If you want to trade a volatile instrument like CL live, you have to learn to trade with an edge, with strong risk management, and learn to let winners run so the chop days are meaningless in the larger scheme of things.
You can't trade based on what "seems" to be so. You need hard statistics so you can have enough confidence to trade comfortably in an environment of pure chaos and uncertainty, knowing you will come out net profitable if you follow the rules you know give you a statistical edge.
I do meticulous bar-by-bar post-market analysis of every valid setup I could've traded and enter the information into Excel manually. I use a 5-min chart for setups, a 5-min or 3-min chart for entries, and a 1-min chart to determine the inner details of price action such as whether a non-survivable stop survived, how much profit showed initially, how much heat taken on the trade, whether the market easily offered more than target on a trade, and ways I could manage my trade to take advantage of that.
I posted a sample on this thread a while back: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=3037344
Nothing I've ever done has been as valuable as this. This is how I learned to have confidence in my edge, what my max stop loss could be, how to target profits, when to stop-and-reverse, when to wait patiently for a confirmed setup, and so on.
This is how I learned to have an "edge" in trading and how I learned to trust it, because the hard right edge of the chart in real time appears a lot scarier than it does when you review a chart later on and can see what price actually did.
T, do you have an edge in your trading? If so, can you describe it clearly enough that a a 10-year-old with a set of rules could trade your edge effectively?
Do you have strict rules for when to enter, when it's OK to chase an entry late and when it's not, where to place stops, when to move stops in your favor (such as to b/e), how to set profit targets, when to stop and reverse?
This is what keeping good stats will help you do. If you haven't done this, you'll struggle whether trading live or sim.
The way I got ready for live trading was to call my trades on the CL Redux thread. This ensured that I didn't trade random setups just because I was in sim, and also ensured that I didn't cheat by averaging down or trading without a stop (which I'd done a lot of in sim as a counter-trend trader).
I recommend that you do that for a week or two before going live. After you determine your edge and your rules, of course.
) from the 20-bar EMA, take a confirmed counter-trend position off the first HL/LH with a target of 20 ticks or the 20-bar EMA, whichever is greater. Confirmation is determined by a pivot in the opposite direction of the move that breaks a previous bar's high or low. I take a long position @ 89.44, break of the 8:35am ET bar's high with a soft target of 20 ticks and a possible trip to or through the 20-EMA. Price breaks through my 20-tick soft target and through the 20 EMA with conviction, pauses and makes another go at that 89.75 high and the moment it breaks I move my stop to 89.74 to lock in 30 ticks profit because it's close to a "previous support becomes resistance zone". Stopped out for 30 ticks profit.
I should've only been in 3 trades during the pit hours...which would've equated to 1 win of about 40-45 ticks, 1 B/E, and 1 10 tick loss. Which makes sense since my set-ups dont usually form up during choppiness so the total number of trades should be on the light side.