Macro Momentum Pattern Recognition Trading Journal

[formikatrading]

11/23/2018:

An additional note on the Friesen interview, he said the one thing he would tell his younger self is that "You are okay. Your tendency to underestimate yourself and your abilities is a limitation that you no longer need."

I'm going to use that when I'm experiencing self-doubt.

Today, I did a quick scalp in ES on the first pullback (was between a 50-62% retracement) which was apparent on a 15-minute chart. Trade ran to a new high from that point but only captured a small portion of the move. My daily indicators, although oversold, never confirmed a reversal today and nearly all of today's move was given back.

I actually was tracking the initial move (which was apparent on the 5-minute chart) but was having some technology issues and it ran away without me.

 

[formikatrading]

 

[formikatrading]

11/23/2018 (Market Close):

A few insights for today:

Stock market downtrend continues, although market breadth was not horrible and hasn't worsened in past few trading sessions. This could lead to the market firming up a bit next week. Russell 2000 held up much better than the S&P 500.

Oil downtrend continues with no signs of stopping. At some point, once there is a momentum shift, there could be a nice rally in the other direction so need to be aware of that.

Bonds have rallied a bit but not as much as would be expected given the market weakness. Weekly charts are now potentially overbought with some "divergences" so may be possible opportunities to sell bonds next week.

Gold / Gold Miners -- no clear read on these right now.

 

[formikatrading]

This may be my last post to this journal. This was a beneficial exercise as it taught me that I preferred a web-based solution to express my thoughts and ideas. That led me to look at other, more robust options such as TradeBench and Trademetria. I had been trying to use Edgewonk, which is a good product but there are a few features that it lacks that are important to me: (1) a true, web-based solution (Edgewonk is a stand-alone solution and while it can be installed in DropBox to make it cloud-based, it still isn't as "portable" as TradeBench and Trademetria); (2) multiple account support in a single instance (Edgewonk recommends setting up a separate instance of Edgewonk for each account so you end up having multiple journals that you need to manage which can become overwhelming); (3) freestyle journaling without needing to identify specific trades (Trademetria has the best option for this as you can have a daily journal and if you took trades that day, it will automatically capture those; TradeBench has a "Notes" tab which can be used for this, although not as structured, organized, etc).