Price Action Swing Trading Futures on Sim Journal

[ironchef]

I only trade liquid FAANG tickers and index. Not an issue to trade cents off mid.

It is like picking my poisons.

Wide bid/ask for a reason: Few knows where things are going.

Bid/ask cents off mid for a reason: Crowded, populated by smart pros like you and I often ended up on the other side of your trade.

Either way I need to sharpen my edge to survive.

 

[ironchef]

got creamed in corn lol. This isn't the worst trade i've ever made, huge breakout to the upside, let it pull back some and entered long for continuation. Some mistakes: I held too long when it was red straight out of the gate and stayed that way almost the entire time. Poor patience for a proper setup. I also let it slide way too far against me.

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The oil trade prior was luke warm....terrible ETD. I am figuring out some nuances on TV sim account. Stop orders are funky...sometime they go through sometimes they don't. Sometimes you cancel them...and then they get filled later on after you have exited a trade (notice the +14 Long MCL trade up top...that was an early stop i placed on the short trade on the bottom of the screen).

Thank goodness it is sim.

 

[zghorner]

tracked performance metrics after 3 weeks of trading. Really rusty at first and still getting out of intraday mentality. Not terrible so far, +12% on the account with a 1.5 PF. I need to see improved results going forward, < mediocre at this point.

 

[schizo]

im short crude here.
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corn looks strong on the short term. but so damn ugly when you zoom out. I might take a long position tomorrow with a tight stop, we'll see.

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crude doing me good right off the bat. hate it when my positions get menaced as soon as i enter.

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Where are your stops and price targets? Why don't you treat it seriously even though it's only paper trading. Moreover, if you want input from others, it would be better to share the reason why you entered at that particular price. And I expect more concrete reason than just some banal crap like "uhm, well, let's see, maybe it looked good at the time, you know what I'm saying..." Anyway, just a thought.

 

[zghorner]

Where are your stops and price targets? Why don't you treat it seriously even though it's only paper trading. Moreover, if you want input from others, it would be better to share the reason why you entered at that particular price. And I expect more concrete reason than just some banal crap like "uhm, well, let's see, maybe it looked good at the time, you know what I'm saying..." Anyway, just a thought.

I agree with your criticism, this reply isn't a rebuttal. I just need a lot of work on everything.

Moving forward some Ideas I have:
- Profit targets need more data. backtesting will come in useful. I will look at setups and measure MFE to create a probability distribution. This also needs to be broken down further into a market-market basis. Pretty severe undertaking to do it right but i think it's worth it.
- Also I need to look more deeply into ETD and a possible trailing stop based off of a similar concept as above. maybe a simple % basis. idk
- stops in general need some love desperately and would benefit far more from live, forward testing. If MAE reaches X amount, the likelihood of it being a losing trade is X, for example. I for sure need to work on a time based stop as well is a similar concept to MAE.

 

[Overnight]

I'm only happy when it's raining money. You know what makes me even happier? Piles and piles of money. Ooodles and noodles of dough. Like a bank vault full of benjamins. Can you visualize it?

Yes sir.

 

[zghorner]

Poor week. was busy with other things and I didn't put the required time into it.

I gambled on the Corn trade plain and simple. Broke one of my most basic rules for this journal which is to only trade in the direction of the prevailing trend.

Going forward I will trade one very basic setup that has to meet all of the following criteria:
1) Direction of longer term prevailing trend only (multi month).

2) Has to follow a counter trend move.

3) Have to fade channel extreme to increase odds of early green position.

These are 3 foundational requirements that I must stick to. Nothing fancy, very basic stuff. Beyond #3 is where it gets fuzzy...using the picture as an example: should I require a BO to the upside to fade? Should I wait until price hits the previous resistance level of $71.92? I think #4 is where the magic happens. I have a few more foundational rules concerning exits I follow but i'll leave them out for now as i doubt anyone is interested.

I need to strictly focus on the swing I am looking to capture to reduce ETD. I hold thinking "big-medium picture" when my profit target should be set to "medium-small picture" and my paper profits get wiped. I exit to grab a point while i can, having already given up 2 points to ETD.

Going to start looking at average volume instead of just price alone this week to hone entries and exits. I've read some interesting stuff recently (basic concepts) about volume analysis that I want to play with.

- Removing Lumber from my list. Tick size is too large and I have to risk too much of the account value to trade it. Have previously removed mini VIX as I think that instrument alone is unique and would require a completely different approach.