gosu

What were the technicals that called for being long going into the report?

With the caveat that I do not trade currencies, it looks to me the charts above are showing the market in a lateral. Advice was offered to wait for a "pullback" (what I call a retrace) before entering. There is something that precedes a retrace, however, and that is a BO (breakout). In this case, it would be a BO of the lateral. Having the market "clocked" in terms of volume data if it were available would be of great help. Regardless, trading inside low volume laterals in index futures sucks big time. I can't imagine it being all that great for currencies either.

The market was centering at the beginning of the period in question but I didn't see what you describe. You might want to check your data connection for that period.

A nice description of an actionable event. I monitor for essentially the same data but on the inside bid/ask and t&s.

July and August this year have been atypical. After Labor Day is when the market picks up seasonally. The rest of this year is gonna be wild. I won't be surprised one bit to see a thousand point drop on the INDU and 100 point drop on the SPX. Not a prediction, just what I feel after being through a few bear markets.

For me, the DOM ranks very low in usefulness, and I no longer monitor it. I look to the bid/ask and t&s when an action is required. Almost 100% of my monitoring is spent on price and volume on the charts.

$500 intraday for index futures...yeah I'd say that's more than fair.

Should read: Eiger / mentorship courses / $69 - $1199 (with coupon)

$1599 but $1199 "with coupon." LMAO Where can one find a coupon, in the PennySaver? This is quickly becoming my favorite thread. :rofl:

So that's what he means by "New friends wanted." LMAO

Thanks for the thorough and thoughtful post. Also thanks for sharing your recent performance results. I'm always interested to see the results of skilled traders and how they think about their approach to trading. Judging by your use of a fiscal year, I can surmise that you manage OPM, which is something I avoid entirely. That likely explains a lot of the difference in our approaches and the stats we keep. As you know, my approach is discretionary, directional trading. I do not trade with preset loss parameters as you do, yet I do not consider myself a risk taker at all. I am a believer in avoiding risk and taking the low hanging fruit first prior to looking for additional opportunities. I see the market's risk/reward diagram as a scatter of points all over the graph rather than an upwardly sloping regression line with rising risk for rising reward. There are times when there is essentially no risk to extract. I call this "free money." There are also times when risk of loss is high with little available to extract unless I guess the subsequent direction correctly. I call these times "centering" and "dry up" and I am sidelined during these times because trading is not a 50/50 game to me. In between these two extremes there are various opportunities which I have been able to differentiate over the years and train myself to act accordingly when they are presented. There are still many market positions I have yet to differentiate but I am still relatively young and have many market repetitions ahead of me to learn. I am describing the above as a reply to your assertion that I am prepared to risk blowing out an account to trade the way I do. Because trading is performance based, I cannot rule out the possibility. But I do know that I am only getting better the longer I trade. With regard to whether applying "risk management" could have avoided my early losses, I would say that I knew at the time that "risk management" was very important and meant always having a stop loss in place and taking my losses without exception. What that got me was a disheartening grinding down of my account. I found that rather than having set stops, "scaling" in to trades achieved far better results. I would have a long string of positive days and felt that I was finally on to something until a trade came along to wipe out the gains of prior weeks and even months. I no longer concern myself over "risk management", but strive to stay on the right side of the market at all times and sideline when the right side is not clear to me. Entry price is irrelevant. The lone exception is when the right side immediately becomes unclear after entry and I look to "wash" the trade with costs. If I am sounding like I never record a "loss", I want to dispel that notion. I'm always working on cutting down my losses due to stubbornness, laziness, boredom, euphoria, etc., otherwise known as human errors, which always seem to be there lurking underneath the surface. Cheers and continued success to you.

Thanks for the rewrite. I read it through and enjoyed it. Obviously I pushed a button not only with you because I got a PM from the owner referencing my post to you to be nicer. So let me try. If you've gotten rich off trading futures, that's great for you. It was a long journey for me with a lot of heartaches and setbacks. I had made a bundle with stocks at a daytrading firm I traded from but the tech crash and going to penny increments pretty much killed that golden goose. I transitioned to index futures and thought it wouldn't be all that different. But trading futures was something else. I blew through 2 accounts, the first one pretty sizable. I funded the last account with $10,000 and started with 1 contract. I had a goal of getting to a million with futures and thought that would be the moment when I would never look back. In actuality, it was much sooner than that. It was when I got to 5 contracts ES and dwelled there for a long while. That was over 8 years ago and I've only been taking money out since. Now, you might be so far ahead of me that you sneeze at a million. For me, it's a great year. I've reached it only twice trading futures, including this year. And to be honest, I feel pretty good about it. You might accuse me of bragging again, and maybe I am. My main point is that I've never had to set up math problems and figure risk or return or whatever else to get there. But I'm always looking to improve. So if you're as good as you imply in your post, I'll be sure to watch out for your posts going forward. Maybe I'll learn something and have a 10 million dollar year some day. Cheers.

I could not get through your post after the first part. I get that you disagree with my comments, so let's leave it at that. I stand by what I said. Cheers.

You are obviously sincere but very naive. It might benefit you to take things less seriously, because what you desire to obtain from here may not be possible. The reality is very little transference can be accomplished through a message board. You do get to see a lot of the myths in the industry get repeated over and over, sometimes by loudmouths and sometimes by polite idiots. Is there much of a difference? The interest of the site owner is not aligned with that of a person who seeks to go beyond the myths. That's something you're going to have to do on your own outside of places like this.

LOL.. Good one. Maybe with like a rating agency for vendors?

Amigo, these little math problems have little connection to actually trading the index futures which is something I know just a bit about as they are the only things I trade. $20,000 is more than enough to trade a contract of ES. Of course not in the way you describe. Only an idiot would trade that way. Just like only an idiot would trade one contract on a $300,000 account. Do you understand that the index futures are a leveraged market? The current overnight initial margin on the ES is $5000. Most brokers allow intraday initial at half of that, some even much lower. Can you understand that people with skill want to use leverage? Can you see the possibility that there are people out there beyond your limited experience who do not trade the ES according to these silly math problems you invent? Until this thread, I had no idea there was such a thing as a risk of ruin calculation in trading. LOL... Would I have made my first million faster knowing it? I doubt it. I would be interested to know who was the first yahoo who applied it to trading? Sounds like some guy who failed at it and then went to invent something to sell to others to get his money back.

Harping on your "mistakes" is a mistake. LOL I use the word "error." Some errors are major, most are not. The two biggies for me are misreading sentiment and not obeying when sentiment changes. The first is related to the trading methodology and the second is related to behavior. These two errors are very serious and go to the core of extracting from the market. Less serious errors are that of timing, what people describe with the terms "early" and "late." All beginners know that fine tuning the timing of actions is worthwhile. Hence they spend an inordinate amount of time and energy looking for entries (usually called "setups") and exits (good if at "profit targets," bad if at "stop losses"). Compared to errors in misreading the right side of the market and not staying on the right side, timing errors are very minor but overemphasized by conventional wisdom (read: educators, writers, system sellers, etc.). Negligible errors are things like hitting the wrong key, forgetting to switch contracts at rollover, trading with a hangover, etc. Now to your point about whether "getting stopped out of a trade" is a mistake. Of course this is a mistake. Getting stopped out is in the first category of errors stated above that go to the core of extracting from the market. It is a very serious mistake, and people who trade this way as a rule are fish posing as serious players. Yet look at how the entire vendor industry is organized around setups and stops and profit targets. These are just experienced fish selling to newer fish.

Awww...did I hurt your sensibilities? Me sowee. I didn't go to Kindergarten so that could explain it from your perspective. Or it could be that you can't look past the mean messenger at the message. Hurry, go tell Teacher! But seriously, you're reading too much into it. Everyone who knows me knows I'm a sweetheart. Friends, okay?

More than a couple of attempts have been made to set you free from the fallacy that flipping a coin is analogous to trading. Yet you cling on to it, for whatever reason. Did you pay to learn that "fact" and don't want to waste your investment? Did you think it up yourself and it's become your pet notion? You need to start thinking about trading as a game of SKILL. But let me play along with the coin flipping game a bit. In coin flipping, there are but two outcomes - heads or tails. In trading, there not two but three outcomes - profit, loss, or breakeven. Now, the smart yahoos reading this are thinking, "Well if commissions are counted, there is no breakeven." Like the market gives a shit about their commissions. Would the coin give a shit if you had to pay a small fee for every toss? The number of outcomes and the odds are the same. Speaking of odds, what are the odds in trading for the 3 outcomes? Intuitively you know it's not 1/3, 1/3, 1/3. If that was intuitive, you would not have assumed trading has only two outcomes. It turns out that the answer is very problematic. To be able to calculate odds, you have to be sure of the occurrence of actual outcomes. In coin flipping, you flip and wait for the coin to settle on the ground and call heads or tails. The coin does not change from heads to tails a few seconds after you call it heads. In contrast, the market may flip back and forth, sometimes back again, before you call anything. Moreover, just because you "call" it, doesn't mean the market has stopped flipping; it continues to flip without you. In other words, the "call" has no definitive meaning to the market. Thus, calculating trading outcomes based on calls is arbitrary. The practical consequence is that for a lot of people they get to see that they're not the flipper but the flippee after their account is drained.

This is the kind of article that results when the writer has 22 years experience in the markets but has merely repeated the first year 22 times. Does he actually believe that new traders with their piker lot sizes make any difference in the market such that an expert is licking his chops at the prospect of taking their lunch money? Where does he think the vast majority of an expert's profits comes from? Evidently he is unaware that the participants who matter in markets do not operate with the same motivation as expert traders. The article contains other inanities too obvious to mention. Yet look at the inexperienced parrots squawk in and repeat the writer's references to "discipline" and blah blah blah. What they lose tomorrow in the markets is a rain drop in the pacific ocean. At least the reply immediately above this one questions the writer's absurd statement that beginners are using the same techniques as experienced traders. Who but a beginner would actually believe this? What is the prospect that the writer of the article will get a clue and not repeat his first year of trading for the 23rd time next year? Not good.

Making rules for yourself is fine, so long as they do not usurp the market's role in the extraction partnership. I have one that I abide by: Every Saturday I break completely from the market and consider the greater whole of my life.

Define "far too much" and "far too little." Or if you prefer, state what would be just the right amount. If by "market forecasting" you mean predicting, I would avoid that and its partner, betting. I consider all the questions on the list as an orientation away from the predicting and betting paradigm that pervades the trader education industry. Extracting from the market is best done using a continuous approach of data gathering, analysis, decision-making, and taking action.

"The problems traders experience in trading are the same problems they have avoided in other domains of their lives." The problem with this statement is that it doesn't differentiate between problems dealing with actual trading (what can be called "trading problems") and problems experienced by someone sitting in front of the screens thinking what he's doing is trading. Here is the original poster's problem as he describes it: What is being described is really not a "trading problem" per se. I liken it to the novice chessplayer who has no trouble at all playing casual blitz games on the computer or against his pals but when he goes to the park and plays against a stranger for $20 per game, he forgets all his preparation and goes into a panic. Is what he's experiencing a "problem of chess"? It is mental for sure, but does he need a shrink to fix it or start delving into his history and how it was full of lack and limitation? What if the stakes were 25 cents and he had been going to the park for a year playing all comers? What if the person across the board from him was a familiar patzer he had beaten many times before? Then maybe he can focus on the game itself and the problems on the board and make what he understands to be the best moves to win. Some examples of trading problems are the following: How do I determine the current sentiment and its strength? How do I determine when the sentiment changes? How do I determine a retrace from a reversal? How do I know a breakout will fail? How do I know a breakout will continue? What precedes a breakout? What is the difference between an expansion of the price boundary on the left side versus the right? Etc. Most people who sit at screens thinking they are traders are unaware of actual trading problems. How can they be expected to find workable solutions that would vastly improve their game? These people go bust without ever discovering what the game is.

@zdo: Instead of you playing the role of mall cop, how about we let the site owner handle anything that might violate the terms of service I agreed to when I registered. I'm too used to doing as I please, when I please, how I please to change now. If you continue to have issues with my posting here, I recommend you seek out Rande Howell who can help you regulate your negative emotions. Who knows, he might also help your trading as your purpose is to trade when you don't know what's going on. This is my final post to you. Good luck.

@zdo: Thanks for the laugh. "Please desist"? Get a grip. "Learn to trade in ever increasing levels of uncertainty"? Have you tried flipping a coin to enter and exit? That's pretty uncertain. Carry on.