Jun 17, 2008

Blender trades

That's what I call it when I get chopped up. I said I wouldn't post till I had a profitable day but just wanted to relay that while I haven't been profitable in awhile I have made some winning trades. Unfortunately, there's been more chop than pop.

I'm not a big market analyst (maybe I should put more time into that) so I'm not sure why the 5-min charts are getting chopped to pieces. Setups that had performed well time after time are now failing. Granted, shorter timeframes are more susceptible to chop but the market for me over the past few weeks has been downright unforgiving. It's like my orders have a tag associated to it and once they execute there's a message that appears on every other traders screen that says: ATTENTION: OONR7 HAS JUST ENTERED AN ORDER, PLEASE SELL OR BUY IN THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION OF HIS ORDER. THANK YOU FOR YOUR PARTICIPATION.

The chop isn't entirely the market's fault. I've made some mistakes and made greedier entries. Entries that if I had allowed for a wider stop would have proved very profitable. Also, once I've reached my max loss I end the day. So there have been trades that if I was green... I would've taken.

Bottomline... the 5-min charts can wait. Wait till I exceed a certain equity threshhold which allows me to take riskier trades. I'm switching solely to the 15-min charts for now with entries at or above/below the ORH/L.

I've also made some pretty significant changes to my watchlist to allow for more candidates. I'm now including stocks that have just closed above yesterday's high/low and include 2-day gap stocks as well.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Can feel your pain man... even the 15-min is getting very choppy lately, so it must be tough for the 5-min. Get smaller may help.

OONR7 said...

I think you're right... but the :15 at least slows things down.

greytrader said...

What daily max loss limit are you using ?

Trade with the Trend said...

NR7 trades work well. In my own tarding, I track NR7 days on end of day charts, then follow up the next day on a five minute chart. Often, the five minute will give an early indication of the NR7 breakout direction.

I have some NR7 charts here:
http://www.indiatechnicals.blogspot.com/

OONR7 said...

gt: max loss is 2R.

sudarshan: I will check out your blog tonight. Thanks for sharing.

Anonymous said...

Hey there oo,
I support your choice of switching back to 15m (and if that doesn't work you can try switching to 30).
Anyway, i think thats just a standard drawdown, nothing to get too excited about.

"What do we do when a draw down comes, honey
What do we do when it gets real big, babe
What do we do when it’s even bigger …
We stick to the plan and pull the trigger."

cya
trader a

OONR7 said...

trader a: that's a great comment and I couldn't agree more. Maybe 2 years ago this kind of drawdown would have killed my spirits. But with a healthy number of trades under my belt and more knowledge than what I had back then... my outlook is so much more optimistic.