Welcome to NexusFi: the best trading community on the planet, with over 150,000 members Sign Up Now for Free
Genuine reviews from real traders, not fake reviews from stealth vendors
Quality education from leading professional traders
We are a friendly, helpful, and positive community
We do not tolerate rude behavior, trolling, or vendors advertising in posts
We are here to help, just let us know what you need
You'll need to register in order to view the content of the threads and start contributing to our community. It's free for basic access, or support us by becoming an Elite Member -- see if you qualify for a discount below.
-- Big Mike, Site Administrator
(If you already have an account, login at the top of the page)
I have reviewed the first week of my Combine journal today. It's amazing how memory can be misleading when you smoothly drifting along the way and it seems that it was all the same always. Journal can help you to reveal what memory hides from you. I could see I traded differently during the first week, and later started to go onto loss minimization route, taking only stop run trades for lesser amount of ticks. It worked well of course because I had enough firepower to exploit it. But I doubt this is the best strategy for the real life trading. Fighting with slippage, for every tick, and by adding more contracts making the problem and struggle worse.
I like some conclusions I have drawn from last week trading with these mini-consolidations, but I also this I had a very good idea in the beginning that waned away after volatility in gold subdued, by trading with momentum bars. Now it seems we are having decent volatility again, so I will look to re-introduce momentum setups back, maybe I could combine they with breakouts, by treating a large momentum candle high/low as a key level and trading it as such, finding a mini-consolidation or a compressed pullback and trading its break in a direction of momentum. This week I will try to trade all setups with 10 ticks initial stop to avoid rogue tick stop outs, but will reduce it after initial movement and put to break even or around when one entry retest is done. In reality putting to break even is a bad thing, as rarely a level where your break even is bears any technical significance in the market, so you are trying to impose you view on the market and it never works. In reality you should apply some trailing technique right from the start, so at some point the stop will be past your breakeven and lock in some profit. I know that 10 ticks is a very small stop in gold to employ that tactic, so I will be looking for some healthy compromise and instead of technical points or swing high/low will use high/low of the 6s momentum candles in my direction.
I will start trading my practice account with this technique in my starting today as if it was a live account. I am tired of doing 50 trades a day just to see "what if" might work better or not. I think I stuck a bit in a search of perfection.
Thanks, Iqgod! Here is my trading plan for this week, I will try to adhere to it for the whole week no matter what. I will have any NFT interview tomorrow, but doubt any live account will be available this week, maybe by the end of it, so I better gain some confidence again by trading practice week this week and not touching live, either PTP or my own.
So the trading plan:
1. Trade only break out setups out of mini-consolidation or tight pullbacks, during large momentum candle run in a prevailing market direction, i.e. sentiment. Don't trade reversal early, until one rotation is done in a new direction and a pull back failed to continue in old direction. Basically my old setup #1, but not going with entry 2 ticks past candle high or low, but rather using break out technique inside the candle. Use 10 ticks stop. Use just 15 ticks profit target initially, subject to review. I expect the average stop to be around 7-8 ticks, so it should be more less fine. If market is really moving and we are approaching a key level that if broken can generate a lot of movement, I will manually change my take profit to 20-30 ticks, but I won't change my OCO setting in the DOM. Default will be 15-10.
2. For this week I will pass on fading any levels as it tends to generate too many little failures in the row. I will need to work with 3 consecutive failures in a row as max (same as live), so I need to focus on more probable setups even if they might have lesser R:R due to larger stops. I will still be watching VWAP fading setups and mark my trade ideas on chart real-time (anyone can find a good trade in a hindsight and reason it as a real pro) for later evaluation during the weekend.
This is a super simple plan, but everything genius is simple, but not too simple. (c)
Even if it looks like a mechanical system, it is not. I look for sentiment, traded volume, liquidity, spreads, compare sizes of rotation, promitity of key level that act like magnets and when broken can propel trade to profits fast.
@kevinkdog, yeah, still waiting, my interview is tomorrow and Hoag just back from having a week off. So I guess it will be finalized this week, still expecting some paperwork to be done. It's fine though, as I need to get back to my winning confidence mode by doing a good week on demo. I will be off sailing for 2 weeks in second half of July, so I believe any real trading will start in August.
So started trading in "live" mode I did. I like the feeling of orderly trading with thoughful setups. I dislike getting chickened out of first 3 winning trades taking some of the profit, while all three would produce 15 ticks (my target) without much further delay. I dislike that a losing trade I took slipped my exit 2 ticks, and dislike that I probably should have closed it with market order when it returned to range and settled there. That would limit my loss to 7-8 ticks max. Last trade was a piece of luck, my limit was at +15, but it moved so fast when server simulated activation process at exchange it took me out at +21 as price was already past my limit.
Lots of accumulation in gold today, I believe we will see more upside in gold in days to come. New quarter as well.