Grateful for your time as you provide feedback.

I hear you about catching falling knives and buying at the breakout. This time it played in my hands, next, it may not.

Stop Loss and Taking Profit are my next questions. I understand to look for smaller bars so SL is smaller. As for TPs, I am working on recognizing potential levels of Support&Resistence. Your feedback is most welcome. I will include filled price and initial SL and TP to my trades.

Babool 

Ok, It is helpful to know what time zone your in because it makes it easier for people to to pull up their own charts and see where your trades were. Looking at your trades, Trade #1, On an opening gap outside the previous days range you took the first buy after a new daily low. Unless that low is rejecting some kind of strong support I would not have done this trade. Your attempting to catch falling knives here....not something a new trader should do. Trade# 2, I love this trade. A with the trend trade entered after a retrace to the moving average. Where is your initial stop. You initial target was to short as it should have been a couple ticks above the current swing low. Trade #3. I would not have done this trade...you sold a breakout of the daily low. Question, where was your initial stop because often times your going to get some buying coming into the market once you hit that swing low. People that took your trade number 2 will be buying to take profits after a test of that swing low and other traders will be buying that swing low as a double bottom test of the current daily low. A low odds trade if your stop is to tight. When describing your trades, please tell us the price you were filled at and indicate your initial stop loss and initial target price.

Good advice on using internal text features of NT. Completely forgot about them. Resetting zoom has not helped. The markers stay exactly as they have been from the beginning.

So glad that the journaling turns out okay. I'll add initial Stop Limit and Take Profit points.

I hear what you are saying about a good trade vs successful one. It is an important distinction.

bobwest 

Good journaling. You cannot change the marker size. I don't think I've seen these very small markers before, and don't know how you got them.... You may have used Zoom In to increase the bar size at some point (Right click on chart, scroll down on menu to Zoom In and Zoom out). If so, clicking Zoom Out will revert back to normal. Then, if you want to adjust the bar sizes, change them for real in Data Series. This is my best guess. If this doesn't fix it, I haven't a clue. Someone else may know, but I don't. As to how you do your posting, any way that works well for you is how you should do it. Everyone has the problem of not remembering the trade details if they wait until after the close, so some people simply keep the posting window open throughout the day, without actually sending it to the website, and update it as they go. Then, at the end of the day, they post their reply window with one chart with the trades numbered or marked. Or, you could just use the text drawing tool in NT to keep a running commentary on the chart itself, and post that once a day. People have done it that way. It could make for a crowded chart, though, unless your comments are very short. Or, you may keep comments in Notepad or something during the day and copy them into the reply window to post them. The way you're doing it is also OK, obviously, but you may find you're taking a lot of time with journaling instead of trading if you keep posting charts throughout the day. You'll evolve something you like soon enough. The comments you're making are very informative so far. Simple advice is to include as much info as you think you need to explain the trade, and more importantly, for you to review in your mind why you did the trade, and whether it was a good one by your criteria or not. (A "good trade" is not necessarily the same as a "profitable trade" -- it's a trade where you followed your rules correctly. Then you can decide if your rules are good or not.) Bob.

Calming 

The markers stay exactly as they have been from the beginning.

Well, something happened at some point, but I don't know what. The small markers are not the standard for NT. I've never seen this before.

My only suggestion is to create an entirely new chart, basically starting over. Make sure the markers are set to show on trades. Set the account to the Sim 101 account. It should pick up the existing trades and have the default markers.

Bob.

bobwest 

Well, something happened at some point, but I don't know what. The small markers are not the standard for NT. I've never seen this before. My only suggestion is to create an entirely new chart, basically starting over. Make sure the markers are set to show on trades. Set the account to the Sim 101 account. It should pick up the existing trades and have the default markers. Bob.

I also have these horrible small trade markers. They are very annoying. I first noticed them when I started trading on my MS surface. Due to the high resolution small-size screen, windows 10 is set to scale some stuff up. I always guessed that the tiny markers was a casualty of that scaling... like it stayed the same size while everything else in the app scaled. Just a theory. I need to compare to my other nt8 system.
@Calming, by any chance are you on a laptop with a high res screen? Or am I waaayy off?

FlyingMonkey 

I also have these horrible small trade markers. They are very annoying. I first noticed them when I started trading on my MS surface. Due to the high resolution small-size screen, windows 10 is set to scale some stuff up. I always guessed that the tiny markers was a casualty of that scaling... like it stayed the same size while everything else in the app scaled. Just a theory. I need to compare to my other nt8 system. @Calming, by any chance are you on a laptop with a high res screen? Or am I waaayy off?

You are exactly right. Win10 on a laptop. What constitutes a high res these days? Looked up mine - currently at 3840x2160 by default.

Okay, trying something new with journaling - putting all trades and comments in one screen. Let me know how easy it is to read and comprehend.

I tried to include all the relevant information. If you have a different understanding of PA, do not hesitate to let me know. We learn from each other.

Self-reflection:
- it is somewhat hard for me to determine the current direction of a trend, once I get it, trades come easier;
- battling with stop limit (SL) sometimes it is easy, sometimes, not.

Calming 

Okay, trying something new with journaling - putting all trades and comments in one screen. Let me know how easy it is to read and comprehend. I tried to include all the relevant information. If you have a different understanding of PA, do not hesitate to let me know. We learn from each other. Self-reflection: - it is somewhat hard for me to determine the current direction of a trend, once I get it, trades come easier; - battling with stop limit (SL) sometimes it is easy, sometimes, not.

Very comprehensible.

Some suggestions:

- The most important thing is the explanations of what you did, and your brief descriptions are fine, easily understood. Also, your "self-reflection" comments are things everyone else struggles with too.

- I know that the request was made before to include your stops and targets, but the bare numbers were hard to follow and understand. I really could do nothing with them. (Perhaps that is just me .)

- Why not try something like your initial descriptions, entry price, stop x ticks, target y ticks, and possibly why you picked those levels, why you exited, etc. Then the amount of profit or loss, plus any other comment you want to help make things clear.

- As it is, it's sometimes hard to figure out how the trades went, as well as how you did overall for the day. For instance, from your comments it appears that Trade 1 was breakeven before fees, 2 and 3 had small losses, 4 had a profit, 5 and six might have had small profits or losses, and 7 clearly had a good profit. But I had to figure that out instead of just reading the P/L for each trade, and from the day's total.

- Also, NT keeps track of profit and loss for you (on the Control Center window, New > Trade Performance. This may be useful at some point as you track your progress. Also, you can enter your commissions (Tools > Commissions, I think) so they are deducted. (You may want to check out Help for the commissions.)

I thought both trades 4 and 7 were very good, and the others were reasonably managed and you controlled your losses to keep them from growing, which is important.

Overall, this was a good start, and you did make everything clear enough to understand what you were doing.

Bob.

Calming 

Okay, trying something new with journaling - putting all trades and comments in one screen.

Very good sir. Me likey

Rrrracer 

Very good sir. Me likey

Glad you liked it! It would be helpful to hear what exactly was good. Also, would you change or improve anything?

Calming 

Glad you liked it! It would be helpful to hear what exactly was good. Also, would you change or improve anything?

The consensus has been to keep doing it, track the results, know your expectancy, think about your edge and the markets in probabilities. That's what defines you in the market. I don't care about anyone's method. First, I want to see the numbers. When we see what the numbers are saying, then we can look to the method and try to understand what's giving you poor/great results and refine it.

A quick rundown of how I operate:
Define trend
define range
define strength
Define your arguments for being bullish or bearish
Determine all in all out, scale in scale out. or all in scale out
Determine your expectancy/risk
Trade your strategy
Review results
Refine entry/exits (if needed)
Repeat