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I have to say that I have not been good about getting up and practicing. Even in sim I fear loss. I find myself looking at a lot of charts and seeing setups that have panned out well, but when I try it live (sim) its a completely different thing. Especially if I'm trying during mid day or even the afternoon for that matter. The best time is probably the AM.
I would rather trade CL because it does move fast. I know I shouldn't trade CL because it moves so damn fast. The indexes just seem to drag on and what I think is a set up really isn't.
One thing I have noticed and will be trying to follow is that setups that occur on the higher time frames may work better than the ones on the lower time frames. That will mean my patience needs to increase.
I don't intend to trade TF, but I wanted to SIM something and though I saw a decent set up. I was wrong.
Hi david, sure was a tough day, summer lunchtimes are tight so far it seems and low volumes all round. Funny I was reading your journal over the weekend and marks method with the cci that you were trading is actually very similar to what rick is teaching and you seemed to be going in the right direction with that? Any trending method will be tough in these times and when we are at such important technical levels on the bigger time frames. I will post full es charts of yesterday here if you would like? Will be tomorrow as I'm on my crackberry now as pc is sleeping for the night!
Just throwing this out there, have you ever considered swing trading USO (same as CL more or less, but an equity)? I know you probably don't want to do 25k for a day trading account, but you could consider swing trading it for far less, and you can precisely control your risk by buying a small number of shares.
This way you get the volatility of oil, but the risk of whatever you desire. Assuming that you are amenable to swing trading such a stock instead of scalping it.
you capture my feeling about MP perfectly. Bottom line, one can only trade what one believes in. If you don't have an absolute confident in that indicator then it's worthless not matter who else using it. So what to do? find something so simple that you understand it inside out then only then you can start building your believe in it.
I second that. If you want to stick to futures and are not scalping then try QM.
Otherwise USO is also a great option. You can try interactive brokers and trade 100 share lots for $1 or less. Again will work if you are not scalping.
Regarding Market Profile: I use the intra-day volume profile to identify areas were potentially we can have vertical moves. You will see them as low volume areas. The price will repel the boundaries or go through quickly. See this post for an example of an intra-day volume profile
Multi-day volume profile shows how yesterday's high defined a low volume zone for today. Later in the day this became a support/resistance zone. Once it broke prices took a big tumble down. After recovering …
Thanks. I think you may have mentioned this before. Its a thought and I actually may consider it. I feel that swing trading requires even more patience though. I'll look at USO and see .
Sorry, I couldn't remember if I had mentioned it or not
As for the QM vs CL, I am on the fence on that one. A few months ago I was recommending someone try QM, so I thought I would do it myself for a few days, and the results weren't very good. For my style of trading -- breakout/breakdown -- the spread was a problem. I was giving up too much, or I was getting hit on QM when I wouldn't have on CL, so it really screwed with me. But if you enter based on other conditions (not breakout/breakdowns) then it would probably work ok, as long as you are going for at least 10-12 ticks, otherwise the slippage/spread is going to kill you.
Remember, if you take 4 trades a day with 2 contracts each, and you pay the spread (buy market/ask) to get in, and you factor in commission, you've spent $ 120 that day just to pull the trigger. Do that 250 days a year, and it's $30,000. If you have a $30,000 account to begin with, you could break even on every trade (no losers) and still be broke at the end of the year.
Mike:
The issue here are purely psychological. You need to trade small till you are comfortable taking the losses and letting winners run.
QM reduces size and as long as your as you are going for more than 15 ticks will work. Of course once you can master your psychological game, you can always move to CL. Think of it this way, QM allows you to double your loss stop compared to CL. Most of the time a good student is not wrong in his or her entry; where they get killed is in their ability to tolerate draw-downs.
Here is a 15 min day session only of the ES yesterday. I have market it up showing reasons to trade away from the marked areas. You could use either volume setups from Gomi's ladder or Market delta or indicator based triggers on lower value volume charts or dare I say it price action triggers!