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Take profit Planned: 4693, so about $937.50 Realized: -$503.88
Result: loss
Quick notes: Last night of night shifts. Woke up at 10:30. We are trading between levels, although price seems to have found short term support @ 4671. The premise for this trade is that support, and that market makers will push the price back to 4693 (think mean reversion) like they have done for the past 2 days. We are forming a hell of a wedge on the lower time frames, so that is something to keep an eye out for. Not real confidant in this trade as it's between the major (to me) levels that I feel I should be trading. There is a good chance that I made a level up just so that I could justify trading.
**edit** 11:32. This trade is going against me, and it's taking some effort to resist moving my stop loss to the 4662 so that it doesn't get hit, but that's too much risk in a trade that I'm now holding 2 days' worth of risk. I still think that this trade is going to work, so I'm going to leave the trade running and come to the computer in an hour.
Quick notes: Same trade as before, just with a later entry. This is a better trade- so far. Here is how it looks on the chart as of 12:48.
*edit* Moved my stop loss to break even at 1:07 when price moved 10 points in my direction.
**edit** It's incredibly frustrating to be wrong so often, to work hard and long on a problem and seem to make little progress. I'm mad, and that's OK, because I'm done pretending to be OK when it's obvious to me, I'm not. Jung writes-
It is a frightening thought that man also has a shadow side to him, consisting not just of little weaknesses- and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism. The individual seldom knows anything of this; to him, as an individual, it is incredible that he should ever in any circumstances go beyond himself. But let these harmless creatures form a mass, and there emerges a raging monster; and each individual is only one tiny cell in the monster’s body, so that for better or worse he must accompany it on its bloody rampages and even assist it to the utmost. Having a dark suspicion of these grim possibilities, man turns a blind eye to the shadow-side of human nature. Blindly he strives against the salutary dogma of original sin, which is yet so prodigiously true. Yes, he even hesitates to admit the conflict of which he is so painfully aware.
“On the Psychology of the Unconscious” (1912). In CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. P.35
I am painfully aware of my shadow, and, as I am stressed to the max, a serious conflict is now raging inside of me between how I feel and self-control. Apparently, I've swallowed as much anger and frustration as I can hold, because any attempt to repress any more of the same is coming out as rage. I am fighting the shadow side of me, and I am losing.
I think the only way past this is to acknowledge how I feel and embrace my shadow, because there seems to be no way of controlling or fighting it.
I love trading pullbacks on big range moves like this week. Put a 20 factor EMA on your chart. The pullback becomes very clear. If it isn't try a 2,000 tick chart. but the 5 minute works as well.
At what level? failure of the 50 EMA
How many contracts: 1
Planned risk:reward: 1.1:5
Stop loss
Planned: $175.00
Actual: same
Take profit
Planned: $350.00
Realized: $346.12
Result: profit
Quick notes: There are plenty of trade opportunities all day long, as long as I am participating. Part of my trade problems is simply just taking trades. Just do it me. Take trades
Market phase: total shit after quality price action
Buying or selling? buying
At what level? support from the daily @
How many contracts: 1
Planned risk:reward: 1.1:5
Stop loss
Planned: $500.00
Actual: same
Take profit
Planned: $1000.00
Realized: $396.12
Result: profit
Quick notes: There is some bad psychology happening in this trade. I don't like it. Even though I have a valid reason for taking this trade, I think the underlying reason that I traded here is fear and greed. Bummer. If I look at the chart, at #1.- here is a valid short-term trend from the 5 minute that when it breaks, we get the expected move down. This is the trade that I should have taken, but I didn't because even though I was paying attention, I wasn't paying enough attention. #3. The price bounces nicely off this support from the daily. This is where I should have taken profit, or better reversed the trade that I should have taken in the first place, instead, I ended up buying support that turned into resistance at #2, a valid trend from the hourly. The only reason that I am still in this trade is this daily support just might hold (it did). #NotMyTrade.
Stop loss Planned: no more than $250 Actual: too much
Take profit Planned: $500.00? Realized: $1650.34
Result: profit
Quick notes: Where do I start? This trade evolved all night, it turned out to be heavy of management. light on discipline. My plan evolved into finding the bottom and averaging down along the way. What kept me in this trade was the higher time frames showing me that we were actually in a tight range, tight for the higher time frames. Additionally, I could see that price was overextended to the downside, so I expected a correction to something like fair market value, or price to at least pull back to the 50 EMA, giving me a chance to escape. So, every time price hit a new level on the way down, I bought a new contract. This took me seven tries, but this morning when the New York session opened price made a solid move to the upside, not only allowing me to escape a punishing loss, but I also managed to make a profit on this pig of a trade.
A couple of things- Even though this is not how I plan to trade in the future, this one taught me couple of things, the first being that the market rewards calculated risk, but punishes risky behavior. This trade was a bit of both. While this thing ran all night, I worked to refine my set-up so that I can eliminate some of this risky behavior by having a well-defined entry, stop-loss and take profit. The core of what I like to trade is price action at levels that act a support or resistance, but sometimes I lose track of where I am on the price map. doing foolish things like trying to buy pullbacks below the 200. This is usually where I get burned. Also, a lot of times I hesitate to take trades because I don't have that well defined trigger. To fix this I reworked my chart so that I can now ...see things better, if that makes sense. Here's what it looks like.
This is mostly being accomplished with the use @icedfrosty 's MACD indicator from his zombie pack 2. What it does for me is really help me visually identify momentum in relation to the context of key areas that I want to trade. This, along with dropping to the one-minute time frame, something just clicked, and I feel like I just found something that I was really looking for. Anyway, here are the numbers so far for the last 2 weeks.
Not too shabby, even though I consider today half-yolo'd BS, it's in the books, 50 trades is 50 trades. IN the near future I'll be working to keep my stops tighter, trades shorter and entries crisper. I don't need to kill the market all in one day. If I am able to harvest 5-10 points a day when it works and keep my losing days under 5 points, I think I might just have got the basics figured out.
Started early this week. Took 3 trades last night. 2 of them were pretty clumsy, leading to small losses, but the third was ...meh, but at least it made up for the first 2 trades. I'm 2 points ahead for the week. Word on the street says it's a holiday, so I think that I'll wait to see if anything pops off, which makes me think that I should start to put something together, like a calendar, where I can keep track of what news and events directly impact the markets that I trade. I'm sure there is a resource out there for this, it might even be here on this forum.
My kids bought me this gigantic monitor for Christmas. It took some doing, but I finally got everything hooked up proper and found a home for it. Here's where I trade.
20220117_060054[540]
Ain't technology great? I think it's funny that this smiley is still using a CRT. Anyway, I'm about 30% to completing my first official block of 50 trades. So far, I am in profit. I've made some adjustments here and there that I am pretty excited about. I might go over them at length in this journal. I'm still trying to define something about my trading, but it's like a word that I am trying to remember, just on the tip of my tongue. There is also a good chance that this definition might take place as I trade.