Strong Trend Days

Quote from GTG:

I find that as a "counter-trend" day-trader, the worse aspect of these big-trend days, is that I often actually trade worse than on normal days. Of course this especially sucks, because the big-trend days are when I most need to be at the top of my game, as they are so dangerous to my style.

I think I had an epiphany today though. Last night, I had a feeling that a big-trend day was coming on, and so I looked back through my trading journal and noticed that my worse days tend to be the days when I make the smalelst number of trades.

On a normal day, I'll make at least 40 round-trips or so with a good combination of both long and short positions. Then a big-trend day comes along, and I'll make less than a dozen trades...spending most of the day just watching my day-trading position trade against me in one direction.

I remembered what I had noticed last night this afternoon as I was sitting watching my screen, having averaged down into a large loss. I realized I was missing a lot of good scalps, and had hardly traded at all today, because I was waiting for the market to come back in favor of my much larger than normal position. So I started trading back and forth again, after freeing up some capital by closing most of my existing position at a loss, and was able to make back most of the loss by the end of the day...trading on overdrive (I made about as many trades as I do on a typical day, in just the last 2 hours or so.)

The funny thing is I used to be a good trend trader, made a killing but gave alot back in chop. Now I have been good in chop and killed on trends.

Need to learn to switch gears. And have 2 styles of trading for different conditions. The problem is trying to identify these conditions.
 
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