jonbig04

When I switched from ninja sim to ninja live there was no discernible difference on NQ and ES.

With the exception of breakout trades, in my experience price usually just doesn't take of without you. With breakouts I enter at market.

Here's to a good trading week for all! Well..except for the guys on the otherside of my trades

I use ninja via parallels on my mac. It works for me, but I have to deal with windows and all its BS.

To me, chasing implies a deviation from a plan and therefor a lack of disicipline. Chasing happens when you enter because you are afraid you've missed something. If this is the case, and you enter, you've lost no matter what the outcome of the trade. Disicpline is far more important than any one trade and the developing of that kind of behavior will cost you far more in the long run than any trade you may "miss". If its a part of your plan, then its not a chase IMO. So "chasing" can only be defined on a case by base basis.

Agreed, hiring a mentor makes no sense. The only thing you can hope for is that someone will help you simpe out of the kindess of their heart. In my experience there are more people around that are willing to help than you would think. Then of course its your job to sift through any advice you get and try to determine what is good advice and what won't work for you.

"Trading in the Zone" or if you don't mind a little dryness, "the disciplined trader" both by Mark Douglas. These books highlight the mental aspect of trading which IMHO is the most important and potentially the most difficult.

Thanks daedalus, indicators were never for me. Though I did look at the ADX for about 2 hours one day when I first started, but thats about it. I can't say that X or Y doesn't work, but what I can say is you don't NEED them, so why complicate things? I really do try to keep it simple. One day I spent an hour writing on and annotating a chart of that day's price action. I was very proud when I was done and sent it to a trader I looked up to. He didn't say my analysis was wrong, he just asked me "how can this help me make money?". Now I always ask myself that question before I write like 9 pages of analysis...of course sometimes I still do haha. thanks for the kind words.

monthly summary Monthly net on all trades= +23.5ES Accuracy (excludes BEs) 33% I had to erase my database so I couldn't use ninja to find the net, rather I scrolled back from the first of the month and just wrote them down. I'm pretty sure its right, but don't shoot me if I missed one stop or something. It's really not that important. I learned a lot this month. I beat my goal, which is good, and that was without taking any test 1 trades during the first week. The test one trades really are where its at. Although not as accurate as the BO trades, they are more profitable. If I had taken first test trades during the first week, well the result would be even better. A lot better. But there is no point in speculating. I have all next month to take them. I also learned this month just how different the BO trades are from the first test trades. The BO trades are simply WAY more accurate. I need to be more aggressive in taking them ( I missed 2 or 3 this month). Thats the contrast between these 2 setups. I need to be cautious with the first tests and wait for good fill. With the BO trades the higher accuracy merits a more aggressive entry (less confirmation). The BO trades simply don't happen very often and take days or even weeks to setup. They also happen usually during major news (which I am now keeping track of and monitoring). I feel my trading is really improving, and not only because my net is, but I can just tell. I can't really describe it. I was pouring over charts in late June (as I always do) and something just clicked in me. I think it has something to do with what atto said to me. He said "ask yourself 'who cares' when you see something on a chart". Something about the statement really made me focus not on the arbitrary nature of a setup, but WHY its a setup and WHY it works. Don't get me wrong, I'm still a noob who can and will stink it up (eg today and yesterday), but somehow I feel more confident in my trading because I understand why I am doing what I'm doing. Size increases are on the way, but thats not something I am going to put in the journal. Anyways the point of all this is just that after a year of working my ass off its nice to see a damn light at the end of the tunnel, ya know?

So yesterday my long was stopped a tick above the LOD. Today, guess what: my short was stopped a tick below the HOD lol It sucks, especially when you stay up all night because price was so close to R. Unlike yesterdays stop I'm actually proud of this entry. I was patient for hours waiting for some climactic volume as I knew there was a possibility that R was higher up (even thought I didn't think it was). I figured it price bent my level it wouldn't be by more than the previous bend. So I was able to get pretty close on the short, but missed it in the end. No big deal though. I'll be moving R for monday morning. The navy blue lines in all my charts are just alerts, nothing more.

Great work! New design is awesome.

Since it seems picking S/R is as much the key to trading as anything else, I figured I would share my thought process behind it in foresight. For right or wrong, its just what I do. Plus it helps me to write down all the basic stuff so I don't get too complicated and stay grounded in what I'm doing. I mentioned I didn't have any levels up here, well I'm about to and here's why: The first thing I do is start big. The big chart is a 30KCVB chart. Then just pick the obvious stuff. What's that? Well for 2 days price hasn't been able to break the area from 35-38ish. This area has caused some major retracements in the overall all uptrend of the past few weeks. Price touched A, the dropped 15 points. Touched B, dropped 13 points, touched C and so far has dropped 10 points. Thats what I mean about the obvious stuff. Now we can safely say that this 3 point area is major R. Duh, right? But for all the complicated stuff I see about trading it seems like people overlook this simple process. Or they write 90 pages about it so it becomes no longer simple. Anyways for me 3 points is too big of an area. I need it to be more specific. So for that I zoom in on each test respectively using a 5 sec chart w/volume. The first test (A) we see R is at 1035 pretty much exactly. The next test though is more tricky. Price makes it all the way to 1038. But looking at this test and the volume we can see that this was likley just a volatility spike. 20,000 contracts in 10 seconds is a lot, even for ES. There was no real interest at 38 and likely no real value built between 35 and 38 at all. But price DID manage to get back up to 37, if only for a minute. To me this isn't enough time to build any real value above 35, but we really don't have to speculate because we have another test to look at in test C. In this test we can see that selling pressure kicked in right around 35, like the first test. Price managed to push up to 35.75 on the high vol bar.This reaffirms what we thought originally, that the B test up to 38 didn't manage to build any acceptance past 35.75 even though price made it to 38. So for me, I would put my R line at 35.50, but we aren't done yet. When price makes it back up here we don't have to short blindly, we can wait for the vol to kick in again and confirm for us where R is (which will likely happen right where we expect it to, but its just more confluence), but hey if it doesn't happen until 37, thats ok too. If we can get a short in there then we have just shorted R. It's worth noting that none of this has any bearing on whether the R will hold or not, but who cares? If it does hold we see the kind of move it can give us and since we hopefully have R pegged we don't need that big of a stop. All we have to do is hold our winners. If price does blow through the R, we still have the flip to play NO we could have started to play this R level after the first test, or we could have after the second. Or we could wait for more tests. Really thats up to you, I chose to wait it out, but thats just me and what I did this time.

Of course I don't have any levels up here, so I'll have to wait it out. It may be a while before I get to place any trades. Only possibility is a long near 15.75 and that seems increasingly unlikely.

My last post was on the large double (or triple) top that occurred at 1015.75 ES. We saw how price continued to break down hard after this patten confirmed (price broke the midpoint at 990). What happened next was equally interesting. Price broke all the way down to the 977 area where it gathered itself and actually formed a nice double bottom, but I won't get into that here. I mentioned in the beginning of this thread that the failure of major patterns was just as significant and playable as their confirmation. We know that in order for this large double top to fail, price would have to break through 1015.75. We know that such a failure could foretell and explosive move up, just as the confirmation foretold an explosive move down. Well it turns out price DID break through 1015.75. Here's a zoomed in view of what it looked like when it happened. If thats not an explosive up move, I don't know what is. the 10:01 bar is the bar that took 1015.75, as you can see it showed some massive activity there. Just another way to use a pattern to make your trading decisions.

No trades today. Looks like the BO from yesterday is legit! Quick note, for the past 2 weeks I have been sim'ing my first test strat, while taking the rest of the trades live. Even though I've only been doing it for 2 weeks, the strat has already proven itself. I knew it would, my S/R picking just had to get a little bit better. With these trades factored in I have surpassed my monthly goal. Anyways from here on out ALL trades will be live. Hopefully I can smash my goal even further within the next week. I'll be looking for a short around 1015.75 again, or a DT around there.

Thanks JBW. Missed the BO long today though. Bah!

Could we define "profitable trader"? I keep reading about this and really don't know exactly what it means.

I hope some of you benefitted from this!

Got the BO I wanted to for +10ES, and took a stop sim