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7/29 - Well, I guess it's time to start journaling my trading. I'm a little reluctant as I'm still not totally comfortable with a system that I'm confident in yet, so I don't feel completely confident in my trades, but I figure I can still gain some valuable learning experience. I've done Sim trading but I'd rather trade in a live market with small lots to gain experience (and maybe make some money while at it).
I've subscribed to EOT and LogicalForex (use it to trade the 6E though) and I'm still feeling out which of those systems work best for me. The EOT indicators seem interesting but I haven't found settings and a workspace that works for me yet. I've also looked at Sharky's setup but I'm not feelin' it yet. The Logical Forex indicators are nice, but it seems you really need to go through their $600+ one-on-one training to get more out of it, and I'm not afraid to pay some money in something that's going to help me make more money, if it will work. I'm not as fond of the 6E as it is not as liquid, but sometimes I like to trade the London open (midnight pacific time) and it seems to trend nicely.
Lately I've been playing with simple swing high/swing lows breakouts, but I haven't back-tested this strategy yet so I'm not even sure it's a good strategy to follow. I was just looking for 4-tick scalps on ES and 6E. Not sure I want to do that again (trade 2 instruments simultaneously) as there were a few times I had open positions in both instruments at the same time, but I had an ATM strategy in place to provide some protection but sometimes I like to manually override the ATM, which I was able to do just fine today, but maybe I just got lucky. Furthermore, sometimes I get tired of waiting for one of my instruments to give me a trade, so I'll watch both and if one signals me I go in and ignore the other instruments, but sometimes they both signal at the same time. I often enter with stop limit orders 1 tick above a swing high or 1 tick below a swing low, so sometimes orders can get filled on multiple instruments at the same time. I notice ES and 6E often in the same direction sometimes, hence the multiple executions.
I started just trading 1 contract on each, then later trading 2, 1 scalper and 1 runner (12-16 tick targets). I was up about $330 at one point in the day and should have stopped trading as I like to just trade the opening hour (6:30-7:30am Pacific time) but I over traded and ended up with a $160 loss instead trading another 30 mins. This only emphasized the need to make daily profit targets part of my trading plan, and then sticking with that plan and shutting down once targets are reached.
My trades are outlined on the charts below.
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7/30 - No trades today, slept in too late. I usually have to get up by 6am to be ready to trade at 6:30 but I was up too late last night, after a long day of "normal" work and wanted some time to do some strategy development didn't get down until midnight. It's too bad because I missed some really nice moves right around 6:30 at the open.
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7/31 - Had trouble waking up but finally got up and the computers fired up and running before the open. But NT was giving me troubles when I was trying to bring up my charts. Spent 10 minutes trying to figure out why my charts would not load with live data once connected to Zen. I figured I'd try closing my charts and hitting the "Repair Database" feature in Options and that fixed it. Good to know next time I get this problem.
I got 2 quick winners, +4/+6 on the ES and +4/+5 on the 6E. I hit my daily targets in 7 minutes of trading and stopped trading for the day.
8/7 - Got up on time, had a good day. I'm trying something different now. Instead of trying to play swing breakouts, I'm playing the bounces off of swing lines, which are just S/R lines. If price revisits a high and a bar closes below the EMA(7) (purple hash line) then I go short. If price revisits a swing low, bounces off of it and closes above the EMA(7) I buy it. I enter my limit orders at the EMA(7) line that was penetrated. I did try to play 1 breakout but it failed, which was my only failing trade today. All other trades are winners. Some of my trades were pre-emptive (I thought it would penetrate the EMA(7) before it actually did) so I did get lucky on some of these trades.
There are some trades I missed but the market was moving so fast I couldn't get each opportunity. On some I did try to take the trade I just didn't get the fill I wanted, which is fine. Otherwise, things were just happening too fast to take each trade. However, as you can see, I got plenty of them. This strategy misses out on some of the really big breakout runs, especially in the 6E, which often has large runs, but I think I get higher probability trades which makes me feel better.
On the 6E I was nervous going long on swing low bounce backs since the overall trend in the morning was down, and it continued downward for quite a while after I traded, but it's interesting to see that there's enough profit to be made in the chop even on counter-trend retracements, though the continuation trades would have allowed my runner contract to make more money. I didn't realize the longer-term trend until 2/3 the way through my trading and it wasn't part of my trading plan.
BTW, I'm only using 2 indicators (Swing(5) and EMA(7)), both built into NT and no need for 3rd party indicators. I like the simplicity of this method. I hope it continues to be successful. I have the EMA(50) on there as well but wasn't using it, but I should in order to help determine longer-term trend, or something like it, and whether if I want to play counter-trend retracements or continuation trades. Or, like this morning, just step back and notice the declining/ascending swing lines on a bigger picture (time frame).
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I have not, just with my eyeballs. I discovered it the other night. It seems the best strategies I find is when I consider a strategy that I think should work and when it fails miserably I do the opposite and get better results. I mentioned this in a previous post.
It would be somewhat complicated to code, the state machine could be large, but it can be done. I've been busy coding some other strategies but I should probably focus on this one if this is the one I'm going to use for my discretionary trading. Good weekend homework! Sim trading of trading small (1 contract) is one method I use to verify my strategies as well because at the end of the day it's all about whether or not I can execute the strategy well.
I've been switching around. I like range charts because they graph just price moves, but I also like tick charts because when the market gets active I'll get a lot of bars which gives me visual perspective about market velocity. As for last Friday's trading, I can't remember but looking at the chart it looks like each bar is the same height so it's probably a 4 range chart.
8/10 - Really choppy this morning, got whipsawed around, couldn't get a winning trade. I placed several other orders that got canceled, which saved me, but also couldn't get filled on some of the orders I wanted that went well. Hit my daily loss limit, stopped trading.
ES - 0 winners, 3 losers
6E - 0 winners, 1 loser
UPDATE: I think I'm starting to hate ES and like 6E more. Maybe I'll trade 6E exclusively at some point. Or maybe I should just trade spot forex.
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