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Platform: Sierra Charts, Investor RT, Ninja Trader
Broker: VanKar
Trading: NQ
Posts: 520 since Sep 2009
Thanks Given: 583
Thanks Received: 1,248
Tuesday is like any other day of the week. Same length of time, etc, but it is the day of the week I trade the worse. I have no idea why that is so. I track my trading performance by the day of the week (among other metrics) and Tuesday is by far the worse day for me. I have no idea why. I seem to have developed a mental block for that day. Each week I tell myself this week is the week I change that.
Well today, I did not. In fact, it is my worse trading day in a while. I did 8 trades, 2 winners, 1 scratch, and 5 losers. I think all the losers went my direction, some coming within 1 tick of my target before they went against me. One loser had an increased stop loss due to the volatility just prior to the trade. I broke my rules once and did a counter-trend trade (the last one of the day). The best winner I had came off an inside bar trade (the bar had initially broken low, I took that as the first trade of the day, it went 5 ticks my way and reversed); the winner came when price broke the inside bar going up.
Bottom line: I was fighting against the market all day. I should have called it quits earlier, but thought I could get back in sych with the market and regain some lost ground. I did not. I need to revisit the concept of a daily loss limit. Looking back at the trades, the entries were not as clear as I thought at the time. Perhaps a bit over confident? Don't know. Need to go let this day settle for a while. .
Papa15
Platform: Sierra Charts, Investor RT, Ninja Trader
Broker: VanKar
Trading: NQ
Posts: 520 since Sep 2009
Thanks Given: 583
Thanks Received: 1,248
I have been doing some analysis of my results today. I see some things that I goofed up:
- I listened to a John Person seminar this morning before trading. He stated he expected oil to come down (to be fair, not today but over time). Any way it planted a seed in my mind. I then saw the over night drop in CL prices, and considered it weakness. I allowed this to fixate my thoughts on the market would be going down.....in other words, I formed a bias and followed that rather than really trading what I saw.
-the first trade met my entry criteria but the timing was off. I should not have entered immediately before the opening of the CL pit trading.....there is too much volatility then.
-On most of the trades, I really did not get all the entrance criteria met. On many of them, price was above the moving average, but the ergodic was below zero....conflicting signals. Best to stand aside.
-I allowed my frustration to overcome my discipline and I did a counter trend trade. That was a fundamental violation of my guidelines, and is a cause of concern. The next time I get frustrated, will I do it again? I tell myself no, but I must prove it to myself. (But of course, I don't want to get frustrated enough to have to test this
The first trade losing did not bother me. I know not all trades will be successful and figured this was one of those that just failed. I did not hesitate to continue trading. There were a couple of other trades where I was stopped out but very soon saw another entry, and I took them. I think that is good. What was not good, was continuing to trade once a reasonable daily loss was met, and especially the counter trend trade.
Lessons are there to be learned.....now can I act on them?
Papa15
Our office trades a certain automated system where the vendor "blocked" Wednesdays in the code. He said that that on back testing that day was not a good day to trade. He claimed that there are certain news releases that affect the system to perform poorly on Wed.
Naturally, as a technical guy and not a fundamentalist I initially negated this idea.
However, that proved to be right in real life.
So I thought about your post about Tuesdays and wanted to bring to your attention that API (American Petroleum Institute) releases figures every Tuesday. This would cover inventory of refineries, non traded petroleum products and crude oil. Maybe this would affect your method? In anticipation of the news and during the release of the choppiness for scalpers might be too volatile?
Maybe Tuesday demo trades are required to do prove whether this indeed has an affect on your bottom line P&L.
I hope this helps.
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Platform: Sierra Charts, Investor RT, Ninja Trader
Broker: VanKar
Trading: NQ
Posts: 520 since Sep 2009
Thanks Given: 583
Thanks Received: 1,248
Had 2 news reports today, one at 10 am and oil inventory at 10:30, so I decided no real money trades until after those releases.
I did sim trade however. I used a 400 tick chart as the primary chart for criteria to be met on (it is sort of a compromise between the 233 and the 610 tick charts, a goal of mine would be to reduce down to one chart to look at). Had good success as can be seen from the attached chart. I also used Ninja Trader today.
After the news releases, started real money trading. Was focusing on proper execution. The first trade threw me a bit of a curve ball as I suffered about 11 ticks slippage on entry...and then took lots of heat. I stuck through it, leaving my stop at my original point. I took a reduced profit though as the slippage and subsequent heat gave me a bit of a pause....
The second trade is the only one I regret. I noticed on the 15 min chart that a shooting star formed at 11 am. I thought this might signal a downturn and put in a sell stop beneath it....the ergodics did not fully support this (they were positive but sloping downward). My entry was hit and the stop was hit almost immediately. It was very quick.
I caught the drop with a subsequent entry and was actually increasing the profit target when it was hit. I did get a 12 tick target.
My last couple of trades as price came back up. I did wait for entrance criteria to be met, but price action post entry was poor (choppy). I just took reduced targets.
Overall, with the practice and the real trades, was 10 for 11. One of the trades was essentially a scratch.
What did I learn? Well nothing new....if you establish entry criteria, wait for the criteria to be met, enter and then manage the trade......but we all already know that don't we?
Papa15
ps: after quitting for the day, while writing this the market broke through the 106 barrier....but I didn't miss any thing...I had already determined to quit as I was satisfied for the day.....
could be one of them, could be all of them, in no particularly order
volume - look for same small amount of volume across multiple pars
bars - they overlap each other you can group them into a rectangle
time of day - lunch time is frequently a slow time
repeating behavior - if prev day it spikes up in the morning then flat all day and if today spikes up then look for the same
Platform: Sierra Charts, Investor RT, Ninja Trader
Broker: VanKar
Trading: NQ
Posts: 520 since Sep 2009
Thanks Given: 583
Thanks Received: 1,248
First, I want to say today was a positive day dollar wise. That is the good news. I did 7 trades and was 6 for 7....which is also good news. The bad news is the losing trade, which was the second one for the day, suffered a large stop loss. I had the stop entered as a fixed number of ticks (12) but manually adjusted it to be above a moving average. I did not really look at the risk to reward before hand, and if I had I should have realized it was not good enough to take the trade. My bad on that. My second bad is that once the short term ergodic turned above its signal line, I should have cut the trade. That is a strong indication that the trade is not working.....
Any way, I went into a hole and spent the rest of the day working out of it. I really focused on following the entry criteria as closely as I could. The market was fairly choppy and about time stuff would line up, price would reverse. It took a lot of patience, but I did get positive on the day. I used smaller targets, trying to increase the probability of success.
A real difficulty I face is I am a one lot trader and I face the issue of do you trade for a fixed target or do you use a trailing stop loss in an effort to get a larger target. I have always defaulted to using the fixed target method. Each of the trades I took today, I could have gone for a slightly larger target, but I chose to use the smaller targets as I am still "kicking the tires" of this ergodic setup. I want to see it under many different price action scenarios to get a better grasp of how it responds. I would welcome any feedback you folks have on this subject.....it is one I have pondered for a long time.....