Trades today - see chart attached
Needless to say, I wouldn't have taken any of these trades because the MACD and Momentum are drawn with no history when Globex was shut down.
I agree with MandelbrotSet - will step aside until opening gyrations are exhausted, then consider a long from a spike down
Good article on EXITS
Continued here:
http://www.breakoutfutures.com/Newsletters/Newsletter1207.htm
The Breakout Bulletin
The following article was originally published in the December 2007 issue of The Breakout Bulletin.
Exits for All Occasions
When most people think about trading systems, they probably think about how the system enters the market. In fact, trading systems are usually described in terms of their entry technique, such as breakout systems, moving average crossover systems, Fibonacci retracement systems, and myriad other methods for entering the market. Even the terms "counter-trend" and "trend-following" refer more to the entry than the exit.
Despite the common focus on entry techniques in trading, you may have come across the assertion that exits are more important than entries. In my experience, that's usually true. Why? One possible reason is that most market action is random. A good trading system finds at least some signal in all that noise. But with all the noise in the market, a substantial percentage of entry signals may be wrong.
A long-term trend following system, for example, may be right only 40% of the time. Despite the low percentage of winning trades, it can still be highly profitable if it keeps the losing trades smaller than the winners. The way it does that is by cutting the losses short and letting the winners run. In other words, it's profitable because of how it handles the exits.
Generally speaking, I think it's fair to say that exits are the principal method of controlling the intrinsic risk/reward characteristics of a trading system. Whether the system looks for a quick profit or holds the trade through the market's ups and downs depends on the exits. Likewise, whether a losing trade is cut off quickly or given more room to move is determined by the exits. Exits are truly the way to implement "cut your losses short and let the winners run."
Note that I use the word "intrinsic" when describing the risk/reward characteristics of a trading system to differentiate the rules and logic of a trading system from position sizing. Certainly, position sizing can be used to improve the overall risk/reward ratio of a trading system, but position sizing is an external factor, apart from the rules and logic of the system. The focus of this article is on the rules and logic of trading systems, rather than on position sizing.
Exit Types
The following list is not exhaustive but it includes some of the most common types of exits you may encounter or consider for your own trading systems:
Stop and Reverse. This is basically an "exit-less" exit. Stop and reverse systems reverse from long to short and back to long again. If you're long one contract, for example, you would sell two to close out the long trade and go short. You're never flat the market with this type of exit because each exit is also an entry in the opposite direction.
N Bars from Entry. Exit the trade at the market N bars from the bar of entry, where N can be any number greater than zero. For example, you might exit the trade 10 bars from the entry. The duration of the trade will depend on the bar size; e.g., 5 min bars or 60 min bars.
Time of Day. Rather than exiting relative to the entry, as with the previous method, you exit at a specific time of day, such as at 10:30 am. As a special case, this exit also includes exiting at the end of the trading session.
<img src=http://elitetrader.com/vb/attachment.php?s=&postid=2141782 width=800>