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DbPhoenix
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Everything posted by DbPhoenix
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One short, one scratch for 5.25pts by noon.
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It's the protocol. ..
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We are at an extreme in a range between 3795 and 3803. Therefore, short the first retracement after a break below 3795 or buy the first retracement after a break above 3803.
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from the slaamtzen thread: Your experience is typical except that you came out the other side. Most don't. They find no excitement in putting together a trading plan, no glamour, no opportunities for heroics. They consider observation, hypothesizing, backtesting, forwardtesting, and even simtrading to be drudgery. Real-time trading with real money is where the action is, so they'll spend twenty years or more trying to achieve without a trading plan what they could achieve in months if only they'd learn to crawl before spending hundreds of dollars on running shoes and trying to compete with professionals. It's a mystery. No one believes that he can play championship tennis or golf without ever taking a lesson, that he can become a concert pianist without ever doing scales, that he can become a professional chef without knowing the first thing about food chemistry. But one can become a professional trader simply by buying or shorting what seems like a good idea and hoping for the best. It should come as no surprise that so few are able to make a go of this.
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That is correct. The SLA does not prescribe a particular bar interval. Price is continuous, and waiting for a bar to "close" is a choice. If one is watching price move, he can trade retracements without any regard to bars whatsoever. You're miring yourself in minutiae. Having rules that you can't or don't follow is no different than having no rules at all, such as your 2pt stop. And if you've "been planning for a while now to do an analysis", why continue trading until you've done it? This is no different that Niko's "skipping" the one-year backtest. What happens after an entry or exit is irrelevant to whatever rule one has developed for the entry or exit. It is more important to prepare for any outcome than to change the rule after every time it's been applied. Changing rules again and again on the basis of an emotional response is self-indulgent. Like nearly everyone else who plays with this, you're twisting yourself into knots because you have no trading plan. The SLA provides the bones of a plan, but you still have to decide what, for example, constitutes a "break". You haven't done that, so what do you expect? Trading success doesn't just "come" simply because one keeps doing it over and over again. If every trading session is an emotional rollercoaster, the pursuit will eventually be abandoned. For the most part, you're just as eager to cut corners and rush ahead as you've always been, so you're not getting anywhere. But this is true of nearly everyone. By taking what they view as every available short-cut, they take far longer than they would have if they had done the work to begin with. The focus is on finding the trade and taking the trade and fretting over the trade and where and how to exit and how to rack up points rather than understanding what's going on. Me me me I I I. The market has zero interest in one's trade, and if one is focused entirely on the state of his trade rather than on what traders are doing, he will find that this approach has been a complete waste of time.
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Nuances come later, after one has achieved competence. You say that your lines are "a terrible example of implementing SLA". Why? You speak of being "worn down" and "not trusting any move". Why? And of being "fearful". Of what? You say you are "hunting down ways to enter trades even sooner than SLA would allow". Why? A large part of the answer to your problems is in your own questions. Either you're willing to trade by the rules or you aren't. If you aren't, then one more chart in addition to the hundreds I've posted isn't going to make the least difference.
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Not again, no. Sorry. No purpose would be served by my providing yet another chart. Those of you who are interested in learning this are going to have to go over your trades for the day and determine how each of those trades illustrate the rules. If the trades do not illustrate the rules, you're going to have to figure out why you took the trade. If the rules called for you to take a trade and you didn't, you're going to have to figure out why you didn't take it (that most of you introduce so much that has nothing to do with the rules may have something to do with it). If the rules can't be followed, it should be remembered that the SLA is not the only trading method there is. Perhaps something mechanical or even automated might provide a better fit.
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Doing just fine, but I have to disagree with your disagreement. When fear is paramount, trading multiple contracts just isn't appropriate, much less scaling in or out. Until one can follow the rules, adding another layer of complexity serves only to perpetuate and even increase anxiety. If one can get to the point where trading by the rules becomes automatic, he need no longer think much if at all about what to do. This creates about as relaxed a trading environment as possible. Today, for example, there were at least 27pts to be had with only one contract (by 1300), and all one had to do was follow the rules. Wanting more, and adding contracts in order to get more, would result only in winding up with less, probably much less, if one were able to pull the trigger at all. If one is focused on what to do about price action rather than on price action itself, he is far more likely to do the wrong thing -- such as repeatedly going short in an uptrend -- or nothing at all. But if following the rules is automatic, he need not think about what to do at all and can instead focus on price action, which is, after all, the objective.
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I disagree with most of what game said. The SLA is a simple, straightforward, highly risk-averse, self-correcting approach. Those who can't make it work don't or won't or can't follow the rules. This is not the fault of the approach. If one can't succeed with something this simple, adding more tactics and setups and fiddling with trading size and scaling in and out will likely only make things worse. If one is to succeed at trading, whether by this approach or any other, he must "know the game" perfectly and be competent at playing it. If one is more concerned about making money than he is about trading well, he will neither trade well nor make money. Based on the journals I've read here and at ET, I can't point out anyone who is interested in trading well. Hi, Seeker, how's it going?
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See added notes, above.
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This is not likely to work this time of year. First, as soon as a range presents itself, you can't expect to be able to employ the usual ret strategy since it won't work well if at all in a range. If you're going to trade the range, you have to be prepared to take the revs. If you don't want to do that, and there's no reason why you should feel you have to, then just blow off the day and try again the next day. Second, while it's possible that a good entry might nonetheless be followed by a recoil that comes all the way back to your entry point, the best entries of course generally do not. If they do repeatedly, then you are likely in the kind of environment such as this one, and "hanging on" is not wise, particularly if you're not trading the extremes. Third, the market doesn't care where you enter. Whatever choices you make regarding risk management are independent of what the market does. If you want to hang on for -1 or -2 or bail at BE is a choice you make that has nothing to do with what the market is doing. So pay attention to the market, not to your trade. If price comes all the way back to your entry point, think about what this is saying about buyers and sellers, not about the implications for your trade. If the trade is a good one, none of these concerns are likely to be relevant since price won't come anywhere near your entry level, assuming that it was correct. Given that we remain in this OH/OL/rest of the morning at the mean situation, you may want to look for a pattern of how many days we repeat this pattern before finally moving to one side or the other, as we did last week. Or you can investigate other instruments. But given the pattern of these ranges, it's foolish to keep hammering away in hopes that it isn't a range after all. Or trade the revs in the range just for the hell of it without investing anything of yourself in it (you will likely find that you'd have been better off cleaning out the garage). The SLA points out early on that it is not particularly good with ranges. What it does do is throw you out of them quickly so that you don't keep making bad trades one after the other. You should know within the first ten or fifteen minutes what sort of day you're going to have. If it isn't shaping up to be a trend day, just walk away if you think you can't prevent yourself from trading.
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One of the best rules anybody can learn about investing is to do nothing, absolutely nothing, unless there is something to do. Most people always have to be playing; they always have to be doing something. They can't just sit there and wait for something new to develop. I wait until there is money lying in the corner, and all I have to do is go over there and pick it up. I do nothing in the meantime. Even people who lose money in the market say, 'I just lost my money, now I have to do something to make it back.' No, you don't. You should sit there until you find something. -- Jim Rogers
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You need to revisit the basics. After the rejection of 91 at the open and the subsequent rejections of 84 and 91 again, there are no more trades unless you have decided to trade ranges. If you have, then you have to determine (a) how wide the ranges must be and (b) how clear the limits must be, keeping in mind that © trading ranges means trading reversals. If none of these elements are in place, then you have nothing to do but watch. Getting sucked into minutiae serves only to pull you further and further into the weeds. Reread the rules as stated in the pdf, then reassess what you're doing.
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Then avoid the overcomplication and master the basics. No. It's not something I'm interested in.
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This may be important today:
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None of this, however, appears to be resulting in improved performance. This isn't a class, and no one is being graded. If the prep and the review and the analysis and the "how to improve" are all seen as chores, then there's no point in doing them. If there is to be no discussion, then a public forum serves no purpose. If the session itself is so boring that one must resort to chat in order to fill the time, thereby distracting himself from the trades he ought to be taking, then the trader should reconsider his goals and objectives and either stop daytrading entirely or resort to scalping.
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Are the two of you having some sort of private discussion?
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What exactly does this mean?
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If there is to be any discussion of the landscape, it should be done before the open. I've suggested that all of this be posted no later than 0900 so that it can be discussed, but no one does this on a regular basis, so no discussion. At the open of one's session, however, it's time to make the call, and that has to be made by the individual, without distraction, without multiple inputs, without chat. Those who can't do so merely perpetuate an endless phase of simtrading and are never able to move on.
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If you're trading in chat, don't.
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These are only rationalizations for not taking the trades. You are the only one who noted the potential importance of 35, and yet after price bounced off it, and broke the SL, and made a retracement, you still didn't take the trade ( the "Dog" is just a simple retracement). Means and TCs are irrelevant to the trade. And by not taking it, you missed out on a 30pt do-nothing trade. There are all sorts of reasons for not taking a trade, but unless you address whatever it is you're feeling when the ops present themselves, you will not likely ever get past the point of finding reasons to do nothing. Edit: I strongly urge you to vocalize what you're thinking and feeling during the trading session into some sort of voice recorder, perhaps a DVR. Perhaps this will enable you to shed some light on whatever it is that's preventing you from taking the correct actions at the correct time.
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I suggest that those who are still dealing with fear, which is nearly everybody, focus on recording their thoughts and feelings when they are faced with what they perceive to be a entry or exit signal rather than lines and pokes and LSLs and boxes and any other graphic. As I've said more than once, the SLA is not therapy. It can keep you from absorbing losses, but it can't put you in the profit column unless you just happen upon a trend day, and even then, if you focus on lines rather than the demand/supply balance, the latter of which is after all the whole point of the SLA, you will most likely be tossed out before the trend ever really gets started. You guys have to take these fears seriously and deal with them in a serious manner. If you don't, whatever approach you take, even if purely mechanical, won't matter.
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One can accept intellectually that he should trade the extremes, but this does no good unless he actually does it. Price must fall in order to reach a lower limit. This action can prompt a short bias. But even if one is trading the short side via the SLA, at some point the SL must be broken, as it was this morning. The difference is that the trader who ignores the extremes will keep hammering away at the short side due to the bias he's adopted instead of recognizing that he ought to be focused on the opposite side. In this case, the trader should have gone long when and where you did. But there was no reason to exit thereafter. Price didn't even drop more than two points below the last swing low until 1420. Instead of focusing on lines, I suggest you focus on what you're thinking and feeling at the time these trading ops present themselves. Whether or not price breaks a line is not nearly so important as how that break makes you feel. If one wants to further characterize a particular market, this is one avenue of exploration that might lead to clarity, e.g., how exactly does price behave when it reaches what has been thought an extreme.
