charts:
http://charts.dacharts.com/2005-07-13/
today was more my style - decent range but not a lot of decisive direction. this allowed me to take longs and shorts as the market floated up and down.
opening near PDC and POC with very little overnight range, i felt it was kind of a toss up for opening direction. given a 4-tick 1-min open range (and only 1-point between 9:26 and 9:31) on light volume, it seemed like i wasn't the only one waiting for an indication of direction.
i went long at 72.2 since we were closer to the bottom of the overnight range. i sat through a 1.5-point V-rotation (73.7 down to 72.3 and back up). i covered and reversed near VAH (74.2). again, i sat through a rotation from 72.7 up to 74.0 before exiting at 72.20. i then sold again at 72.20 and covered at 68.80 (which was near S1). that was a pretty long position for me (about an hour).
i made a couple other plays around the same 68.8 area (long 669 to 670.5 and 668.7 to 670.6, each about 15-20mins) later in the day, but also churned my account a bit during the morning. i kept close stops and close targets given the relatively tight up-and-down action we were seeing.
basically i made those four nice trades and about 10 other trades that washed (after fees, they would have had slightly a negative net effect).
IB contained upper extreme. IB didn't hold lower extreme, but was very thin after the 3-tick IB break. overnight range was paltry as was any opening gap play. there is a ton of room to fill in (including several patches of singles) between 68.40 and 55.40. little bit of a ledge at 68.8. closed not too far off from POC.
take care and gtty -
omni
BTW: reminder that this was on my SIM account. live trading will (hopefully) resume Monday.