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I use 3 different timeframes - 60 mins to identify S/R levels, 3mins for trading generally, watching the market between setups, and 1min for entries and stalls etc. Actually I use a fourth as well, the bid/ask as a line on 1 second intervals - that first chart above - to trade fast markets & catch pull-backs.
Re the notes - yes I type that stuff in, but using notepad in a little box just floating around out of the way while I watch the chart. I then cut and paste it into the chart mark-up for the record, but I guess no-one reads it and since in theory I shouldn't need it once I've finished reviewing my day's trading, I might just stop recording it. But it's good to have notes for what I was thinking at the time, psych stuff, emotions etc, reasons why I thought price was going to do this or that etc.
ps thanks for reading. Hope your trading is going well.
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
A trend day - still difficult! Should have been easier, I guess though.
Two unforced errors - not grave, but still poor. Getting hustled by big bars. What a strong effect that have on my mind, like a hotwire going straight to my reptilian brainstem and the "buy"/"sell" buttons.
Too frazzled to sort out the issues properly. One thing: I need to put an entry stop order in place when I've got a firm bias prior to the setup.
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
Triggers are meant to work of course, but so often for me with the Euro/USD forex, they work but only after giving me a hard time before the market does what it's meant to do.
Take this last trade on the chart attached - the trigger is the failure of an attempted exit from a stall in one direction, where the market failed to carry on up and just pushed straight back across the stall and out the other side.
I took the entry trigger, but bailed out because price didn't follow through, but of course you can see I should have hung in there.
Trying to work out whether I should hang in there when the price has retraced half way into the stall instead of heading south is something that I'm not good at. Maybe this is just the uncertainty all traders have to live with but it doesn't help my sanity.
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
I am beginning to realise that the YTC Price Action Trader programme is quite complicated and it's a lot to learn, in comparison with some people's journals that I read. I could have cut out all the break-out setups and I would still have enough to work with using just the pull-backs.
But it's not a problem, I'm half-way up the learning curve now (editor: are you sure? ) so I'm not going to ditch the break-out setups.
My mission today was to use entry stops on the break-out setups to avoid missing the entries due to my hesitation. I did that a few times and got caught into trades with a late entry too often, so the stops in their correct position on the opposite side of the break-out were a lot further away. I figured I can't trade like that because the trades would ruin my stats - a risk of a large loss and what seems like a trade with probability just at evens.
In some situations, i.e. when there's a stall before the break-out occurs, it's better to enter the trade before the BO and just take the risk it doesn't happen, so that I'm in the trade if it breaks out and doesn't stall, rather than wait for the break-out and then scramble to jump on board with an entry stop. Guess it helps in that situation if
my bias says the break-out's going to continue, pull-back or not.
Too much hesitation! This whole plan to use an entry stop was all about sorting out the hesitation issue. But it isn't the solution, it doesn't work well enough, so I've still got the hesitation problem. Guess it needs more screen time, and more focus.
The whole point for me of trading manually and not with a trading system is that I want my brain to work at the subconcious level, on intuition, and the whole idea of plonking an entry stop down to guarantee I don't miss the setup is counter-productive here. The hesitation is just something I will reduce by getting to know my setups in detail, and by getting used to the uncertainty.
That's the plan anyway.
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
This paragraph leads me to think that you trade the breakout itself. I thought that YTC was trading only a bounce, a failed breakout or a pullback after breakout, but not the breakout itself. Of course, you can trade as you want, but I just wanted to understand the link with YTC, and perhaps increase my own understanding.
Yes you are totally correct. If I stick to pure YTC PAT techniques, I should wait for the pull-back after the break-out, and if I don't get one, that's it - no trade.
In many cases I expect that is the best thing to do and anything else would be lower probability or higher risk.
However it's often difficult in hindsight to look at the chart and accept that I couldn't have traded it with a good result, especially if the market was strong and the target was big.
The advantage of entering before the break-out when you're really expecting it to follow through is that your risk is so small during the pull-back, and if it doesn't pull-back, that's even better. What do you think?
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
I guess that it depends on the confidence you have in your ability to identify the conditions under which the price is likely to successfully breakout (for instance, with YTC vocabulary: momentum, projections, depths, stall before breakout, etc.).
If, during your manual x-month backtest, you were often right to identify breakout, leading to acceptable profit expectancy according to your standards, I think you should not hesitate to play this setup.
Hi Nicolas, I still find it difficult to judge the likelihood at each setup, I just know it has a positive expectancy, at least in hindsight. It is true that rarely - maybe once every 25 setups - I do sometimes have real confidence - but since I'm not yet profitable, I assume everything will continue to improve.
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
I think that one way to increase confidence is to choose 100 past sessions and look at them with hindsight. Spot the setup (for instance: S/R breakout), analyze what are the best market conditions for the setup, and related performance.
Then, take again the 100 sessions, and play them bar by bar. Wait for the setup, play the setup, analyze best conditions, evaluate performance.
This idea is not mine. It comes from other contributors, for instance Bacon (
At the risk of bucking the trend, Im going to suggest that you need to reword the question. In my humble opinion, I think you should be asking where did you gather information and how did you learn. You can look externally to gather data and categorize …
).
To be honest, I have not done this so far, because it is a little too early for me (I am currently switching from [unsuccessful] automatic system approach to price action discretionary approach). But I am convinced that it is the right way to go to have confidence in one's method. So it is the next thing I will do, probably in 2-3 weeks when I will have finalized the first draft of my trading plan and my trading method (
You should fully understand the difference between a trading plan, and a trading method.
A trading method defines your edge in the market. Where you enter and exit a position, etc. You create a method in order to "win" against the market.
A …
).
The trading method I am building takes bricks from Lance Beggs, Al Brooks, and other price action ideas disseminated everywhere... filtered and reshuffled in something more personal that I understand, that I like and with which I am comfortable. Next step for me is to increase confidence through the above process. And I am sure that this process will also help a lot in improving the method itself.