Colonel B

yep 3 ES trades the blue one was half size the first red was a stop and the second red was a winner I had a bias to the short side because of the notes and bonds in premarket Main thing is VOLUME ON THE WRONG SIDE in or around a zone.

Time to start crushing them The whys.... Volume came out on the wrong side in my zones. Zones are determined by the brackets on my MP chart at the top. Blue boxes are buys and reds are sells

Yes you are right. I must talk to you already on a daily basis and I just don't know it. Oh and BTW Im totally stealing that line. I'm a kung fu ninja killa when it comes to turning knives into paychecks. I EFFIN LOVE THAT !!!!!!

You don't need that much to trade. You may need that much to start off with. IB is only going to require you to have 5000 to trade 1 contract and they are going to charge you a commission for them to put up the rest. When and if you get really good at this you wont need more then 15-20 K in your account. Side note: I am not sure why you want to trade the 6E. Personally if I was starting over with 30K in my account I would steer clear COMPLETELY from the currencies. I would go straight to the 10 year notes and 30 year bonds with the ES. And I would try to strictly trade the treasuries. Its not sexy by any means. In no way shape or form is it big swinging @#$% trading. It is far more predictable and stable.

Wow all the responses so far you need at least some sort of advanced schooling to understand. First off I don't agree with the main stream consensus about psychology in the first place and so far all of the responses are eloquent and publisher worthy. Just reading the first page has been an exercise in journeying into the realm of science and philosophy. Lets pull out the bean bag chairs and blow up furniture fire up the hookah and delve into the cosmos. This is what I do. I scroll out and look at the market at least 1 time frame larger then I am looking at and I ask myself what a 12 year old would say about it. Unexciting I know but hey it works. I use market profile and I usually look at 30 min bars. I mostly look at the current day and the previous day so for me I would look at the overnight in between and maybe the last 5 days with overnight included. I will do this and ask what a 12 year old would see. Is it up or down or just going sideways. So if a 10 min is the largest you look at then switch to a 30 min and at least double how much space you have on your screen. If you normally have 2 hours of 10 min candles on what you consider your main chart (12 in the case of 10 mins) then have at least double that on the larger time frame. You should have 24 30 min candles and now are looking at 12 hours of info like a 12 year old. Is it going up, down, or sideways? Making new highs, new lows, or falling short and not doing much of anything? Its been going up for a few hours but now coming down now? Or the most important 12 year old observation... I DON'T KNOW. Some times its not clear what it is doing. You don't have to have an opinion all the time every time. Sometimes it pays to wait till it becomes more clearer. Let the other folks that think they know battle it out and then when the winner becomes clear or more clear then attack. The other thing I do that is really good is I ask myself how would I feel taking a trade here. If you scroll out and see that we have been on a down trend for a few days now and you see folks getting long you can judge some conviction by how you would feel. Would you hold onto that trade if it goes in your direction then against? Maybe you would but if you would be a little nervous then its safe to assume that other traders are nervous there as well. If its consolidated there for a little while you would feel a little better and again others most likely feel the same and has a better chance of holding. If you have a profit target of 8 ticks and it goes 7 and comes back to your entry how do you feel? If it doesn't effect you and you have no emotions then maybe you are a sociopath. Well it does a majority of other traders and that is what is important. If you are buying at the bottom with a bunch of other guys rest assured that they may be really nervous and if it doesn't go right away then they will get out right away. If its the third or fourth or fifth time in a certain area then traders are really leery that it wont work on those times. If you are shorting some triple top for the day understand that other traders that are short with you might be convinced that it has less of a chance to hold this time up there and feel that the trade is more "riskier" this time up. It is really the same as if we are buying at the bottom of a lots of down days mentioned earlier. So that is my mechanical way of looking at the market. I think all that nonsense about trading is 80% mental and 20% everything is so misleading. Also all that getting caught up into your own head and find a system that works for you is also crap. I think its the overwhelming indoctrination on this psychological topic that causes these beliefs. This is one of those industries that it pays to pay attention to what everyone else is doing and what they maybe thinking.

Alot of traders use market orders to get out and limit orders to get in. Is this the right or the wrong way to do things? Little bit harder to say on that. Here is a few reasons why. If you have a limit order to get in at a price and it trades at that price say 1300. And lets say there are 50 contracts there and you are number 45 in line at that price. well its going to have to trade at least 45 for you to get filled. If it trades only 44 then you don't get filled and you are left standing there. Now lets say the trade is bad and its going against you and you want to get out now and you use a market order and price just trades 1 lot at your stop out price. You could be number 2 if that market order executes quick. On the other side if you use market orders to get in then you can and will get slippage meaning you will buy a tick up if you are going long.

Im going to try posting a few chars.... Hope it comes out ok and you can see it You cant see it so ill have to try another method of taking a screen capture

Hey I read the first page of this thread. Chances are that im not going to read 700 or however many pages there are already. Are you still posting stuff on the ES in the same fashion as the first page? BTW I saw some of the charts posted and want to post some of my own.

Yea can you define "multiple time frames"? Yea yea silly question. Its multiple time frames so how complicated can that be? Are you trading 1 sec, 5 min, 10 min, and 30 min and using moving averages on the ES? I bet that wont work. How about 1 sec, 1 minute, 5 minute moving averages on the ES? I bet that wont work either. How about 1 minute, 5 minute, and 30 minute with moving averages. Good luck with that too. The point is that there needs to be a bit more info to be able to give an accurate answer. I think Tams said every one looks at multiple time frames and I think he is right (not exact words by the way). If your time frames are too far apart then you will end up getting in too late. Simple enough Another thing If you are waiting for "When larger time frame participants trade in one direction" you wont be trading very often and you wont make that much. That doesn't happen often and is more of the minority of the time. Most of the time it is the smaller time frame guys that move the market. The ES anyway. I am not sure about options and stocks but my guess is that its the same over there. From your post it looks like you are doing it backwards. Instead of figuring out where and when the big guys are doing OTF buying figure out where the short term guys are at. About that scalping thing. Basically someone kind of already mention some of this but scalping is taking 100-200 trades in 1 session for 1-2 ticks. The retail market has distorted the original definition and turned it into something else. I guess if you are taking more then 3 trades a day or you are not pulling out 10 points out of the ES then you are a scalper. I doubt that there were ever any real scalpers in the E-Mini. Chances are if you are against more then 3 trades a day, shooting for 10 points, and are not looking at least days out most likely you are not making good money. In the major future markets anyway.

Depends on a few things. Lets say they are all market orders and they all get filled. Then they get what ever price they filled at. If they are limit orders then they get that price they were laid up at. So If they put a huge buy order at 1300 then they will fill at 1300. If they are market orders then they will start at 1300 and after all the sells are bought at 1300 they will go to the next tick up depending on the size of the buy order of course.

Every one wants to trade the 6E. Man if I could just get onto that 500 tick move and hold on with 10 contracts I would take every one I in this thread out for dinner. Their choice. That is what every one is trying to do over there. That is why its so thin. ;D You want R.O.I. go some where else. Go buy some land on the outskirts of a developing town in North Dakota. Understand the 6E isn't a 401 or IRA and that you could lose all of it in a week or a day. Hopefully you wont and you are more cautious and responsible but it can happen. Its not likely you will lose ALL of your money on land in North Dakota. Futures trading is a zero some game and arguably less then a zero sum game because of the fees and commissions. There is no absolute positive expectancy in the 6E. You can get good at futures trading and make 6 figures and be done by noon New York time. But how to do that isn't the question you asked. Hope this helps

This whole concept is putting the cart before the horse. After you are successful in trading you realize that you don't need 10 million or 1 million or 100 thousand in a trading account to make a damn good living. In a futures account anyway.

The ES, ZN, and ZB? They are correlated in every way. Treasuries vs Equities. The 10 and 30 are positive and the spoo and 10 are negative. The NQs and the spoo are positive. Put all 4 up and watch the ranges. I use 30 min market profile split but a 30 min candle chart works just as well. Now that you know that, you can look at the RTH ranges and look at where they are going to open. You get a good heads up considering the treasuries open 70 mins prior to the equities. Is the 10 year making new lows and the ES isn't making new highs? Is the 10 year trading in the previous days range and the ES is opening out of range? The bonds do a great job of forecasting the temperament of the ES.

2 words BONDS / NOTES. If you want to successfully trade the ES and make a living at it instead of a hobby then you should be looking at the 10 year notes and the 30 year bonds. If you are not looking at the notes and bonds then you are trading at one of the biggest disadvantages that you can be at in the ES. It is like playing defense in football with only 5 players. It is like racing your car with out a steering wheel. You stand no chance at winning long term. A really good high school football team has a chance at beating a pro team as long as the pro team is using less then half the required players. Seriously BONDS and NOTES. I am not sure why so many people don't suggest this and give all sorts of fluffy crappy advice. The trend is your friend and every system works with proper money management nonsense. Here is what works CORRELATED MARKETS. Write that down... CORRELATED MARKETS. Oh and while you are at it throw up a CL and NQ chart and watch what they are doing.

Well you got me to read that article. Good job on that. Too bad I am more ignorant for it. :doh: I am not sure why the propaganda got posted in the first place but maybe ill start posting equally useless information like how to beat a certain level in a popular video game. Honestly a Econ 1010 and a Stats 2050 would squelch both sides of the poor fellows arguments. Maybe this clown should go to B school or spend some time learning about the subjects instead of fishing in Alaska. :crap:

You posted a follow up while I was posting. LOL I personally don't use any of that Fib,MAs, or other types of common stuff. I look for where volume is and what type of trading is going on there. For example a common place to take a trade in the day trading world is the previous days open, high, low, and close. I look to see if there are alot of buyers at or around the previous days high. If there are I get short. I guess you could use a Fib but then you get into the drawing it correctly and its an art argument. The main problem with the Fib with how I trade is that if I had a 53.2 -200 fib there might not be enough volume there for me to take a trade. If that 1.21 gigawatt fib lands on a previous day high or low or a overnight high or low I would believe its the high or low not the fib. This is because I think there are more traders looking that the highs and lows then they are looking at Fibs. You can replace Fib with 1.21 MA or the 52-200 MA as well. That Db guy is an insanely fast typist. He put out 2 posts in the time it took me to put out 1. :shocked:

You have to. Or maybe you don't have to but you have a very strong advantage if you do. "Everything else is in your head, and the market doesn't care what's in your head." Actually the market does care what is in your mind under certain circumstances. If the "market" doesn't care then you should care. Why? Because you need to know who is doing what and where they are doing it at. You have an advantage if you can figure out if shorts are trapped or longs are trapped. Why? Because when their stops are hit it moves. If the market has too many short term longs then it can't go up. That is all I look for all day in my trading is who is trapped or who looks like they are getting trapped. I agree with every one else. The sooner you get the MAs off your chart and start using stuff that works the sooner you can start making money.

This is that stuff I was talking about earlier. If you plan on staying in sim and if you don't really care about making a living then follow this guys advice and just skip to the next post. I associate trading to swimming. They can both be dangerous. Swimming can be physically dangerous and trading can be financially dangerous. I actually did alot of swimming in college so I know a bit about it. I was a lifeguard during the semester to pay the bills. I saved a few folks who were self taught and who "studied" swimming and "thought they had an edge." I was there to help recessitate them and call the EMTs. So I guess this guys advice holds true. I am just guessing that you would rather be the guy that mans up and takes the class on how to swim then the guy that I give mouth to mouth to and gets taken out the side door to the hospital in your swim trunks. Getting a margin call on your 5000 dollar account is far less humiliating but is no less psychologically damaging. For some reason no one goes down that do it yourself and figure out your own stroke with out learning some basics bullshit with swimming. I mean we all know you can properly learn to swim by reading stuff off of a forum. The folks that lead you to believe successful traders do it with out help or encourage you to invent until "you find your edge" are wrong. Why don't you go out and invent a new swimming stroke? Go on and go invent something new. Oh wait you don't want to do that? Why not? Oh is it because you don't need to? Oh you are not going to risk your life to "find" a new stroke? Well that is how every one learns right? You want to learn how to swim or to trade you just jump in and figure it out right? So if you want to learn how to swim and to swim good just hook up with a bunch of other failing do-it-yourselfers and your in business? Um NO. Hopefully I have made a few points here that make sense. The main problem in the retail community is that I bet 75%+ of the educators are not going to teach you correct principles or enough things to help you break even let alone turn a profit. Some of these guys are so bad you are better off doing it on your own compared to them. If 75% of swimming instructors didn't actually show you how to swim and instead taught you ways that would for sure get you into trouble then more people would drown. Seriously if 75% of red cross certified instructors taught incorrect principles or told 4-6 year old kids to "figure out there own way" parents would revolt. I totally disagree with Mr. ZDO in this regard (I don't disagree with all of his stuff on other posts). I think most of your time should be spent finding a teacher or mentor and less on looking at markets unless you like wasting time and forming bad habits that will be more difficult to unlearn. I bet that if you look for the best trainer/coach it can take weeks of searching. You could just start with this forum. I bet its backed with tons of people wanting to sell you something. I bet most of them are garbage but who knows. This shouldn't stop you from going through and evaluating them. Seriously I got in my email today an advertisement for "Setups R Us!" presented by Joe Baker & David Dube of Trade Pilot Pro." Setups R US come on WTF. You are going to have to sift through countless hours of this crap to find anything useful. These clowns call themselves pros? Do they use correlating markets? I bet not. Do they even have multiple DOMs for different markets up? I bet not. I bet they have computer science degrees and are or were computer programmers. Good educators are going to teach principles on how markets work and skip all that "big guys move the market" and "lets get on the side of the big guys" crap. They are not going to go for these wild ass 20 point moves but rather teach you how to build size. A good one will teach you about correlating markets and how to read multiple DOMs, I mention these characteristics because they are completely void in everything I see in the retail market.

I recently had an interest in trying out a new trading ladder. So I started contacting a list of retail brokers that allowed for the specific data needed for this ladder. I was talking to one of the perspective brokers and we got into a conversation. I simply asked him about his clients and what that actual percentages were. He informed me that he had short of 500 actual clients personally. I asked how many were active traders and he told me that a little more then 200 were what he considered active. Does anyone have a guess out of these 200 how many were up for the year? Take a guess. 2 That is right only 2. That means that only 1% of his active clients are up for the year. And that .004% of his total clients were up for the year. Now I have heard many stories about 75%-95% of traders lose money. And according to this broker its 99% for his clients. Realize this is a very small sample size and that other brokers may have different numbers. But I hear the same crap all the time about how there are many ways to trade. This is true. There are lots of ways to trade but I am willing to bet that 75%-99% don't make money. Or at least wont make you any money in years like this year. The simple notion that some make money and some don't is a flat out LIE. Lets set this straight once and for all. MOST DON'T MAKE MONEY SOME DO! Its all in the execution is flat out wrong. The chances that you are the problem and you have a good strategy are not good. Chances are that your strategy sucks and your main problems come from ignorance and less from self discipline. I think the idea that most systems work is wrong. The idea that its so much more then the method is false as well. Consider a system that consistently gets you stuck long or short. You will not be able to turn a profit to compensate for your losses. Consider a trading strategy that takes 40-60 tick losers every times its wrong and only 5-10 tick winners when its right. You wont be able to turn a profit to compensate for your losses. No amount or homework, self discipline, or a clearer plan will change these truths. "If you have a method which loses all the time, you won't make any money even if you have everything else covered, but then if you can't get past that first hurdle you need to ask the question of why that is. Is it because the strategy sucks or is it because I'm not using it very well." Soooooo true but how do you tell a good method from a bad method? For a person who doesn't know the first thing about a good system then they fall into the situation of not knowing what they don't know. Often times traders beat themselves up unnecessarily and for no good reason other then its their fault. What about the 50%+ of snake oil salesmen calling themselves "educators" that taught you to buy at the top and sell at the bottom? Some how its part of trading conditioning that its all your fault for following the guidance and counsel of an educator in a non-moral venture. This is not true in that they do bear the blame, but unfortunately you have to bear the consequences. Deal with it!!! Ok hear are some suggestions. If you take the 75% or the 99% number that has been put out about how many traders lose money and use it as a metric for all things trading it works out to this. 75%-99% of paid educators are wrong and are not up in their trading for the year. 75%-99% of posts on this forum are wrong and will not help you to be up for the year. 75%-99% of people on this forum are wrong and are not up for the year. If you try to invent your own system chances are that you are going to fail and by now I don't have to post the percentages of failure. In all honesty you should find out who is currently in the top 1-25% and learn from them . And the top 1-25% are easy to identify because they are the ones that are up for the year. Don't beat yourself up and just understand that this industry is full of failure. You are better off being more skeptical then just "jumping in feet first." Rest assured that there are people out there that are watching and trying to figure out where your stops are and how to get your money out of your account and into theirs. I am one of those guys that looks for where the stops are and how I can get them hit so I can feed my family and pay my bills. You are just a number on my footprint that just got run over. Get a good coach and a good mentor because every pro anything has the best coach. Do you think that Bob Bowman is a part time high school swimming coach? Not a chance. I think if you are going to compete at the highest level you are going to need a coach like that. I bet you wouldn't even think to even get into the pool and compete with his best swimmer because you know you would get smoked. What pro swimmer or pro football team or pro anything got to be pro or stayed pro with out a pro coach? Let alone you getting and staying pro on your own. My suggestion is that you get a Bob Bowman type for a trading coach because its not about just being the fastest in this pool. Realize that at the bottom of the pool of trading there are sharks and in trading you could lose more then you started with. Stop with the idea that you can invent a solution to the bleeding of your trading account when the sharks in the water can smell the red of your DOM. Especially when the sharks have been eating trading accounts for many years and were trained by sharks that were eating accounts for many years before them.

Seriously?!?! Its really hard to believe people use this lagging crap and make money?

My bad John. From your last post I thought you were saying that you were NOT interested in trading like the big boys. Hard for me to tell in text what people mean sometimes. In any event all that stuff I posted is how firm traders trade. There are slight variations but basically those are the main parts. If you got a B.S. in finance from a real 4 year university and went to Chicago or New York and started to trade for a large bank or a large firm then this is most likely what you will learn to trade the ES.

That is hard bro. I mean the econ major. LOL All that econ is going to kill you in trading if you are not careful. I went finance and I wish I would of went accounting. No, wait, no I don't. Accounting would of been better for the trading but I don't think I would of made it through if you know what I mean. Most traders don't care about LRAS (Long Run Aggregate Supply) or comparative advantage. But that doesn't mean its not useful. I have a really good friend that got his econ masters and works at KPMG. He is some senior guy now and just yesterday he went to a local university and did a bunch of interviews. So who knows you could end up at a prop shop or hedge fund watching TV/Bloomberg/news all day and translating the important stuff. But about your trading. Sound like you are a bit underfunded. If you are not going to get any more funds till January and you insist on trading then I have a few ideas for you. Get a subscription to the Wall Street Journal. The business school at the university you go to should have some paper you can sign up through so you can get the student discount. Start asking other students in your classes if they trade or not. Find the ones that trade or at least are attempting to trade. Talk with them and learn what they are using and what they have tried and where they learned it. Talk to the faculty and find the ones that trade or have traded in the past. Talk with them and figure out what works and where to go to learn it. Don't wait to do any of this stuff till your senior year. Start now. Read your WSJ so you can keep up with current events. If you do this then who knows when the time comes you can maybe land a job on the worlds largest trading floor. Getting into a prop shop is your main priority if you want to trade. Oh and of course get good grades. 3.5 or better.

Yep totally agree. Everyone bleeds. There are times where the last trade effects or bleeds into the next trade. Nope totally disagree. Your first step is to make sure you have a mentor that trades and will be honest with you. That way they can help support your development and performance. Chances are if you are doing it on your own you don't know what to look for and what you consider a strength can and often times be a huge weakness. Im not sure how anything so far reveals "The Greatest Trading Secret EVER Told." But hey it got my attention.

Yea totally. I think that in actually compared to what I see on this forum I guess trading with correlated markets is I guess its own signal strategy? It doesn't seem that way to me because that is how we all purchase anything retail.

Sure. Have you ever bought a car? What did you use to to help you decide if you were getting a good deal or not? Did you use a moving adverage? Did you use a stochastic? What do you use to find out if you are over paying for airline tickets? Dojies or wedgies? No chances are you use some corolated market. You go to the Honda dealership and check out what they have and then go to the Toyota dealership and look at what is comparable then you compare price. Same thing with airline tickets. You look at 2 differnt airlines that are leaving and going to the same area and you buy the cheepest. Same thing with the ES or any other market you trade. Now a bit of information on bonds. The ticker symbol is ZN. The 10 year cash opens at a different time. It is about 15.60 per tick. And most of the time is goes in the opposite direction as the ES. At 5 PM -3AM N.Y. time there isn't much going on in those markets most of the time. So don't look to trade it like about to show you at that time. However it could still work at that time. I use a 2 tick stop out on the ZN but some times I have to exit quickly and I hit the market button and get filled for 3. Its just the nature of market orders. So you are looking for structure with in 2 ticks. I am not sure what you use or how you trade but I saw in an earlier post that you look at daily,weekly,monthly levels or highs and lows. Ill basically just use that in my examples so you get the idea. For now just bring what ever you use along and lets see if we can build on it. The thing with the bonds is that they don't trade exactly like the ES. For example the ranges are different. They are opposite but when the ES sells off and the ZN goes up they don't go up in the same amounts. So the ES may sell off 8 ticks where the ZN only rallys 3 ticks. This will become important later. Some times the ES will open close to say the weekly highs. If you are only trading the ES and you see it open close to the weekly high or a range high that it has been trading in for a while you naturally want to short it. Lets say its still a few points above us and we are going to get in right at the high. Now in this scenario a few things can happen which you are aware but lets list a few. #1 It could open go straight south and have a big sell off. Nothing big, it did what we expected and sold off at resistance but left us with our limit order waiting and we don't get into the trade. #2 It could rally and just go straight up. Who hasn't had this happen to them? #3 It could spike up through the resistance say 3 1/2 points then sell off. So you get the direction right but you get stopped out before it goes in your direction. Who hasn't had this happen to them either? These things are common no matter the time frame you trade so how can the 10 year help with this? What if the bonds opened close to a high also? Lets say that around the time when the ES is opening the bonds have rallied a bit and are close to an overnight high, previous day high, or a weekly/range high. If this is the case and you know that the bonds move opposite to the ES one of them is going to break out. Both usually wont rally at the same time. There are rare occasions when this happens but lets say this isn't one of those times. If the bonds start to sell off (should be easier to tell because of the smaller range) then watch out with the ES short because chances are that the ES is going to break out or at least spike. Now the short on the ES might work for a little bit but don't hold it for longer then a few minutes and don't let it go against you (take a scratch) and absolultly don't add. Lets say that the ES is still at its highs close to the open but the bonds are close to a low. However the bonds aren't opening as close to its lows as the ES is opening to its highs. This could be a huge spike tip off. Lets say the bonds want to sell off to the exact number. This happens often on the bonds (remember 2 tick structure). Then there is a good chance people are going to get run over in the ES. Maybe in this situation you wait for it to go through your price and come back. Or maybe you wait for it to go 2 -3 points above the resistance. No harm in that considering we have identified some potential slop at our price. Its the reverse of catching a falling knife. We are selling into the sell off at a certain price. This works really well because we know that there are other players getting long per the break out so we can get filled even on the way back down. As long as the bonds stay above the rejected lows then you should be all good. However there is a chance that the bonds will go through the lows and the ES will go through the highs. This can and does happen as you can imagine but you don't have to wait for a full blow stop out. If it doesn't pay out in 10 secs or less then scratch it. If the bonds hit the bid 3 ticks below then pull the plug on the ES. There are alot of other intuitive things that the ES does to signal that the short isnt going to work but there are lots of tip off in the bonds too. The ES is opening in the middle of a range so no support or resistance close. A few things can happen here as well. #1 We could chop around #2 We could go up #3 We could go down Hard to say what exactly is going to happen and often times its just best to wait and see. However if the bonds are close to a low and reject then you can eliminate in the ES getting long. This is a big part of the equation because if the bonds are going up then the ES is going down. So if it chops around for a bit you are going to want to get short over getting long. The odds are better that the ES is going to sell off and you are going to want to sell it as close to a what ever high that you can. ESPECIALLY if you see longs get in at the top of the chop. When I see 2000 or more get long in the ES when this is happening I get short and put my 2 tick stop above where that volume got let out. This is more common situation then the previous just because of the nature of the ES. You have every one trying to do the same thing so it cant go. Its so head fakey and this will help with some or most of the head fakeyness depending on what you are using.