Birth of a trader

Surprising how oil can trend so strongly and all of my trades that were with-trend were losers. It was the whippy-ness and tight stops that mostly did me in. I alternated between real and sim. On review, there were two signals that I spaced on that were winners.

Trade #1
Price briefly poked above the EMA before heading down. Went short 83.77 with a BE+1 exit. My best trade of the day.

The next hour had lots of overlapping bars, so I switched to sim. Had a push down at 05:45 and more sideways crap. Price made 3 unsuccessful attempts to break 83.54.

Trade #2
Placed sell stop at 83.51 with a 4 tick stop and waited for another attempt to break 83.54. Got filled, then instead of getting out BE+1, I let the trade run. -4 ticks.

Switched back to real.

Trade #3
Tried to get in on the trend. Short 82.72 and stopped out. -9 ticks.

Switched to sim

Trade #4
Right idea, poor execution. Wanted to put a sell stop just under the inverted hammer. Entered the trade too soon and too high. Had I waited for the bar to close, it would have been a nice trade. -9 ticks.

Switched to real.

Trade #5
Another attempt to rejoin the trend, which was pretty much played out by now. Short 82.43 and stopped out -6 ticks.

Switched to sim.

Trade #6
Tried to get back in to the trend. Too little too late. -7 ticks.

Not very happy about missing 2 signals, but other than that, I did take the trades as my plan called for. Need to find solace in small victories.

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Choppy trend days (up or down) are a bitch to trade.

If you can recognize you're in such a day your best bet is to enter (in the direction of the trend) in any correction with a minimal stop (several times until you "catch" it) and then hold your position till you hit major support/resistance on a higher time frame.

This is the kind of day, however, that in hindsight seems a piece of cake, but where you get chopped to death. Consider it a good result that you didn't go crazy revenge-trading.

(I was sim-trading gold, based on my hypothesis that we should see more volatility today in gold than in oil, shorting every new low and getting stopped out at be or at minus 10 ticks over and over till I got sick of it... and then, of course, the next trade dropped like a rock almost 200 ticks... but hey, in hindsight: free money).
 
Quote from Picaso:

Choppy trend days (up or down) are a bitch to trade.

If you can recognize you're in such a day your best bet is to enter (in the direction of the trend) in any correction with a minimal stop (several times until you "catch" it) and then hold your position till you hit major support/resistance on a higher time frame.
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Yes, this was hard. The biggest problem for me was the amount of money I'm willing to risk per trade was smaller than the bars on the 5 minute chart whenever a signal appeared, and on the smaller time frame charts there wasn't enough follow through to carry me with the trend.

Ironically, the 2 trades I missed had all the right criteria and had I not had my head somewhere else, I would like to think I would have taken those trades, entered properly, and actually made money today.

I remember reading somewhere that a trader's main job is to not lose money on bad days.
 
Quote from frank8800:

Surprising how oil can trend so strongly and all of my trades that were with-trend were losers. It was the whippy-ness and tight stops that mostly did me in.
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The action leading into the NYMEX open was poor for survivable tight stops on the 5-min charts. If the bars are too wide for your comfort, drill down to the 1-min chart and look for failed tests of pullback highs. An example is the pullback during the 10:00am - 10:20am ET frame. Price hits 83.39, dips a bit, retests and fails a few minutes later. Short around 10:27am for an earlier entry and tighter stop.

By the time NYMEX open settled in and left that (yet another) lower high closing below previous major support on the daily chart, time to draw a channel and short the lower highs at the top of the channel. This would have you shorting around 83.20, 82.90, and 82.70 before the down channel finally loses steam and trend reversal is attempted.
 
Tried to focus on entries today. There were a lot of mismanaged exits, but I'll worry about that another day.

Trade #1
Price pushed up through the EMA, then pulled back. Entered on the pull back long at 82.23, but no follow through. Out BE+1.

Trade #2
Price did a reversal and dropped back down. Waited for confirmation, then went short 81.80 and price turned around for a brief pop up. Out BE +1.

Switched to sim because I wanted to try some stuff.

Trade #3
After skimming along under the EMA for awhile, I went short after the 06:40 bar. Out BE+1.

Trade #4
After the news, price hugged a trend line, weakening as it went up. Place a sell stop under the last green candle and was filled. Held my breathe waiting for the big retrace to stop me out, but it never happened. When price bounced off the EMA, I moved my stop. +15 ticks.

Trade #5
Took the signal short from a shorter time frame, and managed the trade from there as well. I think if I'm up on a trade, it's best to manage it from the higher time frame. This was a nice runner. +20 ticks.

I took 7 more trades in sim, all focused on the shorted time frame. Made 95 sim ticks and 2 real ticks. Yipee.

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Hi Frank
I've been watching some of your trading experience through this forum. A few weeks ago I went to a "power class" from a company. I didn't end up paying for their 17k class but I did go home and research their methods. It's almost exactly like what I have seen Nodoji post. Pure Price Action!
Check out the site! I think it will make a lot of sense to you!

http://www.forexfactory.com/showthread.php?t=255586 - basic materials and cheat sheats.

http://www.forexfactory.com/showpost.php?p=4019738&postcount=42 - video tutorials to show you how to draw lines and supply/demand zones.

Cheers,
Brent
 
Thanks, I'll check it out.

Had a bit of a technical snafu on Friday. I have been programming NT from my laptop at home, and I had left it connected over night. Went to work on Thursday as normal, and goofed around with different time frames and strategies. Made 37 trades, most losers, all in sim (or so I thought).

At 07:32 on Thursday, I was booted off NT by the broker because a second login was detected. I didn't put 2 and 2 together at that point, but tried to log back in unsuccessfully twice. On the third attempt, it let me back in and I went on my merry way playing around.

On Friday I looked at my statement and it was down a little over $400 on a half dozen trades. The log file on my laptop at home showed a connection at 07:32. After pouring through the log files, I saw what happened and pieced together this story (that's what I did most of Friday). It showed all sim trades until 07:32, then a broker disconnect. After logging back in, it showed the account was live. I am absolutely 100% positive I was trading in sim from my office computer, but the second login somehow screwed things up. I'm sending the log and trace files to NT for analysis, but I don't think anyone besides me really cares (I know Mirus didn't).

I'm just happy it was only a few hundred dollars. It could have been a disaster.

Moral of the story, do NOT leave NT up and running on any computer you are not sitting in front of!!
 
Quote from frank8800:

Thanks, I'll check it out.

Had a bit of a technical snafu on Friday. I have been programming NT from my laptop at home, and I had left it connected over night. Went to work on Thursday as normal, and goofed around with different time frames and strategies. Made 37 trades, most losers, all in sim (or so I thought).

At 07:32 on Thursday, I was booted off NT by the broker because a second login was detected. I didn't put 2 and 2 together at that point, but tried to log back in unsuccessfully twice. On the third attempt, it let me back in and I went on my merry way playing around.

On Friday I looked at my statement and it was down a little over $400 on a half dozen trades. The log file on my laptop at home showed a connection at 07:32. After pouring through the log files, I saw what happened and pieced together this story (that's what I did most of Friday). It showed all sim trades until 07:32, then a broker disconnect. After logging back in, it showed the account was live. I am absolutely 100% positive I was trading in sim from my office computer, but the second login somehow screwed things up. I'm sending the log and trace files to NT for analysis, but I don't think anyone besides me really cares (I know Mirus didn't).

I'm just happy it was only a few hundred dollars. It could have been a disaster.

Moral of the story, do NOT leave NT up and running on any computer you are not sitting in front of!!
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Ouch, man, that sucks and it's particularly weird that the trades that show up as live were those from the office.

I don't want to pry on your log files, so two things off the cuff:

1) Did you have "File>Global simulation mode" selected? Is it selected as default on start-up?

2) Do you have a wildly different color for your DOM when in sim mode? When I started trading with Ninja I got confused a couple of times with the light/dark gray color scheme, but if your sim color is pink/purple/orange or some crazy color there's no way you can get confused (not saying you did). I also like showing the account on the DOM Header.

If it's any consolation $400 comes across as cheap, considering what could have been. :( I know, it's no consolation.
 
Quote from Picaso:

Ouch, man, that sucks and it's particularly weird that the trades that show up as live were those from the office.

I don't want to pry on your log files, so two things off the cuff:

1) Did you have "File>Global simulation mode" selected? Is it selected as default on start-up?

2) Do you have a wildly different color for your DOM when in sim mode? When I started trading with Ninja I got confused a couple of times with the light/dark gray color scheme, but if your sim color is pink/purple/orange or some crazy color there's no way you can get confused (not saying you did). I also like showing the account on the DOM Header.

If it's any consolation $400 comes across as cheap, considering what could have been. :( I know, it's no consolation.
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It's selected on the laptop, but not my office computer. I didn't think about changing the sim color, I just left it at the default. I think I'll change it to something neon!

I'm thrilled that the loss was only $400! I could have been wiped out.
 
Quote from frank8800:

I'm thrilled that the loss was only $400! I could have been wiped out.
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Wow, that is scary, especially if you were trading larger size than normal, thinking "Oh, it's just sim..."

I have my sim account (which I use for chart datafeed) on a different PC, and fortunately all the windows have SIMULATED TRADING stamped across them.

If you don't have safeguards like that, I'd recommend you choose which one you're going to trade for the day and don't even log into the other one. :eek:
 
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