Trading NQ via Price Action

[BonScott]

It wasn't a great day, because we revolved around those levels without going far.
However, we all need a stop loss for the trades. I set mine up automatically as the trade is entered. They only get moved inwards, never outwards. It doesn't mean that I win anything, just that I don't lose everything.
Let this day be the last ever that you hope for a trade to come back to you.
It killed me a few times last year, and I got sick of hoping for it to happen.

 

[fortydraws]

can you tell me what kind of chart that was that you used to illustrate the buying and selling at S/R?

As a number of others pointed out, it is a tick chart with a line on close. I've posted 150 tick charts here. I run the 150 next to the single tick chart. 150 is sort of "get ready, get set" and the single tick is "go." Here is the 150 tick that shows what I was seeing when I switched from short to long, posted in your journal here moments later in as close to real time as I could do. The short, imo, was the failure at 31.75-32, not the break of 4119. Again, this is all just my opinion.

 

[k p]

And here is the next one in my analysis series....

 

[k p]

Sorry man, not sure what to say that hasn't already been said multiple times so I will go with this:

if you *MUST* trade - and apparently you must - please do yourself a huge favor and do it only on sim until you get a) a well defined plan of action developed and b) prove to yourself that you can trade correctly for a week on sim because without those 2 things in place, more days like today are a 100% certainty.

I can't argue with any of this bh_prop... and I just keep thinking that we will hit some magic level, the trade will be so clear.... I will take it... it will go instantly into profit... I will add at the next RET... it will take off again... and within 20 minutes I will have $1000 back in my account. So that is my honest reason... the excuse I keep falling back onto... and further to this, I just didn't think that a day like this would be possible for me. I never imagined I would again hold a losing trade for a loss of 20 points.

 

[k p]

It wasn't a great day, because we revolved around those levels without going far.
However, we all need a stop loss for the trades. I set mine up automatically as the trade is entered. They only get moved inwards, never outwards. It doesn't mean that I win anything, just that I don't lose everything.
Let this day be the last ever that you hope for a trade to come back to you.
It killed me a few times last year, and I got sick of hoping for it to happen.

Thanks Bon. What I find incredible is the lengths I went to to hold that short, even while seeing the long set up, even as we are clearing all the levels/ranges that I thought would stop the rise. I will look into if I can attach a stop loss onto the market order buy/sell button. But in the back of my head is still that feeling of the couple of times when I was taken out of a trade at 5 points just before it went positive again. I do know that out of 10 times though, the losses from not being taken out will more than outweigh the losses from an unfortunate early exit, so it is mandatory.

 

[eminiman414]

I will spend the rest of the evening going over what could have happened if I didn't focus so much on the flow/behavior but just used the 1 minute bars and rejections/penetrations at the important levels.

Hey man....I'm no expert but This I think is your biggest mistake. Forget the money, the entries, the exits etc. if you're not focusing on the flow/behavior what is it you're focusing on? Bars? Also stop the cws on static charts. If you want to use a faster interval and read behavior/flow you gotta do your replay a static chart has no flow. It's awesome bc you can stop,pause, make notes etc. Also can you really expect to open up your charts for the day and use a faster interval without going through a period of observation? It's been said a million times. How can you expect to notice anything/ get accustomed to the ebb and flow of price if you are constantly thinking about entries and exits and so on.

Again I am no expert and yes I am not yet live but there is a reason for that. I have learned so much just by taking a step back/re reading certain material and observing what's been said in the material that I have re read and still continue to read. Honestly I was in a way in your shoes however I wasn't losing money bc it wasn't real however I was getting my ass handed to me in sim so even then I had to be brutally honest w myself and say although I think I know wtf I'm looking at/what I'm doing I have no clue lol. So back to the drawing board I went....more than once. All the way back to the observation phase.

Since then my one objective has been met in terms of entry criteria that allows for a "good" price with less risk all of which would have never happened had I been trying to trade while trying to figure out how I want to trade. Next step for me is management. Followed by more replay/result collection. From there if that meets my needs/goals/personality in sim then I'll roll with it. If not then continue the process until it works for me.

I know you love the teachings of DB and 40d etc so why not follow what they are telling you?

A question I have for you is this. As much as you think trading live is beneficial to your process if you continue to get similar live results if not worse what is it really doing for you aside from losing you money and prolonging the process of understanding the flow of price movement?

You obviously aren't afraid to put money on the line/enter trades and lose, that's clear. So why not take a step back put that in your pocket as a positive and have a strategy where at the end of most days your transactions end up on the positive side.

Again I'm not expert but if I lost a grand in a day trading one contract id probably jump off a bridge lolol jk.

 

[k p]

As a number of others pointed out, it is a tick chart with a line on close. I've posted 150 tick charts here. I run the 150 next to the single tick chart. 150 is sort of "get ready, get set" and the single tick is "go." Here is the 150 tick that shows what I was seeing when I switched from short to long, posted in your journal here moments later in as close to real time as I could do. The short, imo, was the failure at 31.75-32, not the break of 4119. Again, this is all just my opinion.

Bless your heart for reading through all this stuff in my journal to answer my question!

As I'm doing my analysis now, I'm seeing the exact same thing as you... so I do think there is hope for me. I can't quite run the same chart with the line on close as you, but I think my 5 sec charts seem to be a good enough substitute.

I haven't gotten to the part where we broke above 45 so I'm not sure yet if its clear or not, but I am curious what you did the rest of the day if you don't mind sharing and have time (since today wasn't all that nice and tidy I would say and hence why I ask for just one more chart! ).

 

[k p]

A question I have for you is this. As much as you think trading live is beneficial to your process if you continue to get similar live results if not worse what is it really doing for you aside from losing you money and prolonging the process of understanding the flow of price movement?

You obviously aren't afraid to put money on the line/enter trades and lose, that's clear. So why not take a step back put that in your pocket as a positive and have a strategy where at the end of most days your transactions end up on the positive side.

Again I'm not expert but if I lost a grand in a day trading one contract if probably jump off a bridge lolol jk.

I think the answer is what I said to bh_prop up above. These past few days there was a killer trade each day that set up an amazing move and it bounced precisely from an important level. So I'm hoping to get lucky, and I would hate to miss out on it. Its a shitty reason, but its about as honest of an answer as I can give.

To be honest as well, I think that if I did this in SIM, and did as shitty... I'd have no reason to post. And if I didn't post, I might not have had all these things pointed out to me in the past few weeks. I do think that Db and 40D and yourself have taken just a bit of extra time to share with me those things that have opened my eyes. Its an expensive lesson.. that is no doubt... but university was expensive too and that was an even bigger drain on resources. In the past year, I have essentially spent the same amount of money as I would have on tuition and books.

Now don't get me wrong, there were better ways to do this, and I cannot continue like this as my account won't last, but in the past few weeks/months, I have had the best of the best helping me, I haven't jumped off a bridge yet, and I'm maybe even more optimistic today, right now, in this very moment than I have ever been because I am failing spectacularly and yet I'm still in the running. People have bitched in my journal, people have e-mailed me privately, 40D has appeared to share current stuff, and at times it was only my journal that has been kept going.... and I know lots of people read (ok... they look at 40D's charts way more than mine... but I can set the ego aside... LOL)

I guess what I'm saying is that its all been necessary to get to where I am. I certainly am at a critical point now... but I think more good has come out of this right now than bad.

 

[eminiman414]

It wasn't a great day.

To each their own I suppose. I actually found today rather interesting. If you go long off of 19 that uptrend takes you to 51.50 where you get some sideways action followed by TDTDB to 52.50 w TICKQ divergence (action I look for). That takes you down some points then a lower high at 45 a previous level. Another great one was we traded a little below 50% btw 4097 and 4152.50 which puts you at 4124.75 from there we go a few points lower to 21 which was another dog after a bit of climatic action before hand which got as low as 22.75. Again a dog w TICKQ divergence which runs all the way up into the 4160s

 

[eminiman414]

The problem w 52 tho is it wasn't a predetermined level but the behavior was there.