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)
Day's like today are difficult for me to trade, and frustrating to look back on in hindsight. If I miss the initial break out short, getting on board the trend later is tricky due to the stair step nature of the action. It is hard to pinpoint where the reversal is exhausted, and the subsequent move will continue, within a small risk tolerance.
As I mentioned in my April recap, I have been kicking around an idea I have been struggling to get in writing. It has to do with viewing the market more from the perspective of the forest than the trees: where is the market trying to go? How is it trying to get there? Viewed this way, if one was convinced that the market was trying to get to some area lower, to reconcile previous business done there, one could resolve to enter at some general area on one of the pull backs in route, say, around the 50% retracement, and then lay back far enough to let that idea prove out.
Of course, this requires a certain level of conviction that I am seeing the forest correctly, because the stops required will typically be larger than I usually use. I imagine making these types of choices will be a little easier when I have more risk capital to play with.
Looking for a quick move down off the top. Price stalled at the previous break out area so I moved to BE. Often times these types of moves, especially at the end of the day, will never get back to BE, and if they do, they'll continue up. Not this time unfortunately. Would have been an easy 40 ticks.
I (now) believe, strongly, that tight stops can and will kill you. They killed me until I stopped using them.
This does open one up to an entirely new experience of, frankly, fear and trembling, so go into this arena with deliberation.
I think that tight stops are the province of the accomplished scalper, who can put his trades on with enough precision that he knows when to bail out, and who can make a good living trading like that.
But if you aspire to just get the direction right, and are willing to hold on a little more than a scalper's stop to see if you're right or not, it can get you past the tight stop problem.
Wanting to bail out quickly is often just an expression of fear. Tightening up the stop will let a person avoid the fear, but also often avoid the profit if they were right enough, in a general way.
I'm not saying it's easy, nor that if you just take a bigger loss via your stop that you will somehow get a bigger profit.... But what you said about forests and trees may apply. What if you just picked a bigger stop, and resolved to hold until you either hit it, or had another good reason to bail out (a tricky but, I think, necessary provision to make), or got to a good enough profit?
Don't let big stops kill you either, but think about how you might implement something like this. Maybe you can try it and see what happens. Maybe it will work.
I have reached my own conclusion on stops and that is that the effect of size is an illusion, since I see most people that scale in or use wider stops abandon any R:R metric without either realising it or being bothered by it. I'm not sure which, but it doesn't seem to matter, it's just a different route to getting more points correct.
I also happen to think that feeling a different entry method needs wider stops is also an illusion - caused by the way we perceive up and down movement in the markets, a retrace never looks to have gone as far as it has, can or should. I (weirdly, ahem) sometimes ponder having a less biased (maybe) gaming interface instead, whereby price moves from left to right rather than vertically, and time moves from front to back like in the original Star Wars intro's...
Cryptic (ahem), but I think correct, at least on the R:R question.
I think of a stop as an emergency measure, and don't much care where I put them, honestly. I just don't want to trip over them by having them too close. I'll bail when I think my idea of the trade has been proven wrong. I don't try to figure out an R:R ratio that the market has to give me. It doesn't have to give me anything, and I have no good way to know what can be gotten from any move until it's going (or not).
However, I do think the point that is pertinent to @Tap In's situation now, is just to give a trade a little more room to prove or disprove itself. Where the stop is put is not something that requires a lot of calculation: just try some point where you think it will do the job of basic protection. Note how many really good traders ( @Big Mike, @Inletcap, for instance) don't use stops, unless they have to be out of the room.
But that's another entire topic.... It may be best to change things only one thing at a time, sometimes.
There is thickness on the offer this morning. I think we will be testing up to various areas of the recent down move. The question is how will we get there? The 50% retracement is around 45.00. Of course Inventory could change things in a hurry. Look for reactions around each tested level, and use order flow to confirm.
We have had an extended overnight move off the bottom with small pull backs. This is where it gets tricky. Will the small pull backs continue or do we make a larger pull back before continuing up?
There is the too-tight stop, and then there is the stop that is moved too tight too soon. Both can be a blessing and a curse. To the novice, it is a blessing because he is usually wrong. It saves him money. To the expert it is a curse. He is usually right. I costs him money.
I keep records of every trade I make and how far price moves for me and against me. Price generally moves against me more than it moves for me. There are many reasons for that and I am trying to remedy them. Looking at the forest more is part of the process. Right now I would have to say being conservative is saving me money. Hopefully soon I will realize it is costing me.
Kind of a repeat of yesterday. One trade that went nowhere, one trade that went a long ways. So theoretically, moving to BE quickly has hurt me the last two days. Otherwise I would have taken two losses at -10t each, and two wins for potentially 40t each. Hopefully, as I see this more often I will become more inclined to hold.