Quote from txuk:
Finsihed in the positive but overall it was a disappointing day considering how much was on the table. My first trade was a big step forward for me -- I shorted bar 4 and held until bar 8 for +2.5. In the PM I was up +4 but gave up 2.25 on my last two trades which were rockets that came back against me. I should have sidelined after the big drop... it took me a while to realize we were centering.
+1.75
The best part of the 4 bar hold is doing the repeated decision to hold.
I'm sure for several of those decisions, one after another you got to having a good continuing emotional feeling.
The emotions derive from the monitoring sensory stuff but there is a confirmation of the emotions in the deciding affort, especially if you are logging the reason for the hold decision from time to time.
I go through pages of of dily logs. Often, as a trade continues it is a case of going down the column for remarks with similar statements. repeating them is easy and then when you debrief you see the day in a more proportional (representative ) light.
When you have been abole to see 10 or more ticks accumulating under a given market operating point (meaning condition that sustains itself), you are getting the sense of the meaning of "continuation".
At any particular time or the run of any specific bars, there are several ticks involved. Later some of them are not longer involved and other tick values come into play.
The am worked for you with these tick ranges on particular bars. Think while you debrief what was it that correlated with that successful movement. Being as you were short, you may feel more aspects of newness. In the pm try to drebrief and see what was not correlating that was there in the am. What you are finding out is where a change in monitoring occurred durin the three "hold" periods. What you become aware of is the place where learning is now continuing for you. Here is the picture: this am the sufficiency of conditions was less complex and you handled this well. In the pm, additional facets were at play that required synthesizing into the picture. One or more of these facets became the dominating feature of why making money eluded you. Look around especially as bars reach limits of their size (and which end) and when in the time of the bar formation this occurs. You will see, concurrently, other parts of your sweeps telling you when change is coming up.
Having gone along seeing four bars do relatively the same thing and then perceiving a difference that takes you out or into a reversal, you get to experience Holding with reasons, primarily and then acting briefly in the moment of changing circumstances.
Once you are able to hold through intraday trends, you build up a huge deja vu memory file of making money. This takes you very far way from giving it back. There is one more aspect of learning here, as well. It is the matter of recognizing that when you decide to take profits at the end of something, simultaneously you are sitting, at that time, at the beginning of what is next. It is simply the opportunity to resume the former feelings and observations of making more money just after making money. the sets of feelings for making more money are roughly identical to the sets of feelings of making more money. If these feelings occupy more and more of your time through the day, you will find that you spend less of your time having "sideline" feelings.
"sideline" feelings are those that most people have most of the time. They can utterly defeat the learning process as they become more and more deply embedded.
If you take profits by exiting using a reversal everytime, you get to put yourself in a position to deal with just washing if you need to.
Establishing an entry and exit style of trading leads to a condition of being sidelined and observing the market continue without you. You may get to a place where you feel relieved to exit and it is a time for serving your personal needs instead of using the day to make money. Like football players who only play one half of a game or the other. They sit on benches as the game is played. Basket ball is different players remain standing after collecting points and they deal with getting the ball back as a specific effort. They make continuous efforts to participate.
In trading there is a continuous effort not as complex as basketball. In trading you always have the ball, why sit on the bench with the ball at any time?
When you monitor the market, strive to be in the market when you are monitoring price changing. Our objective is to be holding except for 20 to 40 moments perday when we are going through the process of tacking from one mode of making money to the next mode of making money.
Seeing the chunks of 2.2 and 4.0 and 1.3 is how it goes during the day. Collect 20 chuncks a day composed of 4 or so bars each. Its nice to have 81 bars a day....do the chunking.