Dinerotrader

SIM +$450 Positive ending but should have been a $2,000 day. I am pretty sure I am no longer going to trade Wednesday before inventory unless I work out an alternate strategy for trading tight ranges. I am finding the biggest problem right now in my trading is my expectations for the day's trading is driven by the last few days. I'll review a day's trading and note that I should watch out for certain setups or whatever type of refinement, however the notes I take and learn from the trading day typically would be useful if the day was similar to the day I just had. I need more specific refinements to entries that only apply on certain types of days. Today had a great reversal that I should have taken at the turn as Bathrobe and EB took but I got so used to past days of oil making very slow progress after the reversal that I passed on it. I'm having a hard time writing my thoughts on this but you get the idea.

$1.50 move for the morning is not narrow. I normally struggle with 25-30 tick ranges on oil unless I am expecting such a tight range. Yesterday, there were just a few too many times for my liking where price got stuck in a range. I did well in the morning (green square) but not in the blue squares noted on the chart. I was trading pullbacks for the first bit of trading and was up $300 or so. I just need to do some more work on how to avoid tight chop zone range trading and how to adjust my entries depending on how the day is shapping up to be.

SIM -$526 Rough day. Almost quit when I was breakeven but didn't. Very small range days like this suck the trades out of me because I can't ever get any movement off my entry except in the morning reaffirming to myself that I should mostly stick with morning trading. Of course tomorrow is oil inventory so we'll have to see if we get the usual tight range before it comes out.

SIM +$572 Much better number of trades today. I probably need to shoot for more $600 days if I want to get my average daily profit at $400. My desire to keep my profits if I win my first couple trades keeps me for being confident about good setups later on in the day when in fact many of those later trades have some good intraday price action to justify the direction of the move. I need to work on how to handle this.

I hope oil doesn't change for a long while. I traded soybeans for a while because they moved so well and trended so well but that changed over time. It would be quite disappointing if oil stopped moving like it does but I guess that is inevitable. Just have to be ready to switch to other futures if the movement changes dramatically enough that my setups stop working as well.

This might matter on futures like ES and if you use limit orders more often. I always enter with sell/buy stops so I only want to enter when price goes through my entry order. Oil moves much different than the ES so the whole touching a price and reversing idea doesn't matter much unless you are doing some small tick scalping which I am not doing. I do remember when I first started trading futures and was trading the ES on SIM that I got some fills on just a touch. One reason I stopped trading the ES was that the SIM for the fills/exits wasn't realistic and once I saw how other futures moved I couldn't stand to watch the ES tick back and forth. Thanks for sharing your experience.

Not sure what factors OEC's Demo uses to determine fill but when I traded oil live a couple times it didn't appear to trade any differently. The emotional side does worry me. I've traded and do trade stocks live but they are just so much slower so not as emotional. I am trying to prepare myself but my biggest preparation for the emotional side is trying to get more defined entires and exits and have a consistent trading record that shows me I can do well if I stick to the types of trades I know. 2 weeks ago I made some changes to my method that totally changed my consistency and confidence in my trade setups which is why I am just focusing on the past 2 weeks results and not including prior SIM results. Out of all my family and friends, I only know of one person who thinks I might be able to actually do this and consistently make money. I truly believe I can make this my career but we'll just have to wait and see.

SIM +$134 Positive but a bit disappointing. Picked the oil turn around at 8:00 but my entry wasn't good enough to have patience through waves down. Good learning week. Getting more comfortable with my method but still working on some specific rules for handling mid day trend reversals. Shooting for a better week next week.

You think they'll substitute my 4 months SIM trading crude oil for the 10-15 years trading experience. :rofl:

I realized I forgot to include the headings of my excel sheet in my last post and then I got thinking I should ask what others think are useful statistics to track on your trading. Here is what I am tracking right now. I'd be tracking more information if I had fewer trades per day but I am still working on that.

Target hit for about 40 ticks. Not bad. We just keep having these sell offs most days lately on oil.

Oil Slow time on oil but here's a break that would interest me if I was still trading today.

Quick question Jon, Why do you use this weird picture upload thing instead of the forum upload?

SIM +$458 Alright, really lost my way this morning with my rules. I think this week's profitability got to my head a little. Refocused after the first hour of trading and did well. Oil just won't break free so if I had been trading for the big moves today, I would have walked away with a loss or maybe empty handed at this point. Who knows oil could breakout big later on. I just got that feeling that I need to quit so I did.

EB, Do you filter these trades at all by watching the speed of the pullback/price movement or the number of times the top end of the tweezers are touched during the 10 minutes it takes for these to show up on your chart. Just curious.

SIM +$212 This morning's oil action was too tight to trade and I made the mistake of getting lured into several trades so I was down before inventory. Got a good piece of the after inventory breakout and then called it a day because my emotions were too drained to make good trading decisions. Charts keep getting behind DOM price which hurt me a couple times. Still too many trades but not totally unacceptable for oil inventory day.

I normally only consider pit hour price action in my trading analysis so I do have opening gap up/down considerations.

SIM +$534 Too many trades today. Got a nice breakdown on my first trade and a nice breakup on my last trade of tha day and many breakeven trades in between. Had to take quite a few breakeven trades on setups that looked reasonable. So far so good this week.

...and BINGO was his namo! :rofl:

Oil We haven't seen a big volume push today. I'm expecting some sort of break either above or below this consolidation area. Lots of resistance. A big player is going to have to make the move to get a good break.

I need to go back through that TTT thread to see if anyone ever listed out the rules you mention above. I spent an hour last night trying to get something from one of Taylor's chapters and it was painful.

I am not sure how commissions are structured. I have only traded live a couple times and my commission trading one oil conract (CL) was a little under $4 round trip. I think they were having some sort of promotion though when I joined in the fall of last year so I am not sure what rate you would get. I attached a link to their information section on futures trading but give them a call and I am sure they can help you out more than I can. OEC futures info

I'm surprised you don't wait until after the pit open to enter into positions. Interesting.

Thanks. I remember reading through that entire thread, its too bad it got driven into the ground by a few bad posters. I tried to get Taylor stuff in the past but it was beyond me at the time I was reading it. Just thought it would be good for Rich as well as a novice trading group to see the implementation of his service in trading methodology before trying to give Taylor another read through.

Rich, You might consider starting a thread here at TL to give an explanation of your service and show some real time use of the data you would receive as a subscriber and how you think it can be used to improve your trading. I am interested and have considered using it several times. I trade oil almost exclusively so your CL service is what I have considered. Thanks.