trading futures to begin with. Anyone who scalps for this reason should not be trading futures. And likely shouldn't even be day trading. Not if your goal is to make money. If your goal is excitement, then sure, scalping futures is exciting. Swing trading equity ETF's on the other hand, with one trade every 2-3 days, is far more boring yet almost 100% guaranteed to be more profitable for those who currently scalp.
Swing trading a lower leverage product gives you the ability to:
(a) practice your analysis on a big enough time frame that it has time to either work, or not [scalping does not]
(b) set your stop/exit point far enough away to give the trade time to work [scalping does not]
(c) use smaller amounts of money, and risk smaller amounts per trade [futures does not]
Starting with futures is like starting with a Formula One car when you are 15 and learning how to drive.
There is a thread I am following, Bob posts there occasionally. This trader's journal looks a lot like yours starting out, and I would add I have seen dozens (feels like 100's) of journals like yours and his, but unlike all the others, he just stuck with it day in and day out and worked out his trading story. Now he is doing pretty well !
So I am not suggesting you run over there and copy what he is doing, or his charts or whatever. I am suggesting you study it to get a feel for how one trader worked his way from where you are to where you want to be.