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Thanks for the advice! I never try to pick the tops and bottoms, I normally wait for it to move in that direction but it seems it'll go my way for a couple of ticks max then quickly revert and stop me out every time. Doing a little better this morning but still down overall.
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
If it's doing the exact opposite of what you expect every time, you need to try doing the opposite. Consistently getting stopped out is almost as difficult as consistently hitting profit targets. The solution may be as simple as not doing what everyone else is doing and trading against the retail masses.
Trading is just a professional version of rock/paper/scissors or some variation of it. If you see a very obvious level of support that has been tested repeatedly (rock), then you and everyone in the world can see it and the assumption can be made there are stops on the other side of that level. You need to play the break of the level (paper) as people get stopped out. As the level breaks, there will be times where a momentum dies out or someone with deeper pockets than you stops the market and a fake out occurs (scissors) as the market moves back into the original level and the breakout traders (paper) get stopped out. It is just a never ending game of fish eating smaller fish and those fish getting eaten by bigger fish. It is your job to recognize who is eating who and to go with it.
In trading, shortcuts lead to the longest path possible.
Funnily enough, this is analogy makes the most sense.. I've now somewhat changed my strategy and am using a 750 tick chart to get the overall picture and major areas of S/R and a 150 tick chart for entries. I'm looking for key areas and patterns (wedges etc) and trying to buy and sell within the range and eventually ride the breakout.. fingers crossed I can get this down.
Changing the tick size/timeframe could fit better the ratio of your strategy/edge but if you don't understand the structure of the market and the context of price and volume, imho, you will never get over your struggle.
If you understand context every edge, including the most ... ehm .. funny, like EW, works, becouse you will clearly understand when and why it will work and, more importante when and why it will not work; the funny thing is that if you understand the context you are trading, you will soon discover how unhelpful EW or similar stuff are.
check out @Feibel treadh to understand the basics of PA/Volume, @DionysusToast stuff and webinars to understand the structure of the market
Thanks for the advice! I have spent time studying the market structure and know how the trades and price work etc (such as a DOM). I think my issue is with the strategy itself; defining a clear entry and exit strategy, as well as learning how the futures market moves. Typically, I've been trading stocks and FX but those strategies are more longer term so don't work on a smaller time frame.
Coming back to my original question of how other traders trade, I was merely trying to work out what sort of strategies everyone is using. There's a lot of talk about what charts everyone uses, but not many actually declare their trading style. If I knew most were using price action, I'd work on that, if they were using volume, I'd study that etc.
I think you've hit the nail on the head... there are literally countless ways of doing this, but everyone who is making it happen has pretty much developed their strategy by culling bits and pieces of various methodologies and their own insights until it becomes their own. What makes sense to one trader might not work for another.
I struggled with this for a while; I erroneously thought that if I could only copy what was working for someone else that I would be on my way... and got torn up LOL I got past that pretty quickly, realizing that I was going to have to put in the time and effort to find out what works for me.
And for me, it's price action, structure and building my knowledge and intuition about market participants. I discovered that Wyckoff and VSA resonate with me. Mechanical systems, Fibs, Elliot waves, insert method here... none of those made sense to me, just not in my blood, but people can and do make those things work for them.
Whatever you end up with will likely be an amalgamation of a few different approaches that make sense to you... let the homework begin! Good luck!
I agree, I worked out pretty quickly that there's endless ways of trading. If you take a textbook style trending chart, trendline traders will see a trendline, price action traders will see S/R levels and candlestick formations, indicator traders will see EMA crossovers/RSI set ups, pattern traders will see continuation patterns etc etc.
I don't want to copy someone's strategy, I want my own, but it always helps knowing what works. For example, seeing that you're also using price action reassures me that I should keep working on my strategy. Also, the fact that every futures trader I chatted to, read about, listened to all talk about market participants and learning when the big players are in control tells me I need to try and work this out..
Search for "Master The Markets" by Tom Williams, it will give you a great overview of the players and their motives. Wish I would have found this book when I was first starting out.