MightyMouse

Passion in trading is often times confused with obsession. I do sense that there are a lot of people who are obsessed with trading. Obsession will never make you a better trader and neither will a strong desire to succeed. Obsession in trading is trading for trading sake or trading when there is no money to take in the market or risking your capital trading when you can do a lot better elsewhere.

It is true that there are a lot of opportunities to enter the market, but it is completely untrue that missing a few will not kill you. If you miss the good trades, at best, you could end up the year as wounded shark bait.

Rande, You shouldn't be surprised to find participants on a free forum to expect information to be free. It makes more sense for forum members to be surprised when other forum members want to charge for information. MM

Why? I wish mine had none. She would have no bargaining power.

euro is towards the bottom of a large range.Hard to really say it is trending on the weekly. if anything a slight short bias with lower swing highs and lower swing lows usd cad is in a down trend. Audusd is in an uptrend nzdusd is in an up trend usd jpy is in a down trend gbpusd is ranging on the weekly. looks like it is coiling up for something. eurogbp looks like some sort of range too. usd chf is in a downtrend With all of them, look for HH HL on the swings for up trend continuation or LL LH for down trend continuation on the swings. A reversal, meaning a hh and hl in a downtrend on the swings might mean that it is entering into a range, so don't jump the gun and think it is in an uptrend. To take trades, take it off of the daily. On the daily look for breakouts in the direction of the weekly trend. To trade the ranging weeklies, enter using the daily and exit at the edge of the ranges. If you get stopped out, re-enter. When a market is trending on a weekly chart, you are foolish to assume that it is going to end the day you enter if it goes against you. Your timing might be off, but the trend didn't end. So, enter again and again until price moves away from your entry. Eventually it will as it always does. Most fools start to play it the other way. A market usually goes from uptrend to range to uptrend or down trend,. or downtrend to range to downtrend or uptrend, so you usually get a range in between moves. You won't know how far you are from that range until the range develops. It could very well develop around your entry which could suck, but you will never figure out if it will before hand. Its not rocket science. it is patience and confidence.

you have a few weeks of data. Take the MAs off, or whatever they are, change the timeframe to weekly, and post the same charts with a min of 150 data points, showing only the weekly bars. Then do the same with daily and show about a year of daily data of whatever fits on your chart so that they days are still distinguishable. If it is not clear at that point, then post the charts and I will help you.

Traders will make all sorts of excuses for their trading performance. HFT is a good excuse for poor performance. Anything is good as long as they don't blame themselves.

It wouldn't be for sale if it was worth the time to reverse engineer it.

I described what would occur if a sell order was entered as a limit order. The description I gave was very short. It would take pages to detail the mechanics of why such happens. When a sell order is entered at market, the next direction the market takes is generally up, so there is a difference. You may be thinking of this type of order. Again, it would take pages to detail why. At areas that appear to be support, I try to identify the quality of the the positions that are getting long. If they appear to me to be weak, then I will short into support if the direction has turned lower on a relatively small time scale. Weak longs will have stops very few ticks away and they will also begin to scale out right away with very little positive movement. There is no metric for this, it is a visually perceived by watching the DOM and T&S. Other sellers will see this as well and put pressure on buyers to cough up their positions at lower prices. If the quality of the buyers is not weak and there are weak sellers present and the direction is positive, I will enter long at an area that appears to be support. If you watch long enough, it starts to make sense. As far as trade facilitation etc, I believe the markets move in the path of least resistance. In the case of an up market, that could mean a lot of strong buyers and a lack of strong sellers. Or it could mean a lot of weak sellers and no weak buyers or weaker sellers than weak buyers, etc. I totally agree that lots of stops are at various chart milestones such highs and lows, etc. I frequently exit my positions just above or below those points if I have evidence that that is where the market was trying to go.

I did it in the past and it is very humbling and time consuming to remember to post and articulate your actions. Ultimately, you learn to just not care what others may think. However, I did add the caveat of STFU if you are going to make after the fact critical comments on the thread.

It is very humbling. Which is a derivative of one of the most important trading virtues; Humility.

Es is just brutal. good thing you took your 2 dollars

They work sometimes. I wish it was that easy.

When a large sell order is entered the first thing that happens is price retreats to try to see if the seller is weak enough to be willing to sell lower. Bids disappear. Price will not go higher when a large sell order enters. That really doesn't make sense in any auction. If you add your sell order, you are exacerbating the situation. Even if it is with only one contract. Likewise when a large buy order enters. The market wants to see if they can make the holder buy higher. Once the sell order is complete, then price will rise to see if they were weak shorts or not. When the sell order was that of a weak long exiting early, then there will be no further buying to push price higher from the sell order because the weak long exiting will not create stops the way a short order would. It is a huge misconception that your small size doesn't matter. It could be the case that your size gets run over by large orders. But keep in mind that when you are scaling out, others are doing exactly the same thing at exactly the same time, so your small order and their small orders add up to a lot of contracts. It is actually one of my favorite trades to trade into that type of activity, when some of them get stubborn. The only time your trade does not matter is if you are in simulation mode or when you are backtesting. You can't back test live trades, because you can't enter live in the past.

Great topic! I mainly day trade and I add to my position when the trade is showing a profit and I scale out of contracts when the trade moves against my entry. As I add, the average price of my entry rises ( of falls if short) which means that I am constantly moving my break even point closer to the current price. It also means that mental pressure begins to build since the vertical distance between a really nice profit and break even remains small. As an example, if I begin with 2 contracts in CL , say long at 100, by the time price reaches 101.01 I have added 5 contracts for a total of 7 and my BE is around 100.60 and the profit on the trade is about $2900. You need a to develop a lot of confidence in your ability to read the current market conditions. Many, many times I end up turning a decent winner into a breakeven trad, but there are enough times when I can turn a $200 risk into 3-4k or more of profit. Other trades I am all in or all out. I am negative on scaling out because when your trade does become profitable, you only have a small position on and when you get stopped out, your position is larger if you don't scale out of the loser. It goes completely against the grain of maximizing winners and minimizing losses. In addition, as price moves in your favor, your scale outs put pressure on your own position. So, if you are long, and you scale out, you are selling against your position. This doesn't make sense to me. If I am long, I want to protect my position from sellers and if it were possible, I would use a bat to keep sellers away, not join them in putting pressure on my position. If you think that your small scale out doesn't amount to selling pressure, you really need to reconsider how the market works. When you do scale and price continues higher ( in a long trade), then scaling out was exactly what you should not have done since the pressure you added to your position plus the pressure from the other sellers is not enough to stop price from going higher. In other words, sellers are losing and are now getting stopped out and you have a smaller position on because you scaled out. You should not pat yourself on the back for this. If you need to back test this for it to make sense to you, you are in the wrong business.

It really is going to depend on the type of trading you are going to do and the number of markets you are going to trade. If you're new, then you'll probably get away with your current laptop or desk top computer. Multiple screens and a lot of power aren't going to give you an edge starting out. For 2 bucks, get a can of compressed air and clean out your computer. It will run like a new one.

TN, Are you in the USA? We are easily past QE3. Not sure which QE we are on.. The fed is the largest creditor of the USA but we are not printing money. We are officially a Banana Republic country. Such is the case when debt : GDP > 1.

You are very lucky to have any money. So, there is luck and you have it. Not sure what odds book you play from, but with a rising market since Oct. I would say you have been playing against the odds and if you have survived, you are very lucky.

Well I wish you luck. If my assessment ends up being right. I assure you it is purely a guess.

You have been short since Oct and you have had only 2 losing days? Did I read this correctly? That is amazing. However, it seems like you are trading in the same direction as 95% of the traders. How have you managed to lose only 2 days? Is your "core" position underwater?

Jtrader500, Why are you salivating to get short above 1300? I am not trading ES and wouldn't trade it on the time-frames you look at. But, it is in a decent up-move and it looks like it wants to go higher and higher. It looks weak but it can go up on weak volume for a really long time. It seems like weak shorts keep entering trying to call a top and they get their asses handed to them at slightly higher prices. Weak buyers are not really entering which is what you need to have the market go down below 1300. Just my opinion BTW.

Institutions and HFT panic too.

Both are derivatives of the S&P 500 index which is an index of the 500 highest capitalized stocks. You can easily locate sources which will help you understand how stocks are added and taken away from the index. The price of the index moves when the underlying stocks are bought and sold. Sometimes the index leads the futures and sometimes the futures lead the index. Traders buy and sell the futures contracts anticipating moves in the S&P.

Anything that over time helps you minimize losses and helps you stay in winners is a good tool or method. I took the Dalton course webinars early on and was certain that he had no Idea of what he was talking about. I rationalized the price I paid as a donation to an old man. If anyone else listened to these webinars, they will recall him locating 1 tick gaps in the s&p and suggesting that traders would move the market 15 to 20 points because they hated to leave that gap unfilled. It was laughable. needless to say, I couldn't take a trade because there was an unfilled 1 tick gap. He wouldn't to a trade idea to consider before the following week, but was glad to share the incredible trade he took after the fact. He is like so many of the vendors we have come to know and love. Keep in mind that he wrote the book, MoM and he couldn't explain market action using MP that went beyond mysticism.. To use MP value as a provy for market value is to accept that when the majority believes that the market is worth more, then it is worth more. I have had a tough time accepting that and do not have the trust and confidence I need to have to fearlessly take a trade and use the concept of, say, rising MP value as a basis. Once again, I am stating why I could not use or trust MP, not why everyone should not trust it or use it. If it helps you make sense of the market then you are a great deal of the way there. I learned that nothing is going to tell me before the fact that I am right about a trade until I take the trade. I know I have the wind in my sails when I see enough green and I am likely making a mistake with direction or magnitude or both when I see red.

Shield yourself with tinfoil. They won't be able to read your mind. Sorry to the rest. Life sucks without a little fun here and there.