Friday, April 16, 2010

Down But Not Out

First things first, I had a rough week, and i'm still only ending down 7 bucks gross. So we aren't talking disaster here folks. This issue was simply due to my double bottom / double top entries in my trade plan that cost me money this week. They have been removed and won't come back to haunt my profitability from this point forward. Today I had a couple pars and caught this (frankly scary) reversal pattern to the short side for +7. It came within 1 tick of stopping me out so I was more than just a bit relived when it finally dropped.


Here is one more interesting fact I was looking at today - since my trade plan revision 4 weeks ago, i've had only 4 losing days. Yup, out of roughly 20 trading days i've walked away a loser only 4 times. I'm sorry, but i'm astounded by that. It almost has an air of consistency about it doesn't it?

However today I did screw up and I passed on a winner in the 6E out of fear. I had just had that bumpy ride in the 6S and was feeling a bit sheepish. So there's the 87.50 I needed to bump me up into positive territory for the week gone - due to fear. Apparently i'm not perfect just yet.

The other thing I wanted to quickly mention was a little progress report on that pullback trade I talked about briefly yesterday. Today that one setup netted a bare minimum of +21 ticks in the 6J alone. And that's taking profit at +7/trade. As you can see each one of these signals ran at least +11 in favor. Could I use the extra 300-400.00 in my pocket? You bet. These kind of results have been coming in fairly consistently. In fact this week its given only 1 losing signal!

Honestly the only thing i'm really working on before pushing this to production is the trade management side of things and trying to gauge the best compromise between getting something out of the trade with a smaller target (+7) and letting them run further (>11) but hitting lower win rates. If you guys have any ideas i'm all ears!




Trade Results:
3 Trades, 1 Winner, 2 Pars
Gross P/L: $100.00/per

Weekly Results:
Gross P/L: $-7.50/per
Net P/L After Commissions: $-67.45/per
Win/Loss: 40%
Win+Par/Loss: 67%
Profit Factor: 1.05

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I may be presumptuous, but you have too many markets and too many setups to enable yourself a consistency pattern.

Simplify..that helped me...but of course I am not particularly good at multitasking...in fact I am like a donkey...give me one thing to do..over and over again...and may be in a few years it might become 2nd nature...

Anonymous said...

Haha, man, I got caught in a defacto long basket when the goldman news hit today. I shat a brick, but scaled into reversion on the 2pm rally to make a measly $13.

Today was like a heart-attack.

You are doing quite well, imo. Keep it simple.

Matt said...

I appreciate the comments ladies and gents!

Sandy - Honestly I have no problem concentrating on 8 markets at once. I trade very mechanically which means I really just need my setups to appear and when they do its boom boom pow. Problem is, they don't occur all the time so by monitoring more than 1 market i'm left with more opportunity of a setup being captured. There isn't really any discretion either so its not like only watching 1 market gives me a greater edge. Honestly, more markets makes me focus more because it keeps me constantly engaged rather than dosing of on the internet out of boredom and missing setups.

As for the multiple setups, again I really only have two kind of setups, an advancing pullback and a reversal trade. This "new setup" is really just a slightly different price action setup to an advancing pullback. I'm already monitoring the same swing for a setup anyways, this is just another possibility of entry on that same swing, so again its really not a big tax on my focus or effort.

Tuxedo - I'm with you... I was long in the 6E when the news must've been released because it shot up like CRAZY. There was certainly more volatility today than there has been in a LONG time.