Frosty's e-mini journal

Quote from frostengine:

I've had a complete meltdown, went form up 127 to down -200........ why the hell did I decide to start using stops today??? I was doing so well when I would ignore my stops.............. Now i remember why I hated stops to start with I get choped out of nearly EVERY position I enter...
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Frost,

I am sorry for jumping in here but I have been watching since you set up this journal. Your trading method (or lack of) is in serious need of an overhaul. You need to sit down and lay out your whole method from start to finish. You keep having troubles with your stops but your entries and trade management are non existant as well.

Now I am not one to kick a man when they are down so here are a few things you need to define before even pulling up your charts.

1. How are you going to determine your entry. Do you use divergences, breakouts. You need to have this defined.

2. Target for each trade. For YM I would use 10 - 20 points minimum. You could identify a trend and ride it for the day.

3. Stop loss. In your case this needs to be set in stone. Make it where your trading platform has this built in. I would set it for 1:1 R/R.

4. Target and or loss for the day. Once this is hit turn off the trading platform and walk away. I use to open up my simulator and just sim trade the rest of the day. It helped me with my trading and it made me feel like I was doing something.

Once you have all this written down then trade it. Don't allow yourself to break any rules. This market you have chosen to just play with is full of really good traders that just feast on the likes of you. They will take everything you have and not miss a minute of sleep. I hope this will help you some, if not you are going to be sending a lot of strangers children to Harvard while yours will be going to Lincoln Tech...

Good Luck,
4re
 
Quote from frostengine:

boro,

Currently only trading 1 contract at a time. But you are correct, I am cutting my winners short and letting my loosers ride..... one of my MANY bad habits.
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Did you practice trading like this when you were paper trading? I
saw in one of your first posts that you were using the demo at IB.

You must have a cut-off point as to how much you will lose on any one day.
And stick to it like your trading career depends on it. (It does).

It will help stop you with your "revenge" trading.

If your goal is $100 a day, then that could also be your cut-off point for a loss-day.

Plus you need to stop trading once you do hit your goal for the day.
And then turn off the computer(s) and congratulate yourself for
having a good day, with total and complete discipline.

The market will be there the next day. You need to do this for awhile
untill you have control over your emotions.

And you have to take your losses. It's a part of the business.

If you have a negative day and lose $100, so what. There is always
tomorrow. Protecting your capital is important. Keeping yourself
from ingraining bad habits is even more important.

P.S. You seem to trade well in the morning. That's a positive...:)
 
Quote from frostengine:

My mechanical method does..... its really a VERY well drawn out strategy that has been VERY thoroughly tested.... all these trades i'm making, hardly any of them are from that method..... most of the trades I make and post into this thread are from a few other more experimental methods I'm doing....

Kinda funny, my one proven method I dont even trade it, I simply let my bot trade it on Ib's paper account while I trade a experimental method live.... doesnt make much sense does it ;) Its not that I dont have faith in the mechanical system, because I actually do have a LOT of faith in it, but it has a relatively high draw down. My account is currently too small for me to trade that method without pulling my hair out from worrying too much....

I'm really tempted to let my bot just automate the process on my live account starting tomorrow.. but too scared..... May let it automate it, but if i see it get into a trade that I really believe will end badly, such as news coming out that makes the market sudelny reverse hard I may exit the position manually......

Or, quite possibly may let the bot trade ES, and I'll continue trading YM.. maybe this way will offset the losses between the two. Everytime I have a bad day like today, it causes me to want to try somethign completly new the next day.....

PS: Maybe with the bot trading actively as well, it will make me feel like I dont NEED to take a trade just cus i'm bored or feel I need to be active. Maybe it would allow me to sit back and only take trades I feel very confident about and let the bot do the grinding away the rest of the time...
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You need a minimum of 20-30k to trade index futures, 40-50k is really what it takes. You need to be able to scale in and scale out.

If your trading with 5k stop now.
 

Attachments

thanks for all the comments, I deffinetly have a LOT of work to do.... I am leaning very heavily towards using my bot starting tomorrow to trade the ES and continue trading YM on my own. However, I need to come up with some clearly defined entry rules and do not take any trades not fitting into those rules.

Hopefully I'll stop talking about not breaking rules any more and actually start doing what I say...
 
Quote from myminitrading:

You need a minimum of 20-30k to trade index futures, 40-50k is really what it takes. You need to be able to scale in and scale out.
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My thoughts exactly. I wouldn't have been quite as dogmatic about it, but still, scaling in and scaling out would definitely make life a lot easier.

Whether or not to recommend scaling into positions to a trader with already fairly large (occasional) daily losses is another question. If you happen to lose $5k three times in a row, you're down $15k. That might be considered kind of gargantuan in a $40k account.
 
Quote from myminitrading:

You need a minimum of 20-30k to trade index futures, 40-50k is really what it takes. You need to be able to scale in and scale out.

If your trading with 5k stop now.
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Wrong answer. This person has no discipline, no method for entry or exit. You throw more money in an account and it will be gone even faster than the 5k. It doesn't matter right now if he/she has 40 or 50 million.

Now, if this person had a successful method, discipline and was planning to live off this trading account then you are right.

4re
 
Quote from Arthropod:

My thoughts exactly. I wouldn't have been quite as dogmatic about it, but still, scaling in and scaling out would definitely make life a lot easier.

Whether or not to recommend scaling into positions to a trader with already fairly large (occasional) daily losses is another question. If you happen to lose $5k three times in a row, you're down $15k. That might be considered kind of gargantuan in a $40k account.
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I knew I should have said limit you max loss to 2% account equity. That would give someone with 40k and three contracts about 50 points to wiggle. That is plenty for intraday trading IMO.
 
Quote from myminitrading:

I knew I should have said limit you max loss to 2% account equity. That would give someone with 40k and three contracts about 50 points to wiggle. That is plenty for intraday trading IMO.
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I still think this person has more problems than being underfunded.
 
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