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it's time to move from lurking and reading about other's traders' success and failure journeys and write a story of my own.
This journal is to help make me accountable and motivated to move from endless hours of hindsight analysis as a hobby to a hard right edge trading as a business.
I've spent several years on and off doing market analysis, watching price behavior, did some coding and backtesting in WealthLab and TradeStation. I've kept my own notebook journaling price behavior observations and personal reflections at the same time related to both trading and life. I've spent a lot of time with SPY, eventually wanting to move to ES and other futures when less risk averse and coherent executable trading business plan established.
most of my concepts come from the works of tony oz, alexander elder and alan farley as well as quants on blogosphere i.e. stokes, varadi, murphy etc...multi-time frame, recursive/fractal channel trading, cofluence of oscillators, trendlines, horizontal S/R, fibb etc...trivially worded and/or pictorially defined concepts, yet it took me years of on and off observation to appreciate or acknowledge or to make sense of on my own...i guess i was obsessed with trying to capture every zig-zag as well as tops and bottoms which gave rise to multi-time frame fractal characterization...idea was to code it all to avoid a long list of physchological impediments and i fell short....hence have to do discretionary trading then code the exits and eventually entries....
one of challenges is traversing up and down the time frames and getting stuck in execution lower time frame when actually observing a trade setup or getting a signal off of higher time frame...another challenge is executing and managing positions while working my day job during RTH. the good news is i have whole lot of time off at the end of year and thinking of doing the combine program...
most of my signals and/or setups are such that trades are anywhere from a day to a week trying to capture some multiple of ATR, where as combine is probably geared toward daytrading with trades lasting from minutes to perhaps couple or few hours at the most. due to fractal modeling i suppose i could do combine with the observation that every zig is made of zig and zags of its own or rather some range, congestion and breakout directional move...we'll see....
the basic channel trades are either trend mean-reversion, trend pull back, sideways, ranging channel boundary fading, or channel breakouts and strong directional moves in direction of present trend or forming trend reversal ( aka fat tails).
in summary, to me the most important thing is to follow price and interpret price behavior through TA analysis. this is my understanding of term Price Action...
sounds great in theory, then there is practice....
one of different views....trend lines, fibbs, horizontal S/R generating entry zone (EZ) area........rectangles are supposed to be EZ areas, rectangles can get moved with time passing to generate a cofluence with incoming trend line...
all right, at turtle pace...figured out how access platform during RTH while at work.it took me couple of days... it is bit burdensome trying to do this while working but until it is fully automated will have to deal with it...
since i have done multple time frame analysis there is temptation to trade off all signals or look for cofluence between too many signals.
i'm best off to start off with daily bar timeframe for setups and context (i.e. chart in previous post). only issue there is waiting for trades to complete in 1 to 5,6 days.the other chart woud be either 30min or hourly to get a better entry or exit through PA (i.e. first HH or pull back forming HL) .
i find it easier to journal in my notebook than here on the website, thoughts flow easier...
short summary for last couple of days is the effort to determine the target - come to realize that every directional move on a base time frame typically consists of ranges and range break outs in the direction of base time frame directional move on lower time frames. dont see how i can capture directional move on a base time frame other than trying to capture individually range and range breakout moves on a lower timeframe as a way to capture base time frame single move.
how to protect profit against deep pullback or trend-reversals is the challenge here especially given quick bearish breakdowns against steady uptrend gains or very volatile moves during downtrend.
in an essence I see four type of trades to capture most of moves or to mitigate against loss or gains loss:
1) trend pullback
2) trend pullback continuation off of failed mean reversion move = fat tail
3) mean reversion
4) mean reversion continuation off of failed trend pullback = fat tail that can be a real deep base time frame pullback or base time frame trend reversal or range formation
all 4 trades are essentially channel trades where base time frame highs and lows are forming either a trending or sideways ranging channel
sounds like a TA textbook but this is personal conclusion after much analysis....
maybe i am overcomplicating this but it sounds like all 4 trade setups are independent requiring separate (albeit related) entry, exit management...
"Trading is a game of probabilities. I don't have to be right every time. I just have to follow rules. I know my system works. Every trade is just a profit or stop. Any given trade is not of significance. Results over a certain time period is what matters. Trading within my proven system puts odds on my side. I just have to play to allow chances to realize. I know I can trade by rules. All I do is I react on signals, a signal to enter and a signal to exit that are generated by my system. They take me in and out with no hesitation. I can observe the market being emotionally detached from it. Any stock movement is just numbers that change by certain patterns, and I know how to read those patterns. I am totally focused on what the market is telling me. I can hear it and react on it."
it always comes down to the feeling that I have half-a$$ baked plan, made up mostly of lots eye-scanning and some backtest crude entry/exit indicator based setups.
have to go bar by bar to confirm and write out in pseudo-code position management, money management and some stats down like MAE.
i have to memorize and religiously repeat the credo above after i write out the pseudo code.
what has been causing issue with analysis is perhaps the fact that i am trying to do too many things off of the same chart:
define trend and S/R levels, how to enter/exit trades...
same chart settings may be used for all three aspects or not...so am writing out now objective and definition of each: PA action/price structure, trend, setup definition, trade entry/exit...