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I will try to make some suggestions that may help. First of all do you want to be alerted at a MA crossover?
Regarding your failed short: You took it just above the first hour opening range wihch is a strong support area until clearly broken. I think considering the OR will be no bad idea.
Why did I miss the trade of the day?
Here the OR would also be quite helpful. As son as price action re-enters the OR, it´s mostly a very good entry. I´m attaching a chart so you can see what I´m talking about.
May I ask Why do you use a 5 minute chart or time based charts in general? As you know the Dax is a viciously bastard with violent moves and IMO, time based candles are not beneficial regarding entry and stop loss setting. Therefore I,m also attaching an 300 Volume chart that you can see the difference. Hope you find my statement helpful or at least not distracting.
I got a lot of good feedback and also took a time to assess my trading plan. I have also changed slightly the way that I am going to continue this journal.
Any comments always welcome.
Firstly - 2013 Toolbox from @Fat Tails happened. There are many good things about this set of tools not only do they look good and work well but there is a considerable amount of information regarding how to use them both on futures.io (formerly BMT) and on the other thing ... the .. internet.
Some of the feedback that I received so far has been regarding missing some pretty obvious road signs regarding the trend, the direction of a trend, the likelihood of a trend and the overall tenor of the market. The information is too generic and useful for me to ignore. So .. I had to dig in.
The outcome is nothing earth shattering but certainly refreshing and very pleasing for me.
I now have a sort of triple screen setup.
Screen 1: Context
The overall context of the market using 15min, 30min or 60min charts covering the past few trading days or weeks.
I evaluate the context in general terms Pivot Points and VWAP. The 2011 Webinar from @Fat Tails is very useful.
Screen 2: Day Overview
I have been looking at 5 min charts for a long time and I am comfortable with how they represent price action during the day. So I keep my eye on this chart.
Screen 3 - Volume Chart:
@Abde has encouraged me to take a look at volume charts and shared his with me. I like the look of them. As with any chart if you know what you are looking for it helps a lot. I am learning to look for better entries on this chart.
Today's Charts and Trades:
The first attachment is today's context chart as it appeared at 08:30 this morning.
The Pivot Points and the overall trend were clearly down.
The price action at this early stage was at the pivot point and opened a little down.
My decision was to favor short positions.
Trade 1:
A pretty good result. +38 Points. Short from the open - exit when the price hit the bottom of the Noise Bands. This would have been one and done.
Except I am the apprentice so I get to do this all day.
Trade 2:
Much more indecisive. I pulled out at +3 ticks. MFE would have been +30 ticks but it didn't feel right.
Although I was pre-disposed to short positions and this trade was below the Noise Bands, I didn't feel comfortable shorting above the VWAP. Chickened out.
Rest of the day:
The rest of the day was incredibly quiet. I only realized late in the day that it was a US holiday. So it was bound to be quiet.
Is there a nice RSS feed that would tell me that sort of thing ???
In any case - the higher time frame trend remained bearish during most of the day even though the close was just outside the upper Noise Bands and the price action crept up and up.
Today was a success for a couple of reasons.
1. +40 ticks is not too shabby
2. I was content to tell myself to wait and understand why I was waiting - the overall context (and holiday) meant it was going to be sticky - so I was not nervously chasing my tail on the 5 Min.
It is simple stuff - the kind of thing that I was reading about on day 1 ... but I'm happy with this approach.
Let me show my ignorance by asking how you get an RSS feed to tell you. The only time I tried using RSS feeds, it was some sort of clunky toolbar in firefox and it was all a bit non-intuitive.
I use forexfactory although there are many others.
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
I've recently started to use Chrome to its full potential - it's mobile and consistent across devices.
I don't need to be plugged into news all the time but it's nice to have a bit of focused news.
In any case (and on second thoughts) Ninjatrader is probably not the place for me to be seeing any news items but getting headlines from forexfactory is a good idea.
How do you do it?
If you setup Chrome and then add an app like Feedly to it then it will read the newsfeed from forexfactory (or FX Street) for you and display it in a prominent place (maybe your home page or just in a trader news section).
You can organize the feeds very easily. A lot has changed since the beginning of RSS.
I would like to find something low volume - with important calendar dates related to say a currency or specific instrument.
The benefits of this over just visting the forexfactory site would be
1. It would blend news from multiple places if that is what you want
2. It's google - so it's everywhere now if you need or like that
No trades from me today but I have a couple of questions.
150 points is a big move and it seems that the world and his wife could see this coming. @GFS1 was long today but with respect I don't think he moves the market.
Chart 1: The Early Morning Context:
This morning before the open I took this snapshot and made some notes.
a. The order of the pivot points was flipped from yesterday to reflect the reversal
b. The pre-open was getting sucked down to the PP area but was trading just around the VWAP (which is not very reliable in the first 30 mins I am told). In any case it was trading above yesterdays RTH VWAP - and I am wondering if that is the significant point.
In any case - it seemed like a pretty tense day ahead to my apprentice eyes .. but .. brother was I wrong.
What else could I have seen at this early stage ? @vvhg - any ideas ??
Chart 2: End of Day:
The main question for traders who have made a trade and are either in it or want to get back in is how to maintain a long bias on a day like today. I know that this is a bit of a soft question but I am gonna ask it.
I tend to want to time it precisely - to get in at the open of the big bullish bar. Which is of course a mistake ... there were 20 of them before the big push comes. Just having a bullish bias and a comfortable stop would help.
What aspects of the session pivots do people look at to help maintain a bullish bias.
The first indication that it´s gonna be a bullish day was an strong breakout out of the first 5 minute OR. The second indication was that we never touched yesterday´s POC which is a also bullish. And last but not least, we also broke out of yesterday´s VAH which is a VERY bullish sign. Hope this helps a bit.
Well, with hindsight everything is easy, in real time it's a little harder
At the open I had a slightly long bias, but by far nothing I would base a trade on... Have a look at the daily chart, there is a nice trendline we tried to break on Friday and Monday.
But to really convince me it took the 3rd 5min candle, a nice pop through y-close and y-high.
That said, please remember that I certainly am not an expert by any means..
1. It's sunny where I am. That doesn't happen often.
2. I was one and done at 09:30 this morning (well .. 2 and done .. but I will explain)
3. The whole day sort of panned out according to the Volatility based Session Pivots
This all leaves a guy thinking that maybe he will beat the 10,000 hour mark (see the thread here).
It wasn't a perfect day - certainly not in terms of my performance.
Trade 1: (-10 ticks - stopped out)
Following yesterday's reversal - it was a decisive down day today on the FDAX.
The context was bearish but for my amateur eyes I was expecting tension. In any case the screenshot attached shows the FDAX Context at 09:00 this morning. This is the open.
My game plan was to watch the first couple of bars and then look for bearish signs. It didn't take long.
Within a couple of minutes the ADN (Average Daily Noise) band breached and therefore - time to get short.
Unfortunately I was stopped out !!
Butterfingers.
Trade 2: Same Entry Point (+38 Ticks):
I felt this was just a case of a stupidly close stop, so I re-entered on the same bar and got paid on the same bar. I didn't even have time to move my target (default at 15 and 20 points) properly so that I could trail the trade manually.
Butterfingers !!
I felt a bit too stressed to enter another trade after this - didn't want to give it back.
Rest of the Day:
It was very nice to see however that the ADR target was hit. In fact the target could have been described in terms of the ADR target or the VWAP volatility bands.
The 2nd standard deviation was a nice exit point a little later in the day the only other trade that I would like to have taken was a nice move.