**********Important Update************
I have now crossed the bounds into green territory..... now remember i was down 23k......well, i made 16k in a day and made a bunch of other trades, i am now officially in the green by 2k. I started listening to you guys and reviewed my trades overall.....i noticed the times when my tendencies didn't work and i now don't trade at those times....the es is very even keeled .....smooth.....except for volatile times.....when its at overall....higher time frame extremes. So being that my tendencies were extremely consistent....and profitable more of the time then not.....i am now in the green. the 16k was on one of those 100 point move days and i was in the trade early, it started moving against me 4k -5k and then it turned around and i got out the first chance i could at 16k bc it was rippin. and so obviously having huge trades like that isn't ideal in the long term....i feel like i am way more experienced now and am on the right side of the market more of the time then not. I still do make mistakes though. The last thing to take from me is i was consistently profitable during the beginning of the trading session and after about 4 trades i'd start to lose....so i started trading more contracts in the beginning and trading less contracts as the day goes on. Taking my profit for the day and being done.......now that 7k is more like an extra 17k because of losses that i battled through and were talking like 30 trades total. so my gains are still small but way bigger now that i'm trading 6 contracts. the orders still go through almost instantly so slippage isnt usually an issue. its 75 dollars a tick and one day i made 160 ticks before i started trading the 6 contracts per trade. I also contacted my broker and got a steep discount on commission.

thanks so much for the support guys, I look forward to making more profit as time goes on .....i feel like experience, coupled with my edits to my trading plan, are really going to help me make nice profit the days i trade. Now mind you i did make losses too but i recovered from them .....usually the same day.

I felt the need to reply to my own post as there's a lot of valuable information in the series and to hopefully reward those that've stuck with me and read through each post. If you trade like me, possibly my advices will help you become successful too.

thanks all,
HealthWealthTrade

HealthWealthTrade 

**********Important Update************ I have now crossed the bounds into green territory..... now remember i was down 23k......well, i made 16k in a day and made a bunch of other trades

Good for you. In the future, please remember to post your trading stats. Without those, no one can really help you.
See attached for a sample. There are many more stats as well. If you can't get these....I would stop trading if I were you.

is there a way to do it with thinkorswim.....by TD?

HealthWealthTrade 

[questions]: Is there anything in my strategy that doesn't make sense to you?

The rules seem to be all over the place....not concrete enough.

HealthWealthTrade 

[questions]: is there something that i'm doing wrong?

You haven't backtested your strategy

HealthWealthTrade 

[questions]: should i quit as a trader?(down 27k) been at it about a year. is there something more i could do to better my trading?

Analyze your trading results..where is your strategy performance report ?
Look at the MAE and MFE to determine if your entries are bad or exits are bad....or both.

HealthWealthTrade 

[questions]: should i only go for the 1k in 3 or 4 trades? or is the frequent 1-200 gain a good thing too? should i wait till i can trade with more contracts to trade again...like 5 contracts for example? should i wait till i can employ a strategy where you add on successful trades?

Backtesting will answer these questions. Being down $27k in a year indicates your strategy is not sound and will never be profitable.
Time to take a different approach.

HealthWealthTrade 

Hello all, im looking for advice to take my trading to the next level. I made a previous post but got banned for yelling obscenities. so this post im not going to do that instead iill try to give some details and thats it. so this past month i traded the ES about 184 times and ended the month down 411.20....i traded stocks(hence the 20 cents) a tiny amount but it was mostly the es. [strategy]: i look for very short term momentum swings and watch the tick by tick closely....i use RSI to get a feel for the overall trend.....and notice things like doji and inverse hammer, hammer ....along with trendlines to determine entries. i have the 200 and the 50 simpe moving average on my chart....and sometimes use the 50 sma as a .....the es will come back to this spot indication. sometimes i trade based on support/resistance the way daytradingaddict does on youtube. [some things i notice while trading]: a lot of times the tick by tick will tell me that the es is in a state of indicision and ill sit there and wait till theres momentum on one side or the other to place an entry....usually this works in my favor for a small 100-200 gain....with 1 contract but sometimes it ends up with a big loss as either the market is trading as a doji on the 3y weekly chart or there just isn't enough volume being traded/other things. [another thing i notice]: usually i start the day positive but within a fraction of a second im placing another trade that's a loser. as i thought i saw something in the market....an opportunity. but it turns into a loser and then i have to fight to get back to 0. [another thing i notice]: on some days i can make 1000 dollars with just 3 -5 trades but other days i struggle to make 50 dollars with 12 trades. [the underlying problem]: I either don't stop trading when i should or ill have 1 bad losing trade the kind that i enter and it moves really fast and i become stubborn because a lot of trades that start out losing become profitable but these are the trades that don't go profitable and end in a huge loss. i only trade with 1 contract and i dont add on. [advice to myself]:don't trade when it's a doji on a higher timeframe as it's wild and unpredictable at the tick chart level. I use a 7800 tick chart....i find that this is the best. i like being flat at the end of the trading session. [questions]: Is there anything in my strategy that doesn't make sense to you? is there something that im doing wrong? should i quit as a trader?(down 27k) been at it about a year. is there something more i could do to better my trading? should i only go for the 1k in 3 or 4 trades? or is the frequent 1-200 gain a good thing too? should i wait till i can trade with more contracts to trade again...like 5 contracts for example? should i wait till i can employ a strategy where you add on sucessful trades? thanks for reading and i hope you got something out of reading my post and i hope you can help me as well...thanks for your time. -Thomas

Street Smarts: High Probability Short Term Trading Strategies by Laurence A. Connors and Linda Bradford Raschke. I like the Holy Grail trade, easy for a beginner. Patience. Patience. Patience, when waiting for a high quality trade. Use it with a 5 minute candlestick chart.

HealthWealthTrade 

[another thing i notice]: on some days i can make 1000 dollars with just 3 -5 trades but other days i struggle to make 50 dollars with 12 trades.

I think this is key.

What is the difference between days when you make good money vs days that are frustrating?

a) Is the market different? For example, is one a trending day, and the other a choppy day?
b) Are you trading different strategies on each day, for example picking frequent close targets vs a longer further target?
c) Are you trading under different mindset conditions, e.g. something triggering more or less patience?

Have you thought about buddying up with a trader or mentor to talk through these things with?

Reading your later posts, it seems you are quite good at staying in a trending market. That is a good skill. If you focused on breakouts where there is potential for a trade to run for a while, that could be very profitable.

I think the 2 most important things in trading are:
1) getting your risk management right (having daily loss limit helps if you can't control yourself)
2) patience, patience, patience