Jan 31 2007, Yikes,,what will happen?

I'm looking at the charts and all I see is a big mess with no direction. The indices have been chopping around in this channel for the last month. Tommorow is the day, at least I hope, that the market gives us a direction. I think I'm going to watch the market tommorow and record the action on my camtasia recorder. I suck at trading FOMC days, so I need to keep to my stops if I decide to enter on a trade. Also, I need to have my S/R zones in before tommorows trading and I need to pay attention to the tick and volume. I haven't got a chance to do any analysis yet on my tick/time/mp readings from last week, so maybe I can do that tonight or tommorow morning. I'll also need to be watchful of the 1-2-3 pattern tommorow after the FOMC minutes, if it happens I need to take the trade and look for profit targets around S/R zones or until volume and the tick tell me to exit.

Jan 29 week outlook

I'm out of town Mon/Tues. I think the market is going to put in a direction this week and breakout of its range. The trend has been down, and the markets have been volatile lately. I've got a ton of analysis to do with not enough time to do it because I've been working 6 days a week on top of my morning trading. I need to stick to the correction position size for my account and trade my signals, it is simple as that.

Trade analysis of my Worst day

Well, I didn't have any losing days all of January until Thursday. I was trying out a new strategy of scaling into trades, but I was on the wrong side of the trade. I lost about 4pts on ER2 with 2x as much size as I normally would when trading because I was trying out the new trading idea. Also, my stop placement was 4pts, instead of 1.4pts, which made things really bad. I have a lot of work to do this weekend on analyzing my trades, and I'm excited that I will make some progress in understanding things to become a better trader.

Jan 26 trade summary

Well, I held onto my short for the open and made back 1/3 of my loss from yesterday. ER2 had bullish divergence compared to ES all day. I only traded the morning, so I didn't see any of the afternoon rally in ER2. On Thursday I picked the wrong day to try out my new idea of scaling into trades.(I used buy stops to add to my long position only when the trade had moved into the black, however, the trend was against me, and I should have been adding to a short instead of a long). I've been using buy/sell stops, and they seem like they are not working for me. I normally use stops to exit my trades, but I'm getting better at just seeing the order flow and knowing when to cut the trade before the price travels to my stop. Also, scaling into trades hasn't been working either, I'm getting fills 0.2pts below my designated price, instead I should just enter the trade I want right then and stop using these types of orders. I think I need to be more aggresive in my trading in the morning and take the signals I get without hesitation. I think I'm going to use paintbar sound alerts to tell me when to enter trades so I become more systematic in my trades; moreover, this was my plan 2 weeks ago, however I haven't really been looking at the indicator at all. I'm mainly watching my ER2 tick chart, range chart with S/R lines and indicators, and NYSE and AMEX TICK. I think I need to start watching order flow for better timing my entries and exits.
Goals:
1.Setup paintbar indicator sound alert, enter on its signal.
2.Analyze AMEX/NYSE TICK, time periods, and MP levels
3.Analyze trades for better placement of scaling into/out of trades.

I feel like if I was trading stocks I wouldn't ever have big losses because the stops are easier to place without having to worry about noise like ER2 displays.

Note: The ES morning short trade worked just as I thought because there was no volume support underneath.

It looks like I'm tottally screwed

The market the last 2 days has wrecked havoc on my account. It doesn't even look like were going down today. We'll probably rally straight up, and then do the opposite the next day. My short on ER2 is 2pts further in the hole, I wanted to wait tell market open for this position to work out, but I'm getting the worst beat down ever and starting to stress out from having too large of size. I had 2 chances for an exit with a small loss, but instead I decided to give it time to work out. I was long at the close, but then I got stopped out 1pt away from the low, now I'm short and feeling pain. I should just close this position out and be done. How much more do you want to lose?

Worst day YTD.

I traded against my signals and didn't do tick analysis. I didn't see today as being a bearish day. I'm short, and looking for er2 to drop to 779 tommorow, if we go below that the target is 772. ES and NQ are both setup to drop at the open tommorow. ES target for short is 1424. Overall I traded against my signals, traded too large of size, and didn't use good placement of stops. For some reason I wasn't as stressed as I normally would be when losing so much money. I'm going to have a tough time recovering from this loss.

Jan 24 trades

This morning I saw the long signal on NQ and got 4.25pts. I cut my profit short though. I need to improve my trading by letting my winners run forther. I plan on scaling into my breakout trades, and exiting half the position at my target and holding onto the other half until I see it's time to get out.

The research and analysis I'm doing with tick, time, and MP is helpful. What I need to look for is momentum shifting into low volume areas that are prime setups for breakouts. That is the trade setup that happened today in NQ.

I'm starting to right down my tick, time, and MP levels as they happen during the day, so it will help keep my focused and to make it easier for me to put in my journal later.

Jan 24th market outlook

SPY and oil are bullish, NQ and tech are bearish. Tommorow looks like it could be a big day, either bullish or bearish. We've got the oil # out at 7:30, which will be a big determining factor to see if shorts have to cover, or if the intermediate bearish trend continues. The charts look bullish as they stand right now, so I'll be on the lookout for breakouts to the upside with strong volume.

Oil update

As predicted, USO is bouncing, BP and APA are breaking out nicely. I wasn't sure which would be the better buy between BP and APA, but it seems best to take the most bullish stock between the 2.

Things to do Jan 20

No trading on monday or tuesday for me next week because I have to work.
I plan on analyzing AMEX tick reversals at the values of -200, -100, and 200.
I also plan on looking at time periods 6:45-6:52am, 7:20-7:27am, 9:04-9:11am, and 11:56-12:03pm. I also need to do more research on Market profile.

Filtering for breakout setups

Here is a scan I'm working on for stocks to find consolidating high volume stocks set to breakout. I need to work on the filter some more, but this is a start- TradeIdeas

I need to specialize, so I will be focusing on the oil sector for some of my stock picks. I will also be looking at stocks consolidating near 52 week highs and lows as a start.

Here's a nice consolidation and breakout pattern seen in GROW.






Oil looks like it could bounce, APA is breaking out, and BP looks set to breakout with a nice bull flag pattern.

Volume Gap+Momentum=Breakout

This is a volume report for ER2 with data from Jan 9th to the 17th. You can clearly see where the volume gap was and the trade setup that could've been taken.
One of my future projects is to look for stocks with volume gaps like this. There are many stocks with this type of setup everyday, providing high probability breakout trades.

Jan 18 trade summary

Well, I went short on ER2 before the big selloff this morning because I got the signal which accompanied my trading plan. My trailing stop was to close though, so I only got 3 pts on my trading plan, when I should have gotten 6pts. Today and yesterday I messed up on my placement of stops. I need to stick to 0.7-1.4pt stops, 3-6min time stops, stops signals from the appearence of divergences among the indices, or "the gut feeling" which I'm getting better at executing to minimize losses.