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Thanks @Rrrracer and @JMP3 for your support. I've always loved reading journals here on FIO that have these qualities: A consistent, rhythmic, ritualistic, habitual, business-like format, and some personality. I aim to inject a bit of both here.
I can tell you exactly how I keep up with all of these instruments. And if you think this is a lot, please check out @muttoez journal. He's got it down to a science. I am doing my best to follow in his footsteps.
I only look at all of these instruments together in any detail once per week, on the weekend. That's the idea, at least. From there I set alerts that go to my mobile. I may go a whole week and only get one or two alerts that a market has reached a level I am interested in. At that point, I will check that market out in more detail once or twice per day, to see if an entry opportunity arises. I then will typically set a one-triggers-other order for my entry and stop and walk away. If it triggers, great, if it doesn't, I re-evaluate the next day and retry if needed.
Ideally, I don't want to be modifying my stops / targets too often. I will do tweaks in the morning and usually try to set it and forget it, checking again the next day, though I will confess I find myself checking in on active positions way more than necessary.
Walking away is the key. For me a major point of swing trading is to let the market do the work for you.
I find that I absolutely need the structure of the weekly analysis, writing it up, setting my alerts, etc. It makes it feel like a process that I have under control, am working to improve. Like a job I might actually be good at.
It is past time for an update on my swing trading activity.
OPEN POSITIONS:
TLT (20yr Notes)
SHORT (via TMV)
Entry: 1/30 @ 122.41
I've been short 20yr Notes since the end of January. This is the "one trade can make a month" trade. Rather than drop half my position after a small gain, I've held onto the whole position through the entire drop. Price touched my predesignated "first target" but I was a bit greedy and have simply held, looking for one more drop lower before taking profits. Unfortunately, the price action since touching that level has been pretty strong and it is looking like I may give back a good portion of profits if it spikes higher and scares me out. I'm still happy to have held this far, and either way this should end as a sizable win whenever I do close it.
CL (Crude Oil)
LONG (via UCO)
Entry: 2/15 @ ~61
CL pulled back into prior resistance turned support level around 60 even. Then it put in a nice double test before pushing higher. I entered on strength around 61. Not much more to say about this one. Not a huge position because of the volatility of CL, but it is performing nicely so far.
6B (Pound/Dollar)
LONG (via M6B)
Entry 2/23 @ 1.4017
I don't feel too strongly about this position, but it was there staring at me so I took it. Something about the fact that this uptrend has already had two blow-off downward waves in it, makes me dubious. But we had a orderly pullback from the last top followed by a potential higher low and so I took the long. Looking at the weekly, the potential is there for one more reach for 1.50. If that's where it's headed, it will be interesting to see whether the trend stays as steep as it has been, or if it needs to correct sideways and flatten out a little before making the move.
OTHER MARKETS
6E (Euro/Dollar)
The Euro actually didn't blow off as hard as 6B did, and I'm not sure if that makes it more or less interesting ... but with the correlation between eur/usd and gbp/usd I'm not too interested in a long here. The case for it is similar if not actually a bit stronger. The only things I'm not crazy about: that double top on the daily, the lack of a strong boucne off the lower trend line on the daily (yet), and the open air down to below 1.22 on the weekly trend, just from a symmetry perspective. There's a reasonable case for a short on a break below 1.2250, but I am unlikely to take it. My game here is to wait to see if we get a dip below 1.22 and see what happens.
Now for the two markets that continue to perplex and defy me. Gold and Equities.
GC (Gold)
Based on my experience, gold has been one of the hardest markets to swing. The behavior since 2017 looks like a relatively healthy up trend that is just struggling to break and hold 1350, but is actually giving all the signs that it may be ready to do so... The problem is that on the weekly chart there are so many warning signs that we've been here again...and again... over the last several years. The daily chart is relatively sensible and maybe the strategy needs to be to focus on the daily chart for a quick one-two week stab, but position oneself so that if there is a broader move you can take advantage of it with a runner. The fact that PA has been strong looking back a year +, it seems like favoring a run to 1350 and maybe even 1400 is what we need to be watching for at the moment. I'm just not sure I will see an entry that gives me the right structure and R/R to get in.
US Equities (ES / NQ / YM)
Showing ES here.
I tried to short YM last year once, and took a loss. I tried to go long YM this year once, and took a loss. I am now watching patiently to see what happens. If one looks at NQ, all is roses and we are just about ready to make new highs. But that is not the picture we get from YM and ES. The question on everyone's mind at the moment must be: Is there another shoe that's going to drop? And if so, when? I'm just going to spitball some ideas here - this market has given me trouble and whatever it does, I'll be cautious with my read.
2775 is an important level here. If we get more accumulation and healthy buying into the high 2700s, I think concerned buyers currently waiting on the wings will start to come back in to the market, trying to get in before a retest of the all time highs. The most OBVIOUS thing that a bear would want to see is a failed test of 2775 and a dip back below 2750, making a nice little armpit to short with a sensible stop above 2775. Of course we know that the simplest most obvious thing often does not happen. Mostly, what happens is the scenario that confuses and dupes the most noobs. What would that be? Well, it would be the OBVIOUS scenario, followed by a failure of that scenario. In other words, we get a bunch of gyrations between 2750 and 2800, a little fakeout move lower, followed by a continued melt up over 2800. I'll just keep my eyes on the road here and see what comes up, if anything.
Excellent trading, good charts and very clear explanations. I see that swing trading is working well for you.
For what it's worth (absolutely nothing ), I think I would somewhat agree with your ideas about ES, the only one of these markets I follow. I would generally favor the idea of an indecisive-looking trading range for a while, with an eventual continuing move up. Why? Well, I think that traders (noobs and not ) are probably mostly expecting more big moves (hence the trading range, to fool them), and that there's probably a lot of anticipation of more downside (hence the eventual move up.) It's awfully hard to figure out what the general opinion is, and then to figure out what would most likely contradict it, but this is my guess.
I emphasize that I do not particularly care about my "analysis" (guess ), and will simply take it as it comes. But it's a reasonable expectation, to the extent that one can make such predictions.... I agree with your tactical decision to wait and see.
--------------
On a totally different subject, I see that you are on NT8 here, and I know you have written a lot of code for it, so you have some experience with it.
My one question about NT8 is and has been, how stable is it now? Specifically, I still read posts about odd things that people are doing involving clearing the NT cache and other stuff to keep it running well, and I wonder if you find that you need to go through any gyrations or have any other issues, other than just learning the new platform, new coding and other simple learning-curve things.
I have been perpetually on the brink of going to 8 from 7, and after working with SierraChart recently (a very good platform by the way), I am still thinking of a return to NT, which is still a fav for me.
Anything you can say about it would be helpful.
Thanks, and again, good work. I enjoyed your post, which made me think.
Hi Bob, thank you for the great comments, and appreciate the analysis of ES also. Responding to your question re: NT8, let me first flash you back to the last times I commented on NT8 which were way back here and even further back here
I've never had serious stability issues with NT8. I don't do any regular cache clearing or maintenance of any kind. I've been using it on two Win10 systems, installing over itself when new versions come out, almost never wiping and doing a clean install.. just keep the db, the cache, the bin all the way it was and update the app only. Only once or twice have I had the fabled "why is NT8 using 12 gigs of memory?" memory leak problem (more on that later). In the early days of the beta, I was installing a lot of indicators that were fresh off the presses from various community members. I would occasionally get unexplained freeze/crashes until I found the indicator that was causing the problem. Once I removed the indicator, no problem. At one point, I created an indicator that had a divide by zero bug in it. Instead of throwing a handled exception, it would freeze NT8 completely. This is definitely not ideal, but it was fixable by fixing the code
Recently, 3 months ago, I started putting together some autotrading strategies and would let them run all night in testing. In an earlier version of NT, on an earlier version of my strategy code, I had two cases of inexplicable crashing. One time I got to the platform before it crashed and noticed it was consuming several gigs of ram. Normally I'm at around 500MB memory usage. I don't know what that was, but after rewriting some code and moving to the next version of NT, I haven't had that re-occur. Here's the thing - if you are using mostly code that lives within NT's classes, I think it's pretty safe at this point. If you are using other .NET framework objects, especially with asynchronous evocation, you may need to actually know what you are doing. I personally have to do a lot of trial and error because literally 98% of my coding experience comes straight from what I've done in NT over the years.
I've also spotted 2 or 3 bugs in the platform, but this was mostly early on in the beta. I have regularly looked at the release notes for new NT8 versions. In 2016 and early 2017, a lot of the release notes were filled with things where I was like "REALLY?? That was in there! Whoah, that sounds bad - glad I was not impacted by it." Things like - this button doesn't actually do anything, or under certain conditions an order may cancel with no reason, stuff like that. Lately the release notes seem to have gotten much more benign. The employees on the NT support forum are generally very fast to respond and very helpful assuming you know how to present a bug in a manner that is easy for them to replicate.
Would I recommend NT8 to someone who requires NASA-level stability? Or even Enterprise-level stability? I might hesitate on that. Would I recommend it to a typical retail trader who is also a coder with ideas? Abso-friggin-lutely. Based on my experience, I've been able to get things working to a totally acceptable level with the usual try-fail-fix-try-again cycles without too much pain. I don't have a ton of experience with other platforms, but if someone can show me another platform as open and extensible and efficient to implement ideas as NT8 is, by all means... I have implemented large grids of buttons to create my own chart-trader, added custom performance tracking, used the alert feature to text me a screen grab of the chart every time a strategy enters or exits, used draw objects to trigger additional indicator logic, whipped up simple data-mining code that outputs thousands of rows of CSV data to the Output window to be copy pasted into excel... it really seems like the sky is the limit. Now, maybe my tune will change if I get to a point where I am running strategies all the time at sizes and frequencies that require mission-critical stability. But after running my last strategy a week straight with no crashes and no memory leak, I wasn't sure what fixed it-- was it my code revision or was it the latest software version?-- but I didn't care. Hopefully it doesn't happen again!
Actually the most annoying thing for me has been the two times that I woke up in the morning, fired up the platform, and saw a gap in historical data - and this has nothing to do with the software. It's just NT8's continuum data-collecting servers falling a sleep on the job. The last time it happened, NT gave me a one-day guest login to Kinetick to download the correct data, because they acknowledged that their data at that point was just bad, and they were not able to fix it on their end. A little concerning for me, and lost a morning of trading as a result (and a week of looking at a chart skeptically questioning every bar's validity).
There are folks on this forum who's opinion I highly respect, who have had horror stories with NT8. @ratfink, a far better coder than I, comes to mind. But there are also people like @Zondor, @iantg, and others who are far better coders than me and have come out and said NT8 is working for them just fine. Count me in that category. Yes, there is weirdness occasionally. Sometimes I need to click out of something and click back in and it magically fixes itself. Remove and reload an indicator to get it working again. Why did it throw a "unhandled exception: onrender" error? Oh well, click OK and move on. Yes, there is stuff like that. But nothing that kills the experience, for me at least.
My short advise to the curious would be this: Download it (it's free for sim). If you don't have a compatible data feed, get the 30-day free CQG/continuum trial if they are still doing that. Try it out and begin by installing one indicator...I think my favorite indicator to demonstrate the power of the platform right now would be @Camdo's CamsVP here. Even if you don't use volume profile at all... just load it up, select the custom VP-region drawing tool, and enjoy the glory of watching those profiles smoothly forming as you select custom regions all over the chart. And then look at the code...all the power is at your finger tips
But since you were talking about using code beyond the basic native NT stuff, I think I'll be OK for now.
It is very reassuring that you have not had to jump through all the hoops that I have seen here and there on FIO to keep it stable. I'm sure that the people who are doing that have good reasons, probably related to indicators or other code they are running, but if the basic platform is stable, that's good enough for me to start trying it.
For quite a while I was under the misconception that it was mandatory to use tick replay mode to get historical bid ask data. The staff at @NinjaTrader cleared this up a few months ago, so I don't use tick replay at all anymore.
There were all kinds of startup issues when running large numbers of charts in tick replay mode.
Without having to use tick replay mode the performance of NT8 is now incredible. Much better than with any older version of Ninjatrader.
Custom code must conform to the Ninjatrader recommended practices. Bad custom code will ruin everything
"If we don't loosen up some money, this sucker is going down." -GW Bush, 2008
“Lack of proof that something is true does not prove that it is not true - when you want to believe.” -Humpty Dumpty, 2014
“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” Prof. Albert Bartlett
Thanks for this info about tick replay. I had had the same idea about tick replay, but I had seen a post you made a while ago on the subject, and it was nagging my memory today. This clears it up.
Very good to hear this from you about performance. I am always interested in what you say on the subject.
Hi @FlyingMonkey, Really glad to hear NT8 continues to improve, thanks for the detailed update on your experience with it, much appreciated. I have not used it since last Feb and may start to re-explore it later this year, from what you say it sounds like the recent releases are a huge step forward.
@FlyingMonkey, just to follow up on NT8, I did download a copy yesterday. They do still have a free data trial as you mentioned. I got the details on data thanks to @iantg in this interesting post (which is mostly about automated systems, but it was the impulse to action, which I needed ):
I set up some simple charts and just fooled around with it. I will say that I do love it. It has some of the things I have liked in SierraChart -- such as, the tabbed interface, where you can put your charts in different tabs and switch between them, which gets rid of the mess of NT7 charts all over the place (you can have many tabbed windows, in case you enjoy messiness....), and the sucker is quick.
I also flipped through the FIO indicator section for 8, and there's a lot of the @Fat Tails stuff in there, plus I remember you have a levels indicator that I will look at.
I haven't even started to tackle the coding yet, but I'm sure it's just another new thing to learn, no big deal.
So I've got my weekend mapped out now.
Again, thanks for the info. I'm glad I took this step.
), I think I would somewhat agree with your ideas about ES, the only one of these markets I follow. I would generally favor the idea of an indecisive-looking 
) are probably mostly expecting more big moves (hence the trading range, to fool them), and that there's probably a lot of anticipation of more downside (hence the eventual move up.) It's awfully hard to figure out what the general opinion is, and then to figure out what would most likely contradict it, but this is my guess.
), and will simply take it as it comes. But it's a reasonable expectation, to the extent that one can make such predictions.... I agree with your tactical decision to wait and see.
(you can have many tabbed windows, in case you enjoy messiness....), and the sucker is quick.