I've been missing! Still trading just got out of the journaling habit. Performance-wise I'm still getting there. I'll have a few good days, then a bad day. Then a good day, then a couple losses. I still struggle with missing good setups and sometimes taking bad ones. And sometimes I feel like I get lucky on a winner which I equate as a loss.
Overall the last two months I've been about a break even trader which is pretty good considering I'm trading just one ES contract for a 4-tick scalp. Sometimes I'm up a little, sometimes I'm down. But to do that on just one contract is encouraging because I'm not using runners. Some of these trades I would've caught a 10-point runner, and those are the money makers. I don't want to get too far ahead of myself but I look at each trade as if I had runners to work with and note how they would have performed. I consider it a major victory when I have a win that would have netted a big move on the runners, without them getting stopped out after the scalp.
But before I can get to that I must become...the master of the 4-tick scalp. And that is where I'm still developing. I want to prove that I'm everyday profitable on the scalp before I get into runners.
Today was a good day. Three trades taken, three wins. The first one though, I'm not so sure was a great setup. There were some reasons to like it but maybe some reasons not to. I saw it as two legs back to the main trend line working down, with a good signal bar right off that line, so I sold as a second entry short. You got a scalp but not much more before it turned up and it appears this was the start of a major trend working up.
Second trade was nice. I waited 90 minutes for it and really didn't see anything good before that. Big trend now working up, break of that trend and two measured legs to a new high right around yesterday's close, then things started to look bearish. I was looking for a short. We got a big bear bar right at the top of the move that also was a second entry and it was tempting but man that is aggressive. That's top picking and you better know what you're doing if you take that trade. I decided to lay up and wait for a lower high which we got just three bars later, perfect signal bar, hit the sell button, easy scalp. No runner though cause it came back up one more time.
Then it got real consolidated and slow, very little volume or price movement. Just kind of working sideways but a triple test formed with a failed breakout to the downside. It moved back up into the range and gave me a higher low and I bought, another easy scalp but nothing else. Lower highs/higher lows after failed breakouts of ranges are quality setups. Take those.
Not much price action after the first hour and a half but I think I read the market pretty well. A couple times I saw setups form that at first looked good but I found reasons not to take, and they would have stopped me out. That's a win! That's good reading of the chart.