Day Two

You may notice that i'm posting this up at 10am rather than 3pm. The reason for this was that at 2:00 PM EST today there is the FOMC minutes release. While this is not the full out FOMC release it does tend to stall the market after around 11am until the release and the trading afterward can be tight and congestive just like the FOMC day until it decides to break one way or another. Since I have learned to avoid these low odds news situations whenever possible (its also the reason I start trading at 10AM EST, rather than 9:30AM EST - so that the news has already passed) I decided at the beginning of the week to only trade the first hour today and walk away. So I did just that.

I took one trade today and boy did it scare me. I put on the position and almost immediately it started working back off a retest of the low point of the swing. Oh yay - my first losing trade right? It even put in a pivot low which is a pretty good chance that you're done for but no... the trade reversed back down with some vengeance and went straight to par > partial profit > full target like it was its job. So we're now 3/3 and 3 full target trades. I couldn't have asked for a better start to my trading career!


This trade is also a testament to sticking to the system, forgetting "what you know" and trading the chart that's in front of you. The p's had pushed down 15 points in a straight line move prior to my entry... my gut said "surely they must be done, it can't possibly go lower" but my system said get short and it knows a lot more than my gut so I took the trade, it worked for profit and that's all there is to it.

I hear from far to many traders that they didn't do X because they "thought" it couldn't go higher or lower... A successful trader who follows a method and doesn't just fly by the seat of their pants buying and selling doesn't operate like that. You DON'T know what the market can do at any point in time. Accept this fact, trade what the CHART tells you and not what you "know" and your success will increase exponentially. My gut would've cost me 125.00 in profits this morning, my chart made me 125.00 in profits this morning. That's the difference.

Trade Results:

+ 125.00