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I know very well about QM, but I had a lot of drama in my work today, started with several emails I received before the open, felt somewhat pissed off and knew I would not be able to focus, and also concerend about my emotions.
There is no way for me to trade CL with half my stop size and go for a bigger move, and ther was not way I could scalp today and take a lot of shots at it. So I changed a few charts to QM 5tick range, left the volume, TPOS, footprint etc on CL. QM is harder to read than CL.
Did you see that volume by price jump out at 104.50? That could have been a 2 tick stop, but I was not going that direction..
I wanted to swing trade, and should have sold the open, but like I said, "A" period did not seem telling enough. QM is great for that.
Just started playing with Sierra's Risk Reward a lot recently too, Wonderful and easy tool for thinking while in a trade. Until that I mostly eyeballed it. "Close enough" is my motto. LOL!
even on limit trades QM stops short a tick or two ( CL LOD 104.31 ~ QM 104.325 etc) & trades very thin at the extremes of swings, so it can cost you a great fill.
That slippage is cheaper than me trading with a bad attitude any day.
I opened a nasty email this morning around 6:30am, and decided right then that I needed to be very aware of what I was doing, and by 8:30 decided to go to QM, and decide on a specific plan, if I was going to trade at all.
In hindsight, selling would have been a lot easier, but that was not my plan, and if my trade did not come that was the right thing today. Had there been a probe above A, absolutely, that was my plan to go short.
Some days I can be flexible in my mindset, and/or take losses better than other days. I am very happy with my read on my own profile today, either way.
What I have seen, is that if my trading going to be affected by my attitude, my subconscious, my fear and greed, it is usually because I am trading too big. Backing off keeps it out of my concern zone.
QM does not move as much on the screen, I was able to keep an eye on it without it being as noisy, wiithout knowing I could get hit for $200 or more per shot. My max risk today was $87.50.
I know better than to go market too. But I have missed entries entirely before trying to be choosy. When you enter on high volume turns, sometimes it moves so fast. But I swear sometimes when I do go market, that it looks like orders jump out of the way and reappear after I am filled. Freemasons is my guess.
Having recently added so many things to watch, I have some charts in more dominant positions than others. This ne was in a 5" x 5" upper corner to my far left, and I did look at it early, but did not look during the trades I took.
The buys that I took today were also coming off the weekly VWAP.
That would only add confirmation for trade location, and I have watched ETH/RTH VWAP be a point that gets slammed through as often as not, but there are almost always orders there. But I forgot to log in my mind what happened until just now. I have two alternate trade layouts I am using for after hours, each different but both containing a lot less information, so this chart now occupies nearly 50% of one screen and it stood out.
The higher the timeframe, the fewer repetition I get with observing reaction. RTH VWAP comes into play basically daily, but weekly not that often so far, It is still what I refer to as "Ben's Chart", not mine.
But I have now adopted the RTH/ETH session vwap charts as my own, as well as the TPO split. The footprint still something I am not sure what I was doing without it, such a detailed view once I learned to ignore it most of the time.
I am steering away from fibs except for daily, and then intraday on ver small timeframes for visualization. But all the hours of marking line after line, then condensing down on Sunday evenings, I have nearly quit. All of that seems built into market profile as far as daytrading goes. I used to spend so much time deciding which levels I thought would hold, which were most obvious, all discretionary on my part. Market profile removes some of that, gives additional depth of information that make those decisions for me to some degree, which has the feeling of removing some uncertainty. Not that it has any greater effect on the outcome, but a part of uncertainty is deciding which side to be on, when to go with a break or when to fade it, and whether to expect something to run wild or be targeted.
And I have caught myself making mistakes that are related to me trading without MP for so long. I will elect to not listen to what it says, typically proving me wrong. But as that happens it provides the psychological correction that builds my understanding of it, adherence to certain things about it, again reducing uncertainty. Or maybe, less decisions to have to make, calming the mind to be more single-focused.
It is where I think it is most likely they will be, for whatever reason, and that when you are there, it is obvious in a way that shows on a VSA and / or footprint, so understanding that alone is an edge.
But combine it with a cornucopia of "wheres", the learn when each one is most likely, or MORE likely, even if against the current...
1) How it works (fill in definition)
2) Possibilites to capitalize on it (fill in definition)
3) Psychology balanced to that method. (Hard to define)