Quote from JoshDance:
Even if this trade is successful (unlikely), this is exactly why I do not like to use 3 point stops when the trade should have worked with a 1.5 or so point stop. I'm easily suckered in to short these crawls up and will probably wind up paying for it.
I used to trade "tight." My two point stops used to clobber me. Not any more. Not since I started parking my stops 10 points away from my entries. Not that I ever, EVER let them go that far. Now I know within a point or two whether I'm wrong, and then I'm out. (Every once is a while, it's more, but that's rare).
You want to know what's changed my e-mini trading life? Trading vertical credit spreads on the NDX. Seriously.
WTF? I'll tell you, from one self-identified impatient person to another...
Trading NDX vertical spreads is a little like piloting an 18-wheeler through a kindergarten playground. So doing this forced me to establish a method to identify tradeable biases. It also forced me to become patient as hell while I sat in the trade, often for days, to allow the bias to play out. In the meantime--and here was the blessed training wheels aspect of it all--I had positive theta working for me, offering a for-the-most-part false comfort that even if I was "wrong," I had time in my favor. (Like I said, for the most part, that's a canard, but we do what we gotta do.)
Anyway, this has taken me about -- ohhhh, about four years -- but now I'm at the point where my NDX spread trades are consistently profitable.
Fast forward to ES. Markets really are fractal, with a few caveats, so I'm took this approach that I've used on an interday/interweek basis with NDX and applied it, intraday, to the ES. Here's what happens: I identify the probable bias, wait for the trigger, then enter.
Yesterday, you saw that approach at work in the long I took e.o.d. I never, ever, EVER would have been able to take that trade even three months ago. Now, that was a clean entry, (maybe 2 ticks adverse movement) but it was s-l-o-w. Torture for someone like me.
This morning, I took short with a poor entry, but the bias was not invalidated while I was in it, so I took 4 pts heat for 4 pts profit. Not one for posterity, I know. But, with my old approach, I would have been minus 2 points on the trade, period.
Today, I've been in a long since about 11:00 a.m. If I think too much about it, monkeys will start crawling up the inside of my skull. Otherwise, I'm pretty chill.
I say all this without a scintilla of braggadoccio. (The amount of time I've spent on this is nothing to brag about.) I just offer a perspective, one self-indentified impatient person to another.
Find a way to trade "loose," and your stops will no longer be your enemy.