And don't get me wrong here, I admire your intent to show how even small traders can "make money if they stick to it". That has been my rallying cry in my own journal, and transparency has been first and foremost. Honesty and integrity above all. But it has been a long road, and I hope I am showing how difficult the journey can actually be on the road to discovery. I still do believe it CAN be done. But you have the track record at the CME micro contest. Implement it. I think that is what people wish to see.
Micro E-mini Madness (2% per day)
- Thread starter sstheo
- Start date
Same strategy, same entry and exit. Just an extra click of button. It's not a big deal.
All those micro contests don't mean a thing cause it doesn't involve one's real money. Let's see how OP does after a couple of months and good luck to him.
Tariff news out of China put the market in a tail spin.
I traded the micros in response.
The first trade was short before the news came out, but I got $13 on the MNQ.
The rest were longs as I began fading the news, knowing Jerome Powell was up next.
Up about $100 on 7 trades on the micros.
(As mentioned before, this account is an evaluation account with a funding company with real trading emotions built in! My own live account will go active next week.)
I traded the micros in response.
The first trade was short before the news came out, but I got $13 on the MNQ.
The rest were longs as I began fading the news, knowing Jerome Powell was up next.
Up about $100 on 7 trades on the micros.
(As mentioned before, this account is an evaluation account with a funding company with real trading emotions built in! My own live account will go active next week.)
Good luck and I hope you do well trading the micro's.I suggest you dont place your main focus on the daily or weekly average return.Let that be an afterthought to how well you performed each day. In other words grade your performance the way a teacher would grade a student. Each day you choose to trade will have different degrees of transparency as seen through you. Each day you are making the decisions of when to buy , sell or sit on your hands under different market conditions. Grade yourself. Making good grades allows you to move forward. I don't think anyone could say that becoming a successful trader does not include a continuing education of sorts.Are you able to put that education to use? Has it become valuable. Every day is a test in my eyes. My personal goal is to have a good performance each time tested or make a good decision on rescheduling the test date. Average out your grades over time .High grades generally get rewarded.
what I don't like is that I see no stops or no take profit entries..that 06:02 to 06:08 went into loss by a good few points..a lot more than you made on it even by just glancing at the chart
I plan to have a stop and take profit on every trade I do..still working on setups..very important to me..got rid of my Philips 50" wide-screen and now have a AOC 32" and a dell 23"..AOC for multiple charts and 1 min trade chart..dell for line chart
I might need to change again or add 1 more monitor..will see how new setup works out
don't rush trading a live account until YOU are ready..forget about what anyone says on a website..it is your money..not theirs!!
once you are serious..that is all that matters..if you are not serious then it is obvious that you are just wasting your time..it is far more important to get everything right before risking hard earned money..sure only a fool would do the opposite!!!
I am purely chart based, but as previously posted, I closely watch the Cumulative Delta and I use a volume delta chart to see the buying and selling aggression:
But something purely magical happens however when I zoom in on the volume delta chart on the right:
As you can see, by using the summary volume delta chart on the upper right, I am seeing a fast representation of the true underlying data executed trades (bottom chart). The markets move TOO FAST often for me to analyze the numbers themselves, and so most of the time I have opted to see the average up or down pressure on a per-bar basis (upper right chart). When the market is slow, I do often zoom in to the finer details. But the POC is very valuable to me either way. The POC represents the high node on the bar, and I know that that tick is considered "value" for that bar. My stops will often go just below the POC in slow markets and below the full bar in fast markets (or two full bars in very fast markets).
I am only using executed data at this time, no orders on the DOM.
One of my mentors told me something similar: "A loss is still a good trade IF you followed all your rules." I thought it was a stupid idea initially, but then I started to think like you. It's about repeatable, long-term performance. Thanks for the reminder.
Good catch on the rogue micro trade. Good thing it was a Micro! And good thing I got out when I did. The NQ tanked on Friday all the way to around 7,450 or almost 250 NQ points below my entry on that trade!!! On the NQ, that would have been a $5000 loss on one contract. Even on a Micro, it would have been a $500 loss on one contract, or half of my account - which will go live next week.
So clearly having stops in place will be vital. I have still not finalized the Micro stop parameters, but on the NQ and YM my stops are (1) scratch out immediately manually when I feel the trade turning against me and (2) a max of 20 ticks emergency stop. My goal is to never have the emergency stop hit. This means that my entries need to be almost perfect each time, and I have to hit the "MAKE ME FLAT!" button (close) instantly, with no emotion, the moment the reason I got into the trade appears to have vanished.
But these are the Micros, and because of my scalping methods, the commissions will kill me with all the scratching and tight stops if I trade the same way I do on the regular E-Minis. So I need to go to a higher time frame (larger range) chart for the micros, and loosen up my stop parameters and go for bigger targets, as previously mentioned. Coming up . . .
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