Thursday's trades

Had a friend come into town so I knew I wouldn't be able to closely follow my watchlist. After an hour or so I just decided to focus on ES. Caught a couple of nice runs and was happy with the unexpected results.

My own worst enemy

I made money today so this isn't a horror post. But I'm coming to realize that the biggest obstacle to my trading success is me. My second entry in NQ e-mini today was nice (although I was almost stopped out of it as well) but, once again, I just couldn't see the trade through. That's two straight days I've let nice winners just slide on by. Once I learn to stick with a trade and stick with my target then maybe I can consider doing this for a living. Otherwise, it's just a hobby.

Boring and frustrating

Made such a boneheaded move today in my NQ e-mini trade that I'm still fuming. Long story short, I got a great short entry and I went to go move my stop but, instead, I placed a Market order and took myself out of the trade completely. 

So, I made money but price continued to drop a considerable distance. Compound that gaff with the stupid DE and AEM trades and that makes for one disappointed trader. I was able to find another NQ entry late in the day to make me feel better. 

Yeah, poor me. I know, I can feel the compassion oozing through the broadband connection. Hey anon... f you! 

Happy New Year

I arrived back in Paris today... early in the morning. I was greeted with a light dusting of snow which I found strange after being in the warm sunshine of South Florida for the past two weeks.

Sorry for not posting much but I was having an excellent trip. Friends, family, presents and alcohol - love it.

Couldn't sleep a wink on the plane and crashed after an hour back in my apartment. Woke up right after the market opened, got my scanner running and waited. To be honest, I really wasn't in the mood to trade and after looking at the low volume my interest further waned. Blah, blah, blah... I didn't trade today. However, in between picking through bags and checking the charts, I missed this nice setup in the ES e-mini futures.

I love how price breaks through yesterday's high, then falls back down to the PDH and prints a strong, narrow range candle. The rest is history.

Friday's trades - 12/12/08

Very quiet today and actually no equity trades at all. Just one futures trade that I wish had moved just another 1/2 point or so in my favor so I could've had a nice day. Instead, I decided to ride the pullback out and ended up giving back a lot of profit.

Entered on a break of the 12:30 bar high as price confirmed PDL as support. Target exit was the 38% retrace from yesterday's low but it just didn't make it there. Missed a later entry (red arrow) as my son wanted to play Pokemon cards. Thanks son.

Thursday's Trades - 12/11/08

I'm changing my name to The Magician Trader. Instead of pulling rabbits out of a hat I pull trades out of my ass. Today was a complete slaughterhouse for me in the morning. There were a couple of trades that, while they made sense, I shouldn't have taken. But even taking those trades out of the mix (SCHW, COST) it really didn't make a different to my bottomline.

What saved me again and brought me back into decent profits???? ES emini. I went all in again... twice as much as last Friday and ended up catching a nice 9-10 point swing. Of course, it kept dropping after my exit but I was happy to leave when I did. I make fun of pull this trade out of my butt... however, it was probably the best setup of the day - coinciding with the DOW drop. I got spooked out of ACI, JPM and CMI before the dropped big, which really sucks. Can't list all the trades but here are some of the better looking charts and entries. The second arrow shows where I either re-entered the stock or, in the case of ES... added more contracts.

Peace out.

Divine intervention

Don't know what else to call it. Started off the day as usual and with a good, healthy WL. However, a lot of the stocks on the list gapped down and continued moving way down during the second and third bars. I have been drawing my fib. lines from the PDH to the PDL and sometimes to the ORH/L depending on how much it gapped.

This has been working all week.

No need to change right?

Wrong.

I said... let me go ahead and draw the fib. lines from the intraday high to low. Then, once price retraced I could look for an entry. What a disaster. The first trade I entered turned against me immediately (BHP). I then shorted ADI on a break of the 11:30 bar low and that went nowhere. Then, I had an alert set for ES e-mini futures which triggered and I made a couple entries as price was breaking above yesterday's low (:05 chart). And just like that... I was in the hole big. I then said I was just going to trade my way out of it or dig a deeper hole but I wasn't just gonna stand by and be smacked like that.

I then entered AMZN and HES and, one by one, they all were stopped out. In the hole even bigger. So, I watched the ES e-mini on the 5-min chart... and noticed a cup and handle pattern forming right below yesterday's low. It was around 12:30 to 1pm and I actually thought a bear flag was forming till the very end. When I saw price take out yesterday's low on a strong bar, I crossed my fingers and loaded up on contracts. It was make or break.

I'll save you the suspense and let you know that I made just about 13 points off the ES e-mini (almost to the 38.2% level from yesterday's low)... put me back in the profit column and I have since renewed my faith in God. I also had to give up hookers and crack for life.

What's the moral here? Well, I changed what was doing well for me this week and was slapped for doing so. While I didn't change it drastically - just applied the fib. levels differently - at the end of the day I would've spotted at least two to three good trades from my list without the worries. I just feel thankful I was able to end the week on a positive note and keep the winning streak alive for another day. Another thing... it always seems like when my back is up against the wall is when I make really good trades. Joking aside, there's got to be something there I can extract and use on a daily basis. I think it's the lack of fear and being aggressive. Sometimes it's just an attitude change.

Futures... and JNJ

Nuff said. Despite being down early today I managed to make a lot of my losses back. Made a couple of changes mid-day and that seemed to help. My lone equity trade today, JNJ, managed to stop me out for a small loss after revising my stop and dumping half my shares at breakeven.

E-minis

Ended up messing around with the NQ and ES e-minis again. With the wild market swings, gapper candidates are hard to come by. Did well despite placing around 8 round-trip trades. Mostly small winners as I was pretty cautious. If I continue to do well I may do a whole post on it. I was trading on the 1-min chart after pretty much discarding the stocks on my WL. 

Let's see how it goes.

WMS... I wish

I managed another 6 point gain off a short of the ES early this morning. The gain was a bit of a double-edged sword as it put me in a position of only wanting to take 'great' setups in equities. I wish I would've taken WMS as it had an overwhelming amount of good qualities. My only concern was that my entry bar was below the ORH coming off a steady downtrend. The next bar would have been a nice entry as well but it was outside of my rules and I wasn't in the mood to start straying.

Finally... futures

Finally got an honest-to-goodness alert to trade ES today. Managed to go long and take away 6 points. The way I'm approaching futures doesn't provide for many signals but when they come along they're usually worth it. I may have mentioned this before but here are my futures goals per week (any single one option will work):
 
-6 ER2 points
-12 ES points
-3 ER2 points, 6 ES points
 
I'd like to make these kinds of gains consistently with my current system before decided to jack up the contract amounts.
 
So, since today's ES trade finished by around 10:20 I spent the rest of the day being an equities snob.
 
"No, you're not good enough!"
"Pffft... as if I'm going to enter with that lower tail."
"Yeah, let's talk when you hit the ORL, okay???"
 
I did place an order to short CAKE but it was never triggered.

Made some tweaks...

then took some licks in futures today. Let's see... here's the summary:

ES: -7.25 points

ER2: -1.2 points

Got smacked up and frankly... I deserved it. In any case, I saw the error in my ways and hopefully corrected them. No equities today either (not that I didn't try).

This day will cease to exist in my mind... brrrrzzzz (there, wiped clean). Wait... who am I???

Gappers... blah

It suddenly feels like last September for me. Not a whole lot of great candidates and some fairly unreliable chart patterns. I ended up making another ER2 futures trade for a 1 point gain. However, about 30 secs before entry I had connection problems and I wasn't sure what the entry candle looked like. I refreshed and backfilled the data and all looked well and proceeded to enter (with 3 contracts). But then I refreshed again and realized I shouldn't have entered. So, I split after a 1 point gain (which would've ended up being at least a 5 point gain had I let go). In any case, I feel fortunate.

Also, I downloaded Ninjatrader... wow, what a nice charting platform for futures. I'd like to really use it but coding just seems so difficult. Guess I need to mess around with it some more.

More futures

I know how I am. Once I become fixated on something I tend to virtually ignore everything else. Food... work... women - all the same shit. If I find something I like I go full throttle till I either hate it or find something else to interest me. So, with that... my new fixation is futures. Now, I still go through the motions with gathering my stock watchlist and stuff, but really... my mind's on futures. It's just simplier to follow. Please don't confuse that with me saying futures is easy... it's not. But it's also not so damn distracting like following 20 different stocks.
Look into it... you may like it.

Today, I was 2 for 4 in futures.

ER2: 2 wins, 1 loss

ES: 1 loss

Ended up +4.6 ER2 points. EDIT: It's actually +3.47 points.

Here's a snapshot of my trades with prices (won't be doing this all the time)

NOTE: Just like anything else, I use stops and once they're hit... I'm out. So, no HPT scenario for me, thank you very much.

Dead period

I'm sure many of you have great trading stories but for the way I trade (gappers) and the entries I look for I honestly have not see a lot of candidates over the past week. Took a breakeven trade today on SYMC which looked like it was going to jump past the ORH but never had the push. On a positive note, I managed another futures gain... 3 points after going long ER2.

Futures

Made my first futures trade today and managed a 6 point gain off a short of ES. I'm still kinda messing around with some things but really wanted to place an actual trade.
I have to say, I totally understand the attraction to futures. Right now, I'm only concentrating on ER2 and ES. But that's all. Just two symbols to track and only 2 charts up on my screen. Whereas stocks require a bit more attention and preparation. What I would ultimately like to happen is limit my gap watchlist to just 10 or so high-volume stocks every day and only manage those. We'll see how things work out.