New Equity Highs

Traded real poorly today, missed out on an easy +300 this morning AT LEAST. Took a couple other trades for some profit and called it a day at 11AM. The more and more I trade the more and more I feel like I just want to get in, make some money and get out with that profit and call it a day. Two hour work days? I don't know, but i'm certainly working towards that. This is a intense occupation and it requires a lot of focus. Trading for 6 hours a day is doable but it isn't pleasant. So trading less is something I am considering. Not to mention I think 80% of the moves in the FX markets happen by 11AM CST and the 20% that remains into the afternoon is hit or miss most of the times. I like efficiency and if I can be more efficient by working less (and making more) then its a move for the better.

But what I wanted to talk about was that a lot of my poor performance this week hasn't been from bad trades - its been from not pulling the trigger. And a lot of that comes from being back live for the first time in a long time. Confidence isn't at its peak yet and so some of those entries just seem SCARY. The only way you get rid of that fear is by getting in on those trades and building confidence. So slowly but surely that's happening.

Even with my craptastic performance this week - here is the equity curve thus far. Pretty good direction I think! Up +9.6% so far this week.

Hai Guise!

Allright, we all know by now that i'm a shitty blogger. My trading career has been all over and back again in the past few months but i'm back at it after some huge changes in my trading.

However, rather than start back up here with the same old same old, i'm going to be creating a new blog on a new website to discuss not only my trading outcomes, but my progression, ideas, and branch out into a lot more non-trading topics. I like cars, travel, cool things to waste discretionary income on and random useful info. While that content will take the backseat to the trading posts this new creation is not going to focus purely on trading, but more on the trading lifestyle.

Hopefully it will show progression in my career and life and the interaction between the two.

I'll invite you all over to a temporary holding domain until I decide on something to call it all. But I can't do that until its built, and so that's what i'm doing as we speak.

I hope to have more for you soon!

CME Tick Data Changes

Allrighty, so on the 5th, the CME started reporting more granular tick data. Oh joy! In a nutshell from the marketdelta crew:

:: Summary ::
The CME has begun “unbundling” some ticks/trades that were previously being sent as a single tick. From inspecting charts of the ES, it appears that the net result of this change is that approximately 2.5 times as many ticks or trades are being sent on average, WITH a much smaller average size per trade. The change does not effect the volume, just the number of trades (more trades with a smaller average size).

:: Here is what it means and what you will begin seeing ::
1) More Tickbars: If you are using tickbar charts, you will start seeing approximately 2.5 times as many tickbars per day as you were before because there are approximately 2.5 times as many ticks per day. The CME claims this will give the user a more accurate tickbar picture.

2) Slower Backfill: Backfill or downloading of historical data will take longer since there will be more ticks/trades to download.

3) Larger Database: The amount of the space in the database required to store a day of tick data will increase. Thus, the time it takes to backup or verify the database will increase.

4) Fewer Big (large lot) Trades: If you are filtering trades based on volume (in Time and Sales windows or using the Volume Breakdown indicator), you will see fewer large trades since many of these larger trades have been replaced with a few smaller trades. This change is rather substantial. The number of large trades (> 199 lots) per day on the ES dropped from approximately 1800 to approximately 400.

Now where my input comes in is with the adjustment needed to alter your current trading timeframe to the new adjusted timeframe. The TTM folks came out and said "multiply by 2.5x's" so a 233T is equal to a 582T but like most things out of the TTM folks, it sounds easy, simple, and sassy, but delivers nothing but epic failure. So I did my own analysis using a barcounter in TradeStation.

Taking the last 10 days prior to the conversion and finding the average amount of bars per day in two different timeframes I had been trading and comparing them to the average of the new amount of bars post October 5th the following results were collected. I then adjusted the needed increase in ticks until similar results were found.


What I found was that the conversion was between 1.5X's and 1.75X's as much data to correctly convert your old timeframe to a comparable new timeframe. But without any doubt it certainly isn't a conversion factor of 2.5x's as was suggested by others.

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.

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

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!

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!