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Interesting journal, I used to trade in a very similar way but have since deviated slightly from it. Will be following this thread from now on! Thanks.
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
I rewatched this month's trades and I've got a few conclusions to offer.
1) I need to trade more. Many of my calls are spot on--in the moment I'll say "This is going to do XYZ" and it does precisely that--but I just don't pull the trigger. I need to completely give myself in to having the read, making the trade, and having confidence that over 10 or 20 trades that I will make money.
2) Execute on profile areas better. The consistent mistake of executing in terrible spots probably cost me 10+ ticks this month. On NFP I picked a terrible spot and blew out for -2. Had I been more patient and executed at a better price, I would have been staring at a 4+ tick winner. This might be a leftover from when I would trade ES and would have to chase at times. ZN is much slower and large players work it back and forth to get positions on. There were countless examples mid-month where I'd just hop into a strong move, sweat 2 ticks, and then get paid for +2 or so. That's TONS of money I'm leaving on the table.
3) FOCUS! I have a few buddies that I trade with and I spend too much time just bullshitting in the morning. I know I'm partly missing trades just because I'm talking about nothing instead of staring at the DOM.
I'm feeling good for June! Time to make some money!
To be honest you're probably better at trading order flow then me, but sometimes I find watching correlated markets helps with conviction on entering/holding positions. For eg. if I trade ZN outright, I like to look at the japanese yen, gold, equities (S&P500 and nasdaq). If the european session is active then I focus on the german bund (this tends to drive price action in ZN) and the euro/usd. I tend not to look at commodities (except gold) because they are just a different market with different influences.
Sometimes you might notice something like the traditional safe haven assets rally hard, but the ZN has only gone up a tick or two. One thing thats worked quite well recently is waiting for the german bund to open and just following the direction that they go (someone seems to like pushing the bund in one direction in the first 30-60 mins of trading). But this suits my timezone, i think this would be like super early morning in the U.S.
BUT your style of trading is more scalping for small ticks. Plus these things usually show up in the order flow anyway so correlations probably doesnt improve things too much (and correlations can break down too). But I thought I might add this anyway in case you find a use for it in future.
Edit - also keeping up with market fundamentals can sometimes help with determining where the big players are going to push the price. Although I'm pretty sure that as an order flow scalper this is also not going to matter too much, but sometimes its nice to know why a price is rallying/selling hard
I am new here but I also moved to ZN for all the liquidity it offers, primary strategy is neutral trades 90 days out with a lot of breathing room, I just subscribed to this and was wondering if it is still going to get updated
This might seem random, but if youre still having trouble trading the 10 year treasury note futures, try trading the spread between this and the emini S&P 500. I trade it during the asian session so my trading is going to be different to yours, but I feel there's a general predictability to it with a little more inefficiency due to it being a non-exchange traded spread.