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Reason for that is stupidity of my first trades. This is a second day when I'm pushing myself in front of the train because I want to be done before news. My first trades don't make any sense to me.
It was hard to hold myself from trading every pivot and wait for good setups. Market was really choppy today in my opinion and I didn't see any strong direction before or after news. I'm really glad that I ended up with only 1 tick negative instead of -2.5 points.
I decided to make a video today because it's hard to explain reasons for my entries in text and it's been a while from my last video. So here it is:
Do you go back and watch your videos or review your posts every now and then? Do you take notes as to what you are seeing, like common recurring patterns?
I do go back to my posts, but do not watch my videos a lot. That was a reason why I didn't record them for a while. It just seems easier to look at the picture than go through the video.
I do not take any notes. I'm just trying to remember my setups. When I just started trading I had my trading plan in front of me and I was editing it every day after my session making some notes and trying to find the most profitable setups. Then I just lost my account.
My huge problem is that I break rules all the time and there is no such a thing like the best setup that works every time in the market in my opinion. So for me it's the best do not have rules at all. I'm just trying to remember situations that lead to nice runs or at least run in my favor and try to get some profit out of them.
I'm trying to combine everything that I've learned to one thing and work my way up.
Do you think that I should take notes? Notes about my trading and results or notes about setups and market conditions? If you take notes how would it look for example?
I didn't expect any moves today. I thought it's gonna be slow and quiet day, but market started to move pretty fast at the open and I got into 4 trades.
My first trade was short, but I got in too early. The second trade could give me 3.5 points if I waited another 30seconds. I know that "could" and "would don't count so I got 2.6 from that one. I have to be more patient and trust myself. From another side I got profit anyway.
Then I thought we are gonna go lower and that thought was -9 ticks for me. MACD and and that up swing were pretty strong to the upside and had to be my clue do not get short at least at this time.
Last trade was long and it was in the right direction but deep pull back got me out with 5 ticks.
Over all I got +$75 for this week. I know it's not a lot, but I'm glad that I didn't loose money on my first week trading live. I already forgot how it is to trade live. How emotional it is in the beginning. All those emotions are effecting trading and I hope I'll get over it and can look at the charts with clear mind.
I strongly encourage you to write down a few words after every trade. Just a short reason why you entered, and then again for why you exited. Do it within seconds of the trade. Don't do it 5 minutes later after the trade is already playing out. Do it immediately.
Then at the end of the week, go back and review the last two weeks of entries and exits notes. I believe you will find several overwhelming patterns that you cannot find otherwise.
The key is to record the info immediately. The longer you wait, the more useless the info becomes because you alter the reason for taking the trade depending on what happens after you took it. That is useless, as trade decisions need to be made based on the moment only up to you place the trade You can learn from trades as to what happens after you put a trade on, but you need to be recording the reasons for the trade in the first place so you can establish patterns and improve.
Thank again, Mike, for your help!
I think I'll start recording live videos again with saying out loud my reasons for entries and exits then go through them on the weekends. I think that should work.
I believe videos can be quite powerful, but they are also very time consuming both from a production standpoint as well as a review/analysis standpoint.
Personally, I used my webcam and Camtasia Studio to do a picture-in-picture recording of both my main entry chart + dom as well as me (my shoulders and above mainly).
What this allowed me to do was to get a sense or measure the stress level from my body language, and how that would negatively effect the decisions I was making in a trade.
I've learned a lot, for instance I learned that if your butt isn't planted firmly in the rear of your chair, and if your back isn't touching the back of the chair, and your feet aren't flat on the ground, then you are probably stressed out about your position.
These days I am happy to say I do not get stressed out very much about positions. In fact, if I feel I start to get stressed, I tend to just close or look to exit the position because it usually means something is wrong. I wouldn't have been able to do this two years ago though, or I would just exit every trade No, seriously, it takes a lot of work and practice.
But the point of a written journal is just to record the real reasons you entered or exited a trade, based on the info you had available at that moment (not after), and then later do analysis and look for patterns. What I found for instance was that I tended to exit right before a bigger move, usually due to lack of patience or more in fact due to fear. I've now got much better at that, because i know from experience to let the trade stay on longer for the next move. Another thing I found was that I was entering trades too early, I was too afraid the market was going to run without me. Now I still get in with say 1-2 contracts at the very beginning of a setup, but I wait to build a larger position.
Anyway, also check out @Bacon's decision matrix. Another great tool.
First, a bit of background. In Big Mike's price action tread (, I was asked if I keep a journal. I admitted that I don't keep a classical journal, but rather a simple set of statistics that could be intrepreted as a simplified form …
I traded 6E on sim account today. Just wanna keep it fresh.
I had 5 trades and +$300. It's hard to see 2 and 3 trades but they are there.
I've been watching my old videos over a weekend and one thing I see that I'm missing now is confidence to stay in a trade and keep my stop loss in original place before pull back. In today's trading I had the same mistake. Would I keep stop in original place and move it after higher lows all those first 4 trades could be just one nice trade. I've got this bad habit and it's hard to get rid of it. I do feel more comfortable after I get my stop to BE +1, but from another side I will get in right away after it takes me out and risk full stop again.
So what I can see that moving my stop to BE+1 too soon which is a bad habit got me another bad habit to get in again and again (over trading). When I start doing that I'm losing any feel to price movement. From now on I will try to risk just ones instead of multiple trades. That is going to help me with better trade management also.