kserra's emini trades

Charlestrader

Thanks for your input I am checking out some off the stuff you have posted it looks pretty interesting (especially since it is free) although I must admit I am not that big of a fan for entering trades off of divergences, I tend to use them as exit signals more than anything else.

blb078

Thanks again for posting your system and giving me some good desciptions. I am actually in the process of considering changing my system pretty radically.

To be honest I am not quite sure why I am considering changing my system at this point. The one I have right now seems to be working just fine and has showed me good success.
 
Quote from kserra:

Charlestrader

Thanks for your input I am checking out some off the stuff you have posted it looks pretty interesting (especially since it is free) although I must admit I am not that big of a fan for entering trades off of divergences, I tend to use them as exit signals more than anything else.

blb078

Thanks again for posting your system and giving me some good desciptions. I am actually in the process of considering changing my system pretty radically.

To be honest I am not quite sure why I am considering changing my system at this point. The one I have right now seems to be working just fine and has showed me good success.
More...

no prob. since you are still paper trading if you don't like the new system you can always go back to your orig. system.
 
Quote from kserra:


To be honest I am not quite sure why I am considering changing my system at this point. The one I have right now seems to be working just fine and has showed me good success.
More...

Right on kserra! It's really funny how everyone likes to jump into
others journals and tell them they should change their style or
whatever to Jim Bob's CCI system or John Boy's humdinger
WMA with a 15 crossover angling with the 75 MA Bollinger Band
Stochastic that you can only trade when the moon is full and
your charts line up with 7 astrological signs....

As far as I have read in kserra's journal, kserra is doing fine....

So why can't others leave everybody's journal alone? As traders,
we have to find our own edge. Who wants to trade someone
elses's idea of how to trade the markets? Maybe the BORG?

I have yet to see a journal where gobs of others have not
jumped in and tried (and usually do) to change the original
posters ideas into something else completely... and in the process
ruining what would of been the journalist's edge...

And then they use the thread to talk to each other about stuff
that doesn't even have anything to do with the original posters
journal! GAWD! Why does everyone do this?


Good luck, kserra. You are doing great. Stick to your guns and
keep your own ideas...

And you can use the ignore function on porgie.. What is up with
this porgie? Did he eat too much pie?... :D
 
Paper trading is the smart way to go, but emotions are not a factor...emotions are the factor with real money...I will be trading real money again next week...You think I am harrassing you, but I only see you going where I have been for 4 thousand hours and really know how it feels when you are disappointed at times....and know that the more you learn the more you are thinking as you trade...too much thinking is a problem...once you your system is perfected, it will tell you when to enter and exit...having absolute confidence in the system takes a long time to build...the more you learn, the more complicated things become and you become the enemy, not the market. Let the system take the stress away....Patience, emotional control, confidence, will allow you to wait for the system to show the lowest risk, highest probability entries......

Setting safe stops and entering @ low risk points can be done 95% of the time. With your system the safe stops will be in the 3 to 4 point range...when the market goes with you either take the 3 or 4 points or move to breakeven if the system says it is a strong move. If more than 1 contract is traded, exit 1 contract with 3 or 4 points and move other contracts to breakeven..
 
Quote from version77:



Right on kserra! It's really funny how everyone likes to jump into
others journals and tell them they should change their style or
whatever to Jim Bob's CCI system or John Boy's humdinger
WMA with a 15 crossover angling with the 75 MA Bollinger Band
Stochastic that you can only trade when the moon is full and
your charts line up with 7 astrological signs....

As far as I have read in kserra's journal, kserra is doing fine....

So why can't others leave everybody's journal alone? As traders,
we have to find our own edge. Who wants to trade someone
elses's idea of how to trade the markets? Maybe the BORG?

I have yet to see a journal where gobs of others have not
jumped in and tried (and usually do) to change the original
posters ideas into something else completely... and in the process
ruining what would of been the journalist's edge...

And then they use the thread to talk to each other about stuff
that doesn't even have anything to do with the original posters
journal! GAWD! Why does everyone do this?


Good luck, kserra. You are doing great. Stick to your guns and
keep your own ideas...

And you can use the ignore function on porgie.. What is up with
this porgie? Did he eat too much pie?... :D
More...

What the hell are you talking about? I guess you didn't read were Kserra asked for some examples. No one here is trying to change his trading style, some questions were exchanged, he asked for a couple examples and they were put up. No one here ever said that he should change his system, I'm sure he knows he's doing fine with the one he has. Pull you head out of you ass before you start attacking people. I guess you missed the part were he was thankfull of the all the advice, if he doesn't like it he doesn't have to use it.
 
i think (hope) that version77 is directing his comments solely at porgie here. blb078 has added an extra valuable angle, and has been decent enough to post some narrative and a graph on his entry details.

porgie keeps coming in with advice for kserra to change this and that but with nothing to back it up


KB
 
To my knowledge no one has asked me to change my system at all, besides porgie (but he does this in everyone's journal, I am pretty sure if warren buffet started a journal here, porgie would ask him to use three to four point stops and look for a three to four point profit target, with no examples of course, just that we should trust his four thousand hours of research and paper trading experience). I really do not mind people asking me to look at other ideas, I am constantly reading books about trading and ideas that do not correlate with mine, just so I can see how other traders/investors look at things. I don't think other people's input is harmful, I am not the type of person who is a completely original and creative thinker, I find that I work much better working off of others ideas and transferring those ideas into knowledge that can help me. Even when I just began to trade I was taking other's ideas and using them for myself, in fact the first sytem I ever traded I modifed (only slightly) to fit my personality.

This first purely mechanical system I traded used stochastics to pin point oversold conditions and then enter no matter what the market was doing at that point. Originally the system was slated to use 20% stops and look for a 2% profit target (what was i thinking ?). I adjusted the stop point to something I was more comfortable with stops moved to 10% instead of 20%, so that is precisely what I did and in fact this improved the overall performance according to my backtesting results. The key to the system was the fact that about 1 in every 10 trades the system was able to pull off a real great trade. Through my very very very extensive backtesting of the system I became convinced I would be a millionaire (turning less than six figures into millions) within a year or two. despite the system's incredible track record (this track record is actually due to the backtesting software I used, for more info PM me as I am not going to trash the software here) it did not perform anything like it should have been doing. I was making money, but I was upset because my expectations had been so much higher, so I began to explore why my expectations were being thrown off. I discovered all the problems with the system and after hundreds of trades with the system I threw it out after losing most of my profits and ending up breakeven.

From there I became just your average trader, constantly jumping from system to system, spending about a week with each one before jumping to the next. I learned a lot about myself in this time from reading tons of books I knew that there would be no one answer that would suit me or that would just be given to me. I learned that I am quite discplined (and profitable) when I have a profit target, and when I have a solid stop. These two things took most of the emotion out of trading for me. Therefore with my knowledge I set out to look for a system that would work for me somethign i would have no problem seeing. That system is what I ended up with trading with here. I know crossing moving averages are not the most original things in the world, but damn it if it makes money and works for me I will trade it, but that does not mean I am going to just stop there. As I have learned just because it looks like it makes money, you must always be looking for errors in the system, before they rear their head in the form lost money. As Charles Lebeau said "Systems need regular inspection and maintenance just like your car. You don't wait until the engine blows up to see if you need oil."

Recently I have been noticing that there is a problem with what I have been trading. I am persitently trying to call tops and bottoms, I cannot believe that no one has called me on this one yet. I believe that the reason no one has called me on this is my lack of posting charts and the fact that I have been reasonably profitable with this so far, therefore no one really sees a problem with this as I have been fulfilling the bottom line of my trading. While I have been rather good at doing this, I see it as a very dangerous method, and one that is usually avoided by pretty much all of the top traders. Therefore when I saw how blb078's method worked, it sort of calls tops and bottom (I like to think of them as trend turning points though more in this case), but can also be played as a pullback trend following system, I became very intrigued. Instead of trying to fight the trend on a trend day, this system would look to be capitalizing on the trend. That is another thing no one has noticed, a lot of the money that I have made has been against the trend on days where it would have been much more profitable merely to ride the wave, instead of fighting against it.

Therefore I am changing my system at this point in time. I will be using a slightly modified yet incredibly similar system to the system that blb078 has posted. I will be aiming for larger profit targets and looking to enter in the direction of the trend and staying out of the market when there is no edge. I honestly do not see a good reason to repost the rules of the system here as they have been already shown by blb078 in previous posts. I will be taking my signals from the 1 minute chart (i will take flack for this) and then watching the 5 minute for a confirmation of the crossing averages along with some nice slope to the averages and confirmation in the MACD. Exits will be mildly discretionary but generally I will be aiming for a 1-3 profit target with a stop that will be tight 1-2 points, but will mainly depend on the trade at hand. Although the charts will look different and the parameters of the indicators will be modified from what I was trading before, the market has not changed. This new and improved approach will have more detail added to it when I begin to paper trade it with a simulator on monday.

My biggest flaw trading so far has been attempting to enter the market early and with no confirmation, these losses are usually small, but can easily add up if I am not careful. This is somethign I will be watching for

No one here is trying to sell anything (well T-REX and the 2BC charlie system hasn't showed up.....yet) and in fact I think everyone's intentions here are usually good. Therefore I am encouraging everyone to continue to comment, and show me how you may have played a trade yourself. Fighting is unnecessary. Please do not use generic ideas about what is wrong with the system instead show me what is wrong with my system if you really think there is a problem and how you think I should go about solving it. And porgie please post a trade setup and how you played it next time before you go criticizing me, or at least show me some proof as to why you think your ideas are so superior to everyone else's on this board and why everyone should trade the way you do.

Thanks again for everyone's input. Trading will resume on monday.
 
I have enjoyed your journal a lot so far and will keep up with it with great interest, esp as you’re now changing your system somewhat. I feel I have some similarities to you in that I too once traded a 5/10 minute Stochastics/MACD based system (as a result of following Austin Passamonte from Index Skybox as it was called then) which after awhile (and with an overall b/even result) I also found to be endeavouring to pick tops and bottoms rather than just taking the “easy” money following the trend.

I am now trying to concentrate on establishing the existence of a trend and, more importantly, getting a good entry on it and letting it ride through to a signal that the trend is weakening/over (sounds easy doesn’t it!?). I’ve got a thread over in the “Trading” forum which I’ve just started titled “Establishing a trend”

http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=24984

which includes a chart each day to try and illustrate the general idea. I would have it in the “Journals” forum but I’m not trading it real-time as yet (it’s more a collection of ideas) but as soon as I do (whether paper or money) I’ll bring it over to the Journals forum. On these charts you’ll see 2 moving averages and I also keep an eye on MACD so there are similarities I think to what you’re going to be doing here with your revised method based on blb078’s posts.

Anyway, thanks and keep up the good work!

KB
 
Trades for 12-1-03

Trade #1: Long @ 1064.75, stop @ 1063.00, cover @ 1066.25 +1.5 pts

11:30: Trade was taken slightly late as the MACD on the 5 minute took a while to confirm the signal (i find it is better to wait than to jump in to early and get stopped out) as well as the averages crossing over took a second. Got into trade and was looking for a bigger profit (closer to today's highs) however I got out of the trade as there was resistance being shown around the 1066-1067 area. Turns out i could have just stayed in the trade all day but was fine with getting out with a profit.


Profit/Loss for day: 1.5 pts

Overall Profit/Loss: 26.75 pts

The goal of today was not really to trade to much considering use of new system but instead the idea was to watch the system and how it behaves in a live market. Included here is a sample of how the trade was taken in this instance. On the chart the top chart is the 1 minute and the bottom chart is the 5 minute. The moving averages are volume weighted and are set to 3=red 10=blue. Will post more trading signals from today.
 

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