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Intro:
My name is David.
I have been studying trading since 2010 as a side project to my day jobs and entrepreneurship projects. Since then I have spent over thousand hours of demo trading.
I managed to destroy a 10k USD account in 2014 - a great lecture that taught me that I still had very little idea of what I was doing. So, I kept studying and practicing some more.
In Feb 2018 I ended my job commitment and funded a 20k USD account to start trading the NQ futures full time with real money as I felt that more demoing is becoming redundant and I really need to start practicing with real money. As soon as I have done that the volatility spiked and I lost 3k USD in February.
I believe I have set up a good (and very challenging) trading process for myself and as long as I follow it diligently, I cannot fail.
Currently, I am not happy about the discipline of following my process. So, here I am going to expose myself publically to increase motivation not to make stupid things
What am I trading:
I am reading the market through volume profiles, levels and price rotations. I am finetuning my entries and exits by reading the order flow. I have been drawing inspiration from FuturesTrader71, Jim Dalton in the area of profiling and couple of local educators in the Czech Republic in the area of order flow reading.
Currently, I am focusing on NQ futures
So, you will see here screenshots (from SierraChart) of weekly, daily, 30min and 15 min charts with volume profiles where I plan my trading and orientations price levels.
For trade execution, you will see Renko chart, 2min footprint chart and Bookmap snapshots (that one I am still very new to and I am just observing this tool rather than using for decision making).
I will be creating a glossary of my jargon on the fly. If you know FT71 jargon, you will understand most of mine without much problem.
I hope you will find something useful here and please do let me know when you feel like I start slacking on my process.
February was my first month of trading the real money account. How did the performance differ from the demo account?
Positive development: on demo account, once a while, I would overextend stop loss to exceed my loss limit per trade as the money did not feel real, on real money account I have not made one single account-disrupting loss (yet). Seems that I have developed some kind of basic survival instinct.
I became much more impulsive and overtrade on the real money account - too many weak opportunities compared to my demo trading. As a result I have much lower win rate.
In demo, I would trade most trades based on my process, in real money I dont.
So the improvement goals for March are:
Decrease overtrading, the target is to decrease avg. amount of trades from 13 to 6 per traded day.
Increase win rate at least above 50% (my final target is 64%+)
Increase amount of trades traded based on in-play analysis opportunity to 70% (with ultimate goal 100%)
First i got chopped up while possitioning for thedown move. Today Key Lvn splitting two distributions did not work at all, NQ just ignored it, and guess what -> its was a century figure stirke price for options that are expiring this week
I was stalking long at yesterday value area low because it was balanced day and it was likely to get a reaction there. Also there was lvn to manage risk - GREAT analysis.
Now it starts going down hill:
- i get attached to this idea too much
- failed to notice that the scene of crime of the CPI was tested from below and rejected - bearish
- failed to accept that the down move is too impulsive, market sell orders too agressive for trading a first touch without waiting for pullback andcontinuation and waiting to see some buyers in the orderflow
- failed to accept that all market buys are absorbed
Drunkness after entry:
- so i entered long on SierraChart-> i still could live with all the errors above, but
- now i start watching orderflow on bookmap and add another lot there
- my bracket orders get messed up
- I am not sure if my first scale was hit
- i feel dissy, like driving after bottle of wine because the market is moving fast
- adding more lots - (my plan says i can do max 2 lots - poop)
- my attached orders are complete mess, so i press cancel all
- this way i loose my stop loss orders, i start throwing orders around
- 6 minutes into the trade, i am 800usd down and flattening the trade
The positive part:
- it was a really bad trading, however, still I did not ruin my account today, lost only about 6% and I am alive to try again next week.
What did I learn from this (what did I paid tuition for)?
- never place orders through multiple platforms. One trad, one platform only, please no combining
- need to search for some mechanism to realize i am too attached with a trading idea
- when my trade idea has more levels for entry, i need to write down sand in the line price for each level
- if i just had my stop losess in place and had only 2 lots as planned, this would be max 300usd loss.
For the rest of this week, I am taking a break and will trade only demo account.
My challenge is to collect 3 green days on demo to come back to real money account.
I took a break and researched how to avoid mess with orders while scaling in and out in fast moving market and found neat Sierra Chart support for scale ins and outs. Will be testing this today on a demo account:
Reminder, i have to put my self-confidence back after the previous loss. Therefore, I need to get two profitable days in demo to go back to real money.
Wow, i am positively surprised, it works very well. You basically setup bracket order with one distant SL and one distant profit target. Once the position is opened you can freely add, close lots and the amount of lots in the stop loss order and the distant profit target order will automatically adjust accordingly.
I loved it and seting this up as official way of entering orders on NQ.
Woah man, I gotta check this out... been doing everything pretty much manually but it's gotten me into trouble a few times LOL, just haven't looked into it yet. Thanks! Any tips/guidelines to offer?