scourt

I just got the Brooks book yesterday, reading it intently after having gone through this forum and the presentations he's already done. Guys, I have to tell you, risking 4-6 ES ticks to scalp 4 ticks (most of the time) is not my thing because I'm a 2-contract ES player and that's why I feel that if f I'm going to risk 4-6 ticks, then I want 6+ ticks to risk 4 and 12+ ticks to risk 6 on an all-in / all-out basis. Brooks spends an entire book talking about breakouts from 5 min bar ranges based on stop orders a tick outside the range. And this is fine. I think there's a lot of great value in what he's saying. To know what he knows I think can only enhance my trading and understanding of how price action works. But...he's only detailing 1/2 of all good trades. That is, you've got many ranges, built up by horizontal support and resistance which, if not violated by 4-5 ES ticks, will reverse back into the current range for MORE than 4 ticks on average. What you gain in ticks, you lose in winning pct. just as the inverse is true for how Brooks trades. I'm posting this as something to think about as you read (like I) all of this heavy duty analysis of bar-by-bar price action stuff that appears quite complex in real-time to pull off. Now, what's not hard to do in real-time is to buy double/triple bottom and sell double/triple top breakout attempts with a limit order with a 5-6 tick stop. Support and resistance is certainly a subjective matter as well, but *I think* one can come up with some reasonable rules to establish areas which should not be violated by 5-6 ticks in order to hold the S/R and shoot back into the current range (which could consist of multiple "5-min range bars"). I'm also willing to bet that you could get good enough at it, in time, on a 5-min ES chart to nail the turns with a 3-4 tick stop-loss. Here's the kind of thing I'm talking about in a picture of this morning's pre-market on a 5 min 24-hour session chart. I'm using Brooks book to understand how he thinks for breakouts so I can see that other side of the market which he only uses as confirmation stages and come up with 50-55% odds of the breakouts failing and getting 2x the reward for the risk. Emotionally, it's just too tough for me to have to maintain a 70% winning pct. to be successful at scalping. If I fell below 60% winning pct, I won't make it and that would hit me pretty hard emotionally. I've been at this since 2003 and I'm coming to the conclusion that, for me, I'd rather start off knowing that I only have a coin flip's chance of a winning trade, but...that winning trade should pay off for 1.8x to 2x greater than what I'm willing to risk. Anyway, I won't talk about this anymore in this group because it is not my intention to hijack this thread, only to tell you where I'm coming from in reading his book.