Hey ES Jedi, after scrolling through your journal it's pretty obvious why you aren't making any money. No offense, but you have no clue as how to trade. You are basically doing coin flips, and then you wonder why you don't make money. A lot of your trades don't even last 30 secs because apparently you get stopped out. A long trade for you is 3 mins. I'll give you a hint, you ain't going to make money doing that. Maybe 20 years you could still make money doing that, but not today. The computers that are doing the trading these days are going to eat you alive.



So I see you finally got around to trading the right index, the YM. All beginners should learn to trade with the YM. Why everybody trades the ES is beyond me. It's my least favorite to trade. I make my most money on the NQ, But then I know how to trade. Beginners need to stay far away from NQ because all that's going to happen is they're going to get their head handed to them. I recently started trading RTY. That is one crazy index. I thought it was just this sleepy index that never did much. Boy was I wrong. I could see it becoming my second biggest money maker. Then the YM and last place ES. And yes, I trade all four at the same time. Even if you are not trading them all, you need to at least be watching the big 3, YM, NQ and ES. I do a tile of 4. 2 over 2. Or maybe you could do a stack of 3. Don't really matter how you set it up. You just need to be able to see the charts for the big 3 at the same time.



I noticed on some of your charts you had 10 second candles. What the hell is that? Do you think you can out trade the computers or something? I use 2 minute candles, but you could just as well use 1 minute. Don't really matter. 5 minute candles though you are missing too much of the data. You need to be able to see on a finer time scale what the computers are up to. And then you need a candle countdown clock that shows you how much time is left before the next candle. That way as you watch the computers draw the candles in you can see what they are up to. Your candle countdown clock and watching in real time the candles being drawn in replaces a DOM. 20 yrs ago a DOM was useful. These days total waste of time. If you have one on your screen, just delete it.



You also need to be using 24 hr charts. If you ain't using 24 hr charts, you are missing over half the data. Everything is all connected these days. What happens in Asia and Europe effects our markets. Sometimes some of the most important stuff on the charts happens between 3-4am. Europe starts trading at 3am (eastern). Of course since we have daylight saving time this weekend, and Europe doesn't switch for another 3 weeks, it's going to be 4am for the next 3 weeks. And since Asia doesn't do daylight saving, Japan is now going to start trading at 8pm and finish at 2am, and China/Hong Kong starts at 9:30pm and finishes, heck if I know. Not important. China/Hong Kong open though is important. Knowing stuff like this is all part of being a student of the markets. Being a student of the market is how you make money. There are no magic bullets. It takes a lot of study (but you have to know what to study) and watching and learning.



All you've been doing is variations of coin flipping. That's never going to work. So for homework you need to properly setup your trading software. Then as an exercise using a trading size of 1 contract, if you had the chart before hand, how much money could you have made yesterday? You don't need to get every squiggle. Just the major turning points. So Friday was Free Money Friday. If I had the charts before hand, and trading my normal size, I could have made, I don't know, $40-50, maybe $60k. I'm not that good of trader though. I would have to look, if I didn't make it into 5 figures, I was close. So I was able to capture 15-20% of what was available. It was a good day. Hey, it was Free Money Friday. Happens once a month. Next month it will be Apr 5th. Once you learn the markets and how to trade, it's not will I make money, but how much. Even a so so trader should be able to do $200-300 a day. Just because of the math these days, it's way easier to trade then 20 yrs ago. One of the keys is looking at your charts differently. How much is available to be made. If say $2000 and you only need to make $200, then you only need to capture 10 cents on the dollar. Surely you are a good enough trader you can do that.

YM isn't as volatile and it's easier to get fills. I started trading futures back ..... 2003 maybe. I of course started trading the ES like everybody else. I was doing ok at first, but after about a year I couldn't get fills. It had gotten so crowed that it would trade to my price and reverse and I would be, where's my fill. Doing a quick google, it looks like it was trading 1100-1200 range. So if the range for the day was .5%, that's only 6 points between the high and the low. Back then, has it really been 21 yrs, $100/day would have been decent. So you would need 2 point plus a little for the commissions. But if the trading range was only 6 points and you had trouble getting fills. Where these days a .5% move is about 25 points, and even with inflation say you now need $200/day, You only need 4 points out of 25. So just because of the math, it's way easier to trade and make money these days. There are still problems with getting fills sometimes. ES is my least favorite to trade.



I finally switched over to the YM in 2004. It was ok until the volatility started going crazy. When was Leman Brothers? Hm, August 2007. And the DJIA back then was trading 12-14,000. I remember at one point you were seeing 200 point moves in the DJIA every about 30 mins. About 6 times a day you would see these 200 points up or down. That's $1k moves on one contract. That was a lot of money back then. Hm, I guess maybe it still is. That was like 1.5% moves every 30 mins. That would be like 575 point moves every 30 mins today. That would be insane. You're talking $3k moves. It's like where would you put your stop. It wouldn't much matter, it's going to get hit. There was just no way I could trade that.



When did Globex start offering side by side trading (pit/screen) of the grains. Looks like that was late summer 2006. At some point I started trading the grains, corn, wheat and soybeans. I think mostly because the margin was cheaper on those. I was way under capitalized back then. By 2008 I even stopped trading those.



One other advantage to trading the YM besides it being more well behaved and not as volatile as NQ and ES is it only has 30 stocks in the index and its price weighted. The math for calculating the index is simple. You want to bookmark this page and click on the "change" column which will sort them by the stock down the most dollar wise to the one up the most. If you add all the dollar amounts in the change column together and multiply by about 7, you get about how much the DJIA is up or down for the day. It allows you to see the internals and how they move the index price around. By studying this page everyday you will slowly learn how the markets work. It's one of my indicators that I use everyday.

https://www.cnbc.com/dow-30/



They do have a page for the Nasdaq 100 but the problem with it is there are 100 stocks in the index and it's cap weighted so the math is way complicated. I have a general idea of how the math works, but there is no simple way to take a sorted list of the stocks and make any sense out of it. I haven't found it useful at all. But by watching and studying the list of the DJIA stocks, you'll slowly start gaining insight on how the markets work.