CL Redux
- Thread starter schizo
- Start date
Quote from BCE:
Here's a chart. Looks good if I do say so.
nicely done. all that while watching golf, no less!
Quote from BCE:
Out @.96. A little early I guess but I'll take it.
awesome trade!
As I sit here having scratched my way again with 20+ trades to just over breakeven (+20 on the day), I contemplate how it could have been so much easier for me today.
I shorted the break of the 10:10ET bar, and was in +35 when I moved my stop to BE+7 or so, at which point I was taken out. My target for the trade was the lower channel line, as the two 5m bars were off the top channel line, as well as a trendline retest. A double whammy, double bar reversal, with the second bar testing a few ticks higher than the second. Doesn't get much cleaner than that in terms of shorting to me. Should I have moved the stop? Perhaps. What would you have done? That's 1.5 hours to get to the target .. too long to hold? Just a thought.
My second really good setup was the 12:05 bar, shorting 93.10. The 15m chart shows that nice "rolling over" look and .11 was the low of the day, with the bottom channel line still in sight. Even better was that the trend line from 6:05 to 9:45 to 11:15 was broken and retested beforehand, and a buyer bar preceded the breakout so there was fuel to drive it down. Looking at the 15m, my target was initially the globex low near 92.15, which is also near S4 (S3 if you're using wide pivots). Reasonable target, pretty wide open space, and strength on the break. What did I do? I scalped my way down, and wound up with about a third of what I would have gotten had I just left the darn thing alone.
Finally, I went long at 1:45pm at 92.27. It didn't go my way initially, but with my stop 18 ticks lower at .09, I felt safe enough that if it was going to go up, it would probably not go below .10. This time I was determined to leave my stop and target in place and just leave. Well, I left and when I came back, price had made its first push up. Now, logically, would you short when you see a break UP from a consolidation (except to scalp)? I don't think so. So when it was 15 or so in my favor, what did I do? Sold, to take the profit! As I write this, it has moved 60, with my original target .81, a nice 50+ ticks higher, having been hit.
So, first of all, for those of you who have gotten over the bad habit of cutting winners short, what advice can you give?
Secondly, what the hell is wrong with me? I know many traders face this problem, but I am determined to conquer this. Three nice trades, all would have been winners, yet I come away with a fraction of what I would have done had I taken only those trades, left the stops and targets the hell alone, and just been patient. I did 10x the amount of work I needed to do, for about 1/10th of the profit.
I shorted the break of the 10:10ET bar, and was in +35 when I moved my stop to BE+7 or so, at which point I was taken out. My target for the trade was the lower channel line, as the two 5m bars were off the top channel line, as well as a trendline retest. A double whammy, double bar reversal, with the second bar testing a few ticks higher than the second. Doesn't get much cleaner than that in terms of shorting to me. Should I have moved the stop? Perhaps. What would you have done? That's 1.5 hours to get to the target .. too long to hold? Just a thought.
My second really good setup was the 12:05 bar, shorting 93.10. The 15m chart shows that nice "rolling over" look and .11 was the low of the day, with the bottom channel line still in sight. Even better was that the trend line from 6:05 to 9:45 to 11:15 was broken and retested beforehand, and a buyer bar preceded the breakout so there was fuel to drive it down. Looking at the 15m, my target was initially the globex low near 92.15, which is also near S4 (S3 if you're using wide pivots). Reasonable target, pretty wide open space, and strength on the break. What did I do? I scalped my way down, and wound up with about a third of what I would have gotten had I just left the darn thing alone.
Finally, I went long at 1:45pm at 92.27. It didn't go my way initially, but with my stop 18 ticks lower at .09, I felt safe enough that if it was going to go up, it would probably not go below .10. This time I was determined to leave my stop and target in place and just leave. Well, I left and when I came back, price had made its first push up. Now, logically, would you short when you see a break UP from a consolidation (except to scalp)? I don't think so. So when it was 15 or so in my favor, what did I do? Sold, to take the profit! As I write this, it has moved 60, with my original target .81, a nice 50+ ticks higher, having been hit.
So, first of all, for those of you who have gotten over the bad habit of cutting winners short, what advice can you give?
Secondly, what the hell is wrong with me? I know many traders face this problem, but I am determined to conquer this. Three nice trades, all would have been winners, yet I come away with a fraction of what I would have done had I taken only those trades, left the stops and targets the hell alone, and just been patient. I did 10x the amount of work I needed to do, for about 1/10th of the profit.
Don't have time to get into it right now, but those are really nice charts JD and a nice site to post them. It's hard, you know. I had a nice trade on that last one and was patient mainly because it felt like the LOD had been tested already and even sank below it a bit. No one knows if it would test it again, but the 92 level was kind of significant if you go back and look at daily charts. That was the low of the recent range, meaning the last few months.
Now earlier, as I posted, I was impatient with my 93.16 July short and got just .10 out of it when in a few minutes, as DC pointed out, it headed down to test the LOD. Left more than a point on the table obviously.
I agree you need to keep with your game plan and leave you shorts alone and don't over think it, which is what I did on that one.
I'll post more later if I have time. We're all learning to do better and trying to help each other out. Onward and upward.
agree, mr. Schizo. to me it looks like CL might be building a falling wedge.
For me personally, trailing a stop on the CL has never worked. The quick little retraces are excellent at taking you out and then working out as you expected initially.
Realize that you will never nail your exits - you will almost always exit too early or too late. Once you accept this, then you can be at peace w/ your exits. Until then, you will be in a constant loop of woulda, coulda, shoulda. What works today will get crushed tomorrow.
Fear of losing, that's it. You trail a stop so you can say - I can't lose! Then you get taken out (you think for a moment that your trail was brilliant b/c it just saved the trade from being a loser) and then you realize a few seconds or minutes later that your fear trail cost you real money. Your fear of losing prohibited you from getting good profits out of the trades.
Maybe you just need to set an OCO once you enter a trade - either your stop or profit is hit and end of story.
When, where, why to exit a trade are always so easy after the fact. Exits are by far the most difficult part of this job not b/c they require great technical reading abilities, but b/c your brain enters the game and if you are playing w/ scared money, you are bound to get ticked out here and there over and over again.
If you do not have confidence in your entry and/or exit, you will always be looking for a reason to protect your money b/c deep down you know you need to.