Quote from jvbraun:
I thought these were actual trades that you had done
that you were posting?
It is difficult to post either graphs or charts that reflect the precision of actual trades. Several factors complicate this.
Market orders is the first.
Partial fills next
Space on graphs, additional columns on charts.
More accurate stuff is things like trading logs, reconciliations, and actual records.
All the APA stuff is done as best as possible. The entry of a trade that turns out to be a wash is easy and normal. You go market and see what the result is ASAP. The reversal half is done in a way that makes the best of things; usually it is not effective. It could for some people be tied to the former entry and you must move from the 5 min to the one min as soon as the flag goes up. Most APA's are not done in trends but are usually done at times when market direction is an issue. You are in the market and the direction is the issue that subsquently arises.
You have a choice of dealing with market condition; you do that promptly and find out what happened. In the mean time, you are proceding along and you are in the best position that is possible at the time.
Some people do the drawdown thing according to certain rules they think up. This is not that way. They watch the market and it goes closer and closer to an arbitrary planned limit. It either hits it or not. If things go well the market comes back to a more favorable place. They are willing at some point to exit at a designated preplanned place and the market continues onward in some manner. This stuff I posted is not like that.
The focus is making money and being on the right side of the market. You find out later what happened with all the trades you take. Instead of being in a drawdown, previously you have adjusted to go "with the market". As it draws down ,you make money. It can go as it chooses and you do have stops in to protect from spikes on unexpected news, etc. when the drawdown ends, you see this and you take an action to follow the market's new course. This locks in profits and you go along witth the market. The post you made focuses on the APA that is available as you continually follow the trend. Additional Protective Action (APA) is the last thing a person usually adds to trading once they are in the groove vis a vis continuous trading.
Without APA, there is a nagging (best term) condition where in lateral trends trading the opposite of being whipsawed comes up. APA is a partial solution and it is mechanical. The complete solution is, of course, judging whether or not a leteral trend can be played effectively. You use APA instead of figuring it out. this flips the nagging condition form a loss circumstance to a profit circumstance. As profits go down (instead of losses continuing at the bar height plus), you sideline until the market centers for bracketing in on a BO of volume, then price. The S17 to S18 period is one of those sidelines.
There are tons of ways to trade. People go through a lot of considerations to get where they want to be. The APA is a good way to "polish" almost any method. when you look at the list of trades you see all that "wasted" time with washes, 1 tick profits and tick losses. they coulf drag on forever. The chart is the worst I have seen and last Friday came close too.
What does all this count for, anyway? You see so many posts here on the fact that all this is bullshit. That is how people sort themselves out.
What all this counts for is one simpe thing. You get to take all the profitable trades the day offers all day long, every day. Simply stated you are in the market on the right side all the time and when each and every profit opportunity comes up you get to take the profits.
On the other side of the situation, where ET operates largely, that is, the world of constant "fear", APA keeps erasing periods of fear over and over. You can mark fear periods on the sheet too. They are the intervals between the larger profit rows.
By using APA on the worst of days, you get to have it both ways: you are there when he profits roll and you are eliminating fear at all other times.
81 bars to sit through. You watch for three feature films. Over 6 hours. 15 wash trades (or near wash). Only 8 trades that knock down a net of many points. And you have to wait to get the exact results after MOC and the delivery of the account stuff.
My posts fit in the category of "claims" and they are rated as "ridiculous". Luckily, now, I am begining a PnL and I narrate the trades in sound and they are archived and there is a written log too. I used to view some of the people here as actual people who say what they say about me based on some basis. When I looked closely at their complete records, I found the basis of the condition they are in. That made it possible for me to zero out any expectations on my part with regard to their stature.
I only respond to people here. That is to say, I do not initiate stuff here. When I do respond, I have an intention. It is singular. Those people are going to change for the better as time passes as a consequence of my input. If and when they do, that is the only test of my worth vis a vis ET.
Trading is not a macho "I'm the big hunter here" thing; It is a feminine thing as in gleaning food from plants as women did for their families. Arrows and spears miss and people go hungry. any geaner can beat a hunter macho type every day of the week. Meat and fur and artisan skills to get and use them are neat. Beginners bag trends. Experts glean continually and seamlessly.