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The market rallied hard to the upside after hours and is chopping around in a 38 tick range. We have come into a zone of resistance created from trade on 8/22 to 8/30. There are several areas of overhead resistance that could stop or reverse price
A composite profile created from 8/22 to 8/30 revels a high volume node at 46.77 and a low volume node at 47.23. These could be significant later.
Movement could be choppy today until the inventory report breaks things loose.
There's been a big sell off overnight after price hit the RTH close area from 8/26. The choices are a little clearer today. We either get past this area around 46.40 and continue down into 45.80 then 45.40 area, or we bounce off the POC from 8/30 that the inventory report blew though yesterday and retrace some of the over night sell off. I vote for a continuation down but will be ready if evidence show a bounce.
The market has sold off overnight and bounced at the open. The lows did not stop in any particularly significant area so I expect the downtrend to continue after the opening bounce. There are several areas above that could act as resistance, the most significant being Wednesday's RTH POC and the Thursday/Friday RTH low area. Above that and we are probably continuing up to Friday's POC at 46.50.
end of day: the market rallied strong at the open and most of the day from an area that didn't look to be strong support. It stopped at Fridays' POC, and then bounced at Thursday's RTH low. The green scenario played out today.
The market has retraced nearly all of yesterday's rally and finds itself near yesterday's RTH low. This will be an interesting level. I suspect we will continue downward to at least 44.88 and perhaps further. There is not much in the way of overhead resistance to play with, so I will need to find other clues that a down move is continuing. A bounce off 88 could take us back up a decent distance.
End of day: None of the scenarios captured the action completely. It was sort of a hybrid of the green and blue scenarios. Price did reverse off yesterday's RTH low after an early morning sell off.
There is support and resistance all over the place at the moment. I will just have to be ready for how price reacts in the various areas. No point in drawing arrows as there would be too many scenarios. The long sell off overnight combined with the longer term trend sets my bias to the downside. It is just a matter of how price wants to continue down.
A break above yesterday's POC would probably lead to more upside.
End of day: price ended up reacting at many of the levels. In the end it was a down day but not before a lot of post report fireworks.
We are currently hovering just below yesterday's POC. Price has tested a late swing high from yesterday in the overnight. Long term trend is still down so this resistance area will be critical.
I should also mention that price is currently in a small 30 tick range after driving upward off yesterday's low in the overnight so the mid term trend is up. Need to be flexible this morning.
End of day: the morning sort of resembled the red scenario with a little overshoot past the POC, then bounced off the 9/1 POC.
I have been doing a fair bit of research on optimum exit points since it is one of the weak areas of my trading. Since you mentioned the difficulty you had with maintaining a 50% win rate while using a 2:1 reward to risk ratio, I thought the following may be of interest to you.
I used various trend identification techniques, namely Donchian Channels, price straddles at certain times (like Donchian Channels, but with price as the mid point), VWAP straddles (like price straddles, but these were only implemented when price was within 5 ticks of VWAP), and some others not worth mentioning. Each day would have two trades, either a long or a short. I did not test counter-trend strategies as I never found any way to really make these work.
Stops were either 20 ticks or 30 ticks - they were mixed up in different test, but once a stop was chosen it was consistently applied for an individual test. For a 20 tick stop profit targets ranged from 2R to 6R. For a 30 tick stop they ranged from 2R to 4R. One exit point was always time-based, i.e. exit at 16h00 unless stopped out before hand.
The results tended to be quite spread out. Most of my tests showed a clear preference for a 20 tick stop - I guess if you're trading breakouts, there just isn't enough profit potential to offset the losses from the 30 tick stops. With a 20 tick stop, the 2R system performed remarkably well with a higher win% and higher profit most of the time. However, when one of the 6R or time-based exits really scored, then the 2R was left behind. 2 large winners a month would swing the results in favour of the longer stops.
Trading 1 contract after 3 months, final win % for the 2R system was around 40% with average monthly profit just over $1k. The 4R system had a win% of 25% with average monthly profit at about $500. The 6R and time based exits had the same win% as the 4R system, but average gains of about $2k and $1.5k respectively.
Moving stops to break-even did not work that well (especially on the 6R and time based exits) since I was stopped out of too many good trades. Pyramiding suffered from the same fate, and if using multiple contracts, taking the full position and scaling out provided much better results - however, when scaling out it was imperative that the high R exits were still being utilised.
To summarise - using mechanical entries that identify trend, a 50% 2:1 ratio may not be optimal and holding for larger gains seems to pay much better.
November contract. We are hovering around an important area from 43.40 to 43.60 that was created a while ago. One is the major RTH swing low from 9/1 and the other is the POC from 8/11 that was a launching area for a major rally. There is a third area around 43.07 that is the swing low from that starting point.
The long term trend is still down from the sell off overnight but we will have to be cognizant of how the market reacts in these support areas, whether it breaks through or bounces.
end of day: the blue scenario played out this morning off the POC from august.