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wjrusnak
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Everything posted by wjrusnak
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I wanted to try to get two different time (or range) frames going here. Sometimes I miss a lot of activity because I'm way too zoomed out with these levels and not keeping in touch with the more "medium" time frame levels. Here we can see a little more reaction to certain price levels within the last few days: Bigger levels, like 1720 and 1730 for example, will be noticed on both charts. Those are the more popular levels, thus the ones a trader should consider. EDIT: I don't have it clearly marked anywhere, but don't forget 1713, considering its importance in the past and as today's high (as well as S on the morning of 10/28).
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Now I think we all know you still have some bitter feelings at Db for not posting his P&L, but I don't think it is necessary to start passive-aggressively making snout remarks Let's try to keep this productive. I know that both of you have invaluable advice for new traders, so be cool.
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Yes I see your point. My only breakout trade is one that breaks one of my levels then retracts to that level and rejects it from the other side. In this case it was a perfect entry when it rejected 1690 after breaking through it. I took the trade and got stopped out... I can live with that. This is where I completely agree, but I have not mastered this in real-time yet. Remember last week I had a long that could have been stopped and reversed into an even bigger short play had I been ready. It takes me some time to reorganize and I think that is my biggest weakness so far. My biggest fear with that is getting stopped quickly in the order direction. Nothing hurts worse than being wrong both ways in a matter of minutes!
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I saw this hinge differently in real-time. It actually broke before yours and tested the middle before taking off. It is another CWS .
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Didn't really see this until hindsight. This is the hinge I called in the chat. It was broken to the upside then came back for a perfect test. Even though its perfect in hindsight, the 1690 level threw me off completely, as I even tried a break of 1690 to the short side (at 9:47am) before this hinge. If you notice, price broke the hinge (upward) then successfully made lower highs until testing the middle of the hinge (which was 1690!). That would have been the entry had I not been . Too many signals to not take this trade... the beauty of real-time
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NQ ignored 1690 on the 3rd try and I anticipated a break down after that break... didn't realize 1687 would turn out to be to important. Now the long side won't give up. We are finding R at 1705 though. Feeling like I missed the important move now (long 1687). EDIT: 1705 did hold as R and now forces buyers to defend 1696.
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Ranges everywhere... 1690 looks like our closest R then as S we have 1677-1678 holding today and this evening. Below that I have 1666 as midpoint of a previous range, but beyond that, it was R and S about a month ago. Maybe buyers will finally decide to step in around there. If not they will have some pressure put on them if they let it get to 1650. After looking that chart over, I find it interesting that the levels ran in 10's 1740, 1730, 1720, 1710, 1700, 1690, 1680ish... apparently the market is liking the 10 factor.
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We never have the same levels, firewalker. Anyway I do have the 07-10. I made the mistake of not properly preparing for the lower levels yesterday, so today I'll do a little better job.
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Big early rally... Bigger afternoon plunge. The buyers didn't have enough to pull this one off. Let's see if they can defend Support again tomorrow. Still a bit messy in the middle, but that is expected as Db stated.
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The hat works. That was an ugly short at 75ish unfortunately. Got me out break-even. Even so, we seemed to have called those levels sufficiently and I took the trade.
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I can't see the picture you posted, DB. Is this a problem only with me or is someone else having the same issue? EDIT: lol... I see it now. It's a damn wizard hat! I think I've been granted secret powers.
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I took a slightly different approach at these congested levels. I have some of the levels marked off more flexibly as zones (i.e. 1774-1780). I realize that is a 6 point spread for one line labeled as Resistance, but thats the challenge of watching the price action at these levels (flexibility). Either way, it's fairly clear to see that we have a range of 1780 to around 1740 with a couple of significant levels in between.
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I'm a fellow young guy (23 is still young, right?) as well. I started with this site almost a year ago and I can tell you that it sent my trading from mystical to logical. Even if you don't trade exactly like the experienced traders on this site, you'll learn a ton from many of them. And believe me, I think it would be quite the coincidence that you would exchange a futures contract with the hands of anyone else on this site... there are millions of traders out there (referring to your competition statement). So far you've been given some good advice, book suggestions and thread links. Already you can see you'll be flooded with information. A common theme among every method, school of thought, style, etc. is that you need to put in the screen time. Maybe allocate some time in the evening or afternoon (or even the weekends when all is silent!) for learning, reading, and reviewing and then make yourself COMPLETELY available for your screen time. You could even do nothing for a month but watch a standard bar chart of the eMini S&P, Nasdaq, DOW, Oil, etc., be it a 1 minute, 100 tick, or 1 tick chart for two, three, five, or eight hours a day. After just simply watching like this, you'll be able to relate to the concepts portrayed in any strategy. That brings me to the idea of getting to know your charts in the first place! Learn the basics. Eventually, you'll want to lean toward a certain style and learn everything about it. Then test it! There are plenty of SIM trading platforms to test a strategy. AMPFutures, for one, offers a simulated trade account, NinjaTrader platform, and US Futures data for free. Some people frown upon simulation because losing money and losing play money are two different things, but it IS going to help you in the end. Maybe you'll need extra practice dealing with losses when you switch to real money, but simulating is going to help you get a grasp of the market. Point being, if you can't simulate your trading style and be profitable, you're not going to be able to make real money when you're "live". Last, you need to put in the time. Start now. I know personally that I put in about two hours of trading in the morning, sometimes an extra hour before the close, then at least an hour in the evening reviewing and planning for the next day. Not to mention, I may "stop by" to just watch the market during the boring hours around lunch time and here I am posting about trading on my Sunday evening. It becomes an obsession and it probably should in order for you to really get this stuff. Good luck to you in your learning process and remember not to get frustrated. It takes some of us years to survive this career and believe me, I'm not about to proclaim that my trading process was at all as smooth as what I'm suggesting you do. Many of us with good advice have traded very badly or irresponsibly at the start.
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I'm glad you covered this. I was pretty frustrated missing the only good short for the day and around 10:30am I started to review and figure out why I missed that. There was no TQ as you stated, so I felt okay. Then I looked harder and saw a few things that I wasn't catching in real-time. I posted this review in the Coulda...Woulda...Shoulda thread
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Today my levels turned out fairly accurate, but one must remember that finding levels is only half the battle. As DbPhoenix mentioned in the S&R thread, there was a nice short at 1774.50 around 10:00am. I missed it because there was no tick divergence (TD). Though, there were more obvious signals, other than a TD (or lack of one), directing one to enter this short. First, the obvious entry criteria (and usually the first signal for me) was the price action on a 1 tick chart. One can notice a double top. If one was aggressive, s/he could have entered at the break of 1773.25. Even if you didn't catch that entry, the market was friendly enough to provide a second chance. Notice that this second chance was a test back up to 1773.75 on lower volume. Entry for that could have been somewhere around 1773.00. Review for the entry: 1.) Double top on 1 tick; 2.) Test that didn't quite get as high as 2 minutes prior; 3.) The test was on lower volume. Now for the exit strategy (according to me). Logical stops behind swings are marked with blue dashes, which also correspond to time. As you can see, when we finally get a decent supply line, it is broken only a minute later. That would have been my exit (with 1 contract) and my first scaling point had I traded more contracts. Lesson: TICKQ is a great indication of the agreement between the futures price and the overall market, but one shouldn't deny so many other obvious signals when looking for entry criteria.
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Tomorrow we're basically looking at the same levels. 1760 merged with 1758 to form that zone of support, but this is right in the middle. Tomorrow one would look for shorts between 1772 and 1775, maybe even that fluke of a push to 1780 will hold. Long may be the right direction for tomorrow, but if we remain in this area, entry will be sloppy, thus I may be sitting on my hands. The point is: do the buyers have what it takes to break these new highs, or even to get to the new highs? PS. Didn't realize I used a 60m, but it's good to switch things up once in a while After all, levels are levels.
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I am not that quick yet. The move happened so fast that I was just worrying about moving my stop up to a reasonable location. I lost track of price and what the TickQ was doing. Had I taken that short... I would be a hero
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There was a TD for both entries. Yes, I used it.
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It can be noted that I did get that trade at open (LONG 45.50 exit 51.50) and also another at 42.50 that went break-even. Nothing better than a profitable morning
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Do we have ourselves a range?
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I have basically the same levels as Ziebarf, with exception of keeping 1753. It did seem to turn into a mid point though after the morning session. 1773 would be a level, but as of open, it proved to be just overbought territory as DB mentioned. 1760 then looks like better R with 1744 as S. Overall we still have that massive uptrend.
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Sir, you write long posts with many questions. I can't help you tackle this bar by bar insanity, since I'm horrible at it as well. My suggestion to you is to forget bar by bar, because I feel that you were on the right track by seeing price in waves. Another way to look at it is that inside that bar was a ton of other bars upon bars and bars... and then some bars if you want. Point being: bars encapsulate activity within a time frame and spit out HIGH LOW CLOSE. Not much different than watching the highlights of a sports event. In this case you lose the activity which occurred in waves to three or four variables (OHLC). You may have a lot of trouble trying to figure out the market by using a bar by bar approach, so I suggest you simplify. From what I gathered from your other post is that you know what S/R is and how to find it. As for incorporating volume into that, know that it is interest. When you asked "why is this buying? can't it be selling", I feel that you were correct. Can't buy without a seller and vice versa. What you want to look at is price during those times, which then brings you to looking at the bigger scheme (the wave behind it) or intraday activity (smaller bars). Where did this higher activity occur? What happened to price after/during the higher volume surge? Chances are... the activity occurred at S/R or at the top of a channel or at the break of a trend line. Price action... The bottom line is, you have to pay attention to price. Traders form channels, trends, and ranges, based upon an increasing or decreasing collaborative valuation of an underlying asset or commodity (maybe you can chart the price of women's fashions items like this as well?). You want to find those obvious patterns and you'll notice that others are seeing them as well, as evident by an increase in volume. Imagine how many people think.... "if this gets to R, I am going to put on a short". Volume will tell you how many people thought that same thing, as well as tell you how many people thought, "if this gets to R, I better buy for the break-out" (buyers and sellers). Anyway, I feel you may be complicating things for yourself and that is not a good road to travel. Simplify... and good luck. -- Bill
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Thank you for posting that long term outlook DBPhoenix. Anyway, Apple surprised the market and sent the NQ soaring after hours. This leaves us with uncertainty above, but we still have our S below. I plan to approach tomorrow with a real-time sense of S/R. This may be a day where shorting GLOBEX highs or buying GLOBEX lows may be the only option to catch a move. Of course in these cases, one has to pay extra attention to the price action. I was corrected about my up channel (thanks again DBPhoenix). Furthermore, it looks like it was broken again... but this time to the upside. PS. I was stopped out of a long (~32) around 31 today. Ouch.
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Steelers Messy game, but none the less... a win. Anyway, after a week off, it's time to get back to work. Tomorrow we have a mess of levels, but I want to keep to the more obvious ones (marked in bold). We still seem to have that 30ish-13ish range in tact on the lower end and 40 to 55ish on the upper end. 35 also made a light appearance. Overall a larger up channel was breached (noted in chart below). My guess is that we will have some difficulty traveling through the middle of this range (i.e. 25 & 20). That is, of course, if traders decide to move in that direction. The plan: Short R... Buy S.
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If you are trading ETFs on a swing basis, as it seems that you are doing, then you are not confined to one instrument. Furthermore, you seem to be looking for setups that are either not there or are not optimum. Why not browse some other ETFs and see if any have a better setup? Many of us stick to trading only the ES, NQ, ZN, ZB, YM, etc., but this is generally on a day trading basis. This means that we may have to wait only minutes, hours, or maybe a day for a better setup, while you could possibly wait months (or years!). My suggestion to solve your overvaluation of this stock is to move on. Find a stock that is about to setup for a reversal inside a range, or one that is trending and in a retracement, since these seem to be the setups that you're looking for. Anyway, good short, but maybe it would have been wise to take some off at S. You don't want to stray from your rule of selling R and buying S. Good trading.
