July 21 Choppy Day after OPEX

I spent most the morning taking trades on the simulator and working on new audible alerts. I was a net loser on my simulator trades, but managed to scrape out a profit in my real account.


Big trading ranges seen in BAC and LEH.

I Needed about 30 minutes more patience for this trade to workout but kept getting stopped out of my long mid-day.



The NASDAQ A/D signals worked better than NYSE A/D signals today.Choppy trading in the bonds this morning with some bearishness in stocks.

June 28 Trade Summary $1,028

I woke up at 7:15, traded for 45 min, made my daily goal trading from the book without my charts, and now I'm done for the day. I think if I quit trading by 9am my time each day I would be about 50k richer since I started trading last year. This morning I simply traded the range knowing that there was a less likely hood of any breakout trends occuring with FOMC minutes pending. Oil popped up this morning, and I found 70.11 to be a key number on CL, and 846.8 to be a key number on ER2. I was going to quit after I hit 500, but decided to go for my goal before 9:30am hit. NYSE A/D looks to be trending down but is still above 1.5. When NYSE A/D went through 1.5 yesterday, the indices took off vertically, and when we have breakouts above 1.5 during the afternoons like yesterday, the price action tends to be a breakout trend, from what I've noticed. Also when NYSE A/D breakouts out below 0.8 during the afternoon when it was previously in the 1.5 range for the day, then this tends to be a down trending afternoon setup. Today should be an interesting day with FOMC minutes in 3 hours, OH GOODY!
I won't be trading it because historically I've lost more than I've made trading this number, however 2 days later often shows a reversal from FOMC day, and the day after FOMC tends to be a choppy session, which is good for me, because I got work early on Friday, so I won't miss out on much I think.

PS, Am I the only one that has to make posts twice because of bloggers word verification not working the first time you do it?

May 22 Trade Summary $1,166

Well if you didn't see it yesterday, then you must have seen it today. Huge divergence between big caps and small/mid caps. With every low on YM you should have bought ER2, and with every High on ER2 you should have shorted YM. I didn't see this change between the indices until yesterday afternoon, and as a result there was a fatal impact on my trading results yesterday. YM is lower then it was yesterday and ER2 is higher than it was yesterday.

P/L= $1,166

I actually messed up first thing in the morning because I saw a short setup form. Unfortunately I went short ER2 (should have shorted YM instead), and I ended up letting a $500 winner turn into 3k worth of heat. Absolutely ridiculous, I know, it looked like it was going to be another blow up day. But I held the short, Vowing not to go short ER2 again, and finally covered ER2 around the 9am lows for a small profit. I then made a cool scalp trade with 8 cards for a few ticks based on something I've been noticing, and then I had my computer freeze up while it processed this mornings recording, and as a result I missed the afternoon breakout. I later tried going long ER2 at 841, got stopped out, went short and got stopped out, and then noticed a similiar pattern that we had yesterday (a price and volume peak), so I went short and made about 1/3 my profits.(Again, I never should have been looking to short ER2, but I saw the trade and took it, again I would have been better off shorting YM). I then later did some stock trades, covering my short on SMH and XLE too soon, and then near the close I shorted YM, and that trade was a piece of cake.

So until I see things change, if I want to go short ER2 I will short YM instead, and if I want to go long, I will go long ER2 over YM. Another thing I made a mistake on and failed to notice was that the Nasdaq advance decline line is a much better gauge to use when trading ER2 and NQ, where as NYSE A/D is better used on YM and ES. I'm still using NYSE TICK, but I will look into seeing if NASDAQ TICK is any better to use.