Spydertrader's Jack Hershey Futures Trading Journal
- Thread starter Spydertrader
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Hey Ivo,
I created this goal for myself to really access if I can can apply everything we have studied through the past year. This way I review my actions at the end of the day and see where I went wrong and what needs to be improved. I am using a SIM account to do this.
When I use real money I might pick and choose my entries, all depends on how my experiment of trying to stay in the market goes for the rest of this month.
As for being consistently profitable, I would share the following thoughts: patience and cut down on banking the small losses.
Patience
One thing my trades from yesterday showed is that I am become very patient with my holds. I am no where skilled enough at being able to nail the turns at the exact tick so my reverses are a bit late. However, I do what my channels tell me so yesterday there were moments price had gone against me by 1 to 1.25 points but I ended up ahead on most of those trades. If I miss a reverse, I step back to the higher fractal channel and wait for an action point rather than try to make up for the missed trade.
Banking small losses
In my opinion this is a big factor in preventing one from being consistently profitable. All the small losses keep adding up, imagine the opposite what happens if a person banks every .5 pt gain. Anyone is welcome to add suggestions on how to prevent this, here are my suggestions to get started
1) Don't go reverse hyper, I used to do this - reverse 2-3 times in a bar and was already down before I had a chance
2) Trade what you draw and stick to it
3) Don't take action just based on price, remember 'multiple datasets'. If you happen use only a single data set then it should be volume and not price.
EDIT. Don't take this to mean one should never take a loss. If we are on the wrong side of the market then obviously one has to exit. The essence of the message is to 'Reduce' the number of losses one takes.
I attached a picture of a series of volume bars. I had difficulty determining if the related price was bullish or bearish. Can anyone pick this out from looking just at the volume?
What was your thought process through this trade? Did you take the reversal too?
For me this information is not enough to draw gaussians correctly, I need to see the price action too. Volume bars are colored either based on open-close, or previous-close-current-close. For me the price bar is more important than its open and close. All these said, it is probably a larger fractal down trend because the red bars tend to be larger than the black ones.
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