Monday, September 28, 2009

Lets just say, I screwed up a bit.

Meh... as the blotter shows... I made a number of mistakes today... mainly holding for my targets. I had more than ample opportunity to make this a profitable day and I just screwed the pooch.


Good news is this... a recent change in my approach is going to allow me to share my entries with you and my website is going to be reformatted to provide free educational content and only sell the indicator software for Ninja and TradeStation to make the entries easier. Bad news is I spent hundreds of man hours creating a members section and video archive of educational content that i'm now throwing away. Yay for me!

But more on that to come in the future. For now, all you need to know is that I found a dog and I screwed it today. But i'm making the market my bitch tomorrow.

For what its worth... traded correctly today shoulda woulda coulda been a
+290.00/per contract profit and a 92% win rate.

Thursday, September 24, 2009

First day, screwed up.

Day started off fine, took two trades in the NQ. One went to its profit objective at +2.5 points only to not fill and come back and stop out for +1 tick. A second par trade also stopped out for +1 tick. So far so good. Textbook setups, good execution and management. Then I took a loss in the TF and got slipped a tick on exit for a -7 tick loss. Then the screw ups started. I completely missed a textbook winner in the TF for +7 ticks and then ended up getting long into the market on a setup that wasn't valid. I bailed on it after realizing it but not after taking a -2 tick loss. Not a horrific mistake, but a mistake nonetheless.


All in all, what should've been a par day got turned into a losing day and it had nothing to do with the approach and everything to do with me screwing it up. First day back jitters and lack of focus I suppose.

Trade Results:

NQ: +10.00
TF: -90.00

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Going Live Tomorrow... Again!

Sorry its been so long (I sound like a broken record with that phrase lately) but everything is finally taken care of and i'm ready to go. I'm not trading today due to FOMC but i've got the money in my account to trade the TF and NQ. So what i've done is this...

I took 3 timeframes that I really preferred and gave me the most trades out of the 9 I typically monitor in both the TF and the NQ. I'm doing this for two reasons. 1. Cut down on the charts I have to monitor and attempt a more simple approach to make the days (and overall results) much more clear cut. 2. There are some of my "longer term" daytrade charts that rarely give me signals. Therefore, i'm wasting a lot of screen real estate for something that isn't paying me nearly enough to justify its use.

So why trade the TF and the NQ? The idea behind this is simple, to use them as a hedge against one another's performance. I assume that every market has a set amount of probability in its winning and losing trades, however I can't control when and where the drawdowns are going to occur. So the only way to minimize my overall drawdowns on my account is to hedge out that risk by adding a new market. The idea being that while one market may be performing poorly, the other is performing well negating the effects and minimizing (or eliminating) any account drawdowns. The problem is this: The NQ is still fairly heavily correlated with the TF (or any other US market) so its more of a pseudo-hedge if anything but I am going to trade it regardless.

Ideally I would like to use the currencies as a hedge here but TradeStation's margin requirements on Forex futures are ridiculously high. But for example, last week the TF was horrendous for me. I lost a total of 300.00/per contract over the entire week and there was just nothing for me to do about it. It was the worst performing week i've ever seen in the market trading this method. That's just how the trades fell. But if I would've just been monitoring the EC on a 5 minute chart there was +562.50 of textbook profit in that market during the same trading hours as the TF during the same week. So in effect by monitoring an uncorrelated market I was able to hedge out the effects of a horrible week in one market with a great week in another. But until I can get into the Forex futures markets the NQ will have to do!

The idea behind this little experiment is to get some real live results to show the validity and profitability of the results using this approach. Backtesting can only prove so much. Its being able to perform at the hard right edge that defines a trader as successful or as a failure.

So to anyone still around reading this... i'm back along with this blog. Thanks for sticking with me and I can't wait to get the journey started once again.

Cheers!

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Back from the Sticks...

Well i'm sorry its taken so long but i'm officially back after a much needed "vacation" (which consisted of me working 10x's harder throwing together pre/post wedding preparations together).

I should be back at the screens starting tomorrow and get this blog back to daily updates. I've got some neat stuff in the pipeline and I hope to be posting some TF trades in the coming week on here.

I hope you all are doing well and I appreciate anyone who actually still checks in. Lord knows I haven't really given anyone a reason too. I've just been in a fairly big transitional period in my personal and professional life and had a lot of things going on. But its all been building towards an all-out assault on that goal list that is getting ready to kick off in a few weeks.

In fact, now that I think about it, I just finished up one of my goals on the list... I created an LLC and am now the CEO of Synergy Trading Group LLC. Thats a start right? One down, four to go!

Cheers!