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With the closing of the great forum thread started by @mfbreakout I feel I still need an outlet to discuss my trading ideas and the context I use each day. I have learned so much from many different traders that have participated in that thread and hope that we can continue the collaboration on here.
My goal is to not focus on trades taken, rather to focus on the context and concepts that I use to make my trading decisions. If you find value in these ideas, please take what you can from them and use them accordingly.
Those of you that I have gotten to know already are aware that I am a full-time trader, I feed my family this way and feel like I have been blessed with the greatest job ever (most days). This did not come quickly or easily and I have a story that is similar to many others of failures, struggles and frustrations. I have wasted money in trading rooms and wasted more time chasing different trading ideas and not given them the chance to succeed.
I was fortunate to gather the help of a couple of trading mentors a few years back who patiently worked with me until I picked up on market profile trading. I spent a lot of time studying in a MP trading room and gathered the info I needed from there and have turned it into the trading style and method that I use today.
From there I added in ACD after reading Mark Fisher's book and then stumbled onto the thread on here where it all made sense and I have been using the ACD concepts now for quite some time in addition to Market Profile ideas.
I'd like to thank @Balanar and @runner along with several other traders who have shared ideas so kindly with me. I would hope that as they have time, the people that I have shared each day with in the now closed forum thread will feel free to participate in this new thread and while it will never be as good as the original, make it a positive place for ideas to be shared.
Lines definitions:
Black dotted- yesterday high and low
Blue dashed - overnight globex high and low
Cyan solid - weekly OR (Monday Asian Session)
Magenta dash dot - Opening Print (OP)
Magenta solid - ACD OR high and low
Red solid - Value Area High
Blue solid - Point of Control and Naked Point of Control
Green solid - Value Area Low
Black dash dot - Previous Swing high or low
I use previous day RTH value only. I do not use developing value. Instead I use ACD OR for current day developing context.
I use the MP Values indicator available here on futures.io (formerly BMT) forum to chart my value areas. Settings are standard TPO set for RTH trading hours of the market being traded.
This will be work in progress so please forgive the mess!
CL proved to be a rotational day today. Overnight price shot up quickly and retested the highs from Friday. There was also an older previous swing level I had marked a while back which helped form an area of resistance along with the Friday high.
When price could not establish above Friday high we had a nice sell off pushing price through value and retesting the POC from Thursday, where price stalled and we started some choppy rotation until the open.
Price opened just inside of value and quickly rejected value, closing the first 5m candle bearish. For my style, this setup a potential short on the close of that first bar. Price continued down and we saw a volume spike at the overnight globex low, where price stalled. This would be a good exit spot for shorts.
When price held the globex low that provides another trading opportunity for me, fading the move into a globex high or low. With no follow through past globex, I look for rejection and a move in the other direction. Price did just that and continued higher, pushing back into value and holding when VAL was retested. Price then rotated up to the POC where we had a high volume area shown on the 5m chart, which would have been a possible exit on exhaustion volume.
Price then stood around at POC with no ability to move on higher. Too much standing around with price and this setup for me a possible short scenario, looking for rotation back down to at least VAL. Price eventually did move down but after the RTH had closed so most traders would probably have just scratched this short near the close and called it a day.
I've just started to get into ACD recently and MFB's thread and the posts from yourself and the many other regular contributors on the thread has really helped me a lot with my trading. Thanks again to you all, you know who you are.
I will definitely be following a long with great interest and trying to contribute where I can but I'm still an ACD newbie.
For full disclosure, I am a relative newcomer to trading. I have been sim trading for 1 year this month. I have tried several methods prior to finding the "context" thread and adopting the ACD and Market profile methods combined to fit my needs. It has taken a few months of preparing set ups and learning but I feel I am finally grasping the concepts. Many of the traders in the room have helped me and I won't name them because I do not have their permission to do so. Suffice it to say that if you ask questions and show a willingness to learn there ARE people who are willing to help.
Today I missed several good opportunities but I was fortunate to be able to exit without any damage on my early trades. I caught a late day long off a rejection of VAL that made me some tics on my way back to the barn. I have attached my charts for context. I intentionally removed the results because as I understand DCtrader, results are not the point of this thread, setups and context are.
Thanks DC (or is it snowman now?), and if this is not what you are looking for on your thread PM me and I'll go another route.