What's up?

First off... congratulations to all of you who voted. Secondly, congratulations to all who voted for Obama, like myself. Pretty amazing to live during a time of enormous history. 

Now, on to more important things. What have I been up to? Well, I've traded futures, ETFs, used different timeframes and basically 'blew up' the way I had been trading. Why would I do this? Well, that's a very good question. I think part of it is that I'm a little fucking crazy. The other part is I was bored. The way I was compiling my watchlist, combined with the market and how I traded just wasn't producing a lot of trades every day. Then I got this wild idea in my head that if I'm going to be a successful trader for the rest of my life I need to find a way to trade every single day and trade a lot. Believe me when I tell you that I fully explored the 'trading a lot' angle. For about a week I just traded the QQQQs off the 1-min chart. I think one day I had about 18 roundtrip trades. This would've been great had I made shitloads of money. But I think I was up about $100 at the end of the day after being down $800 early on. 

My account balance has taken a beating the past month. But you know what... it was all worth it. Sure, I'd like to have that money back but in the end, I have a much greater understanding of trading now than I did before. I understand how the highest volume ETFs and futures basically follow the same patterns. Another reason why I wanted to blow everything up is to try to trade just a few stocks a day instead of the normal 'gapper madness' I was used to. While this sounds practical, in reality... I much prefer the diversity of the gappers. However, on the days when the gappers aren't there, at least I know where to turn for other opportunities. And I guess that was the purpose of it all. A trader needs opportunities every day.

So, where am I at now? Well, for the past two weeks I've been trading 'gappers' off the 3-min chart and treated the first hour of trading a little different than I did the rest of the trading day. There are some good opportunities early on if you're tuned in. But the problem with this strategy is that if you miss one trade... that can screw up your entire day. That could've been the trade the offset the shitty ones. It was very fast and - with my current schedule - just not feasible. So I've come full circle again. A realization that just occured about a half hour ago. I am going to continue trading off the :15 timeframe to 'slow' things down but I am expanding my watchlist and not deleting any candidates. Of course, anything less than $15 or over $100 will be removed, but I need to remove some of my previous habits that limited my opportunities. 

I've got my work cut out for me to get back to where I was but I'm pretty confident I can get there. Thanks for your patience and feedback and I hope my readers have stuck around.