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I'm a completely discretionary trader. I use multiple timeframes to get a multi-dimensional view of price action. I look at the current trend and strength/weakness within that trend. Also looking at S/R levels to see how price reacts to them.
You can look through this thread and get a good idea for how I trade. There's many videos and pics with entry explanation. I feel like you could look through the thread more and get a good answer to your question but...
To answer your question...
Early on I took a long due to the overall uptrend on a slightly higher timeframe and it was at a support level.
During the remainder my trading session today there was a fairly rapid move downward. I simply sought to find good pullback entries and join the order flow. At one point I took another long as I thought we might see a reversal, but that was scratched for a small loss and I quickly reversed to a short position to take advantage of other (now trapped) traders that were looking for that same reversal I was.
Stop loss is flexible given volatility, but rarely do I allow more than 10 ticks loss on a trade.
I'm off to give a presentation to a finance class at my old alma mater this afternoon. Hopefully interest some kids in trading, and disprove some efficient markets hypothesis believers! Should be fun.
Good trading today. All short trades, as it was a downtrend during my trading session. One loser, kept small, and the rest were solid winners. Especially happy with my exits today, really good exits. Did I mention how good the exits were?
Yesterday was a very painful full daily stop, wiping out all gains made this week. Ninjatrader crashed again. That event in itself didn't cause the daily stop, but I allowed the event to affect my mentality and from the time the crash happened, I turned a 1% up day into nearly a 3% down day after commissions. Really painful. I'm not here to discuss the crash, NT has no idea what is happening, but they're looking into it. For now, I can trade without using any ATM, and things are fine. Just a few extra clicks for trade management.
Today I'm proud that I came back strong, earning 1.25% This first month of performance for the CTA is so stressful, but I'm trading well (besides yesterday).
I would show you the bad trading yesterday, but we had to do a full NT system and file reset, so the trades are gone from the system.
I've got to go to a lunch, but will be back for a review later hopefully.
I'm really sorry to hear this brother, but amazing trading today after that. Shows some serious psychological strength which as everyone says is the most important part. Hope that is the end of your troubles for now.
I don't think it's a coincidence that you started having problems with NT just about the time you started trading the CL with size. You're probably getting segmented fills more often and NT is possibly getting out of sync with your true position at the broker. They could be trying to manage multiple threads of execution within NT and messing up the concurrency issues big-time (aka "race conditions" which are extremely difficult to debug/reproduce).
Have a look at X-Trader. They appear to cater more to the high-end futures trader.
That first bug you experienced with a massive contract order should have never left your PC if NT had a brain-dead option to not allow a position to exceed a set maximum (by you). Geez, I wrote my own software to trade through Interactive Brokers and that's one of the first safeguards I put in. [The second one was to NEVER allow me to add to a losing position.]
You're amassing a very large futures fund. If I were you, my biggest fear would be to wake up one morning, can't login to the broker and find that they're yet another Refco, MF Global or PFG. I knew a 7 figures (per year) futures trader (private account). He kept his futures account small but it had low intraday margins, swept it every month and refunded if it ever got too low on a sharp drawdown.. This was in 2003. Now I know why he was so paranoid.
Just reading through the journal again I do it quite regularly and this is an amazing post in my opinion really resonates with me. I'm struggling at the moment to find the balance and use my intuition correctly because I lack a lot of confidence as I am still a beginner. Great post though thank you.
Pretty good day today. Happy with it given the conditions today. I have switched platforms over to multi charts, and tomorrow will be our first day trading live with it. Problems with NT today put a nail in that coffin. So far, I think I may like multicharts better than ninja. I like discretionary entry with partially automated exits, and it's a breeze with MC.
first trade was a beaut. 2nd one was the wrong side to be on, but managed well. 3rd trade I was too quick to move stop to breakeven and ended up missing the exact move I was looking for.