Finally, a decent day for my style! 3 signals leading to 2 trades, both of which were decent wins.

Still, the movement was slow enough that you needed patience to sit through it. That’s just part of how the game is played, lately. Adapt or die.

I have been getting a ton of stock trading questions lately, and am going to try to write a post covering the types of answers I’ve been giving to people individually. Stuff like which stocks to trade, and things like that. Not sure what’s causing the sudden stock interest out there. Strange…

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• Literature and Latte - Scrivener
  (tags: Software osx mac writing)

Not much going on. I tried to capture a live trade for you guys and gals, but it just wasn’t meant to be, today.

AND, now I see youtube has seen fit to truncate the movie I made. I’m uploading it again, and if the second one is full-length, I’ll replace the one above.

edit: nope, youtube just can’t handle my level of manliness today, and refuses to show more than the first 2:24 of my video. Enjoy!

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Uneventful trading day for me. Small, small profits. Yawn.

That’s what playing it safe is all about, though, sometimes. You gotta be able to stick to the sidelines when your criteria hasn’t been met. If you can’t, you will eventually bleed your account dry.

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Sorry it’s been a couple days since I’ve written a post. I went to visit my parents around Mother’s Day, and took Monday and Tuesday off. What can I say? I’m lazy! I should be trading tomorrow.

Looks to me like the action today really sucked, at least for my trading style. I would have taken a small loss, and then had a smaller gain, if I had traded today. So I guess it’s lucky that I didn’t!

Anyway, here’s an ad I posted on the tradestation forums today, for the eotpro elite series of functions I’m offering to the public. I point out the way we use Bonnie’s Bar colors to bail on failing trades early. In this example, I show a 1-tick loss followed by a much larger gain. Better than my actual trading chart did, today!

Low volume, choppy day again. But with a conservative methodology like mine, you can still find a couple good entry points. Just takes patience and will-power! :-) See you next week.

Today there was a rare, obvious ascending triangle play on ES. I don’t ever see those, it seems like! More often on ES are things like cup+handle, and Head&Shoulders. So that was kinda neat.

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Here’s the link for this week’s eotpro Elite Series seminar: http://eotpro.acrobat.com/p27832528/. We had some good questions this time… so much so that I didn’t get to go over many of the functions!

A lot of people have been chopped up, or unable to find trades the last few days. I’m happy to say that I’ve had very few signals, but they’ve all been very good. I go over that in this video. So, if you are getting chopped up a bunch, you may want to consider techniques like I am using. These include, making sure price is trending against a good support/resistance like Alla’s Avg, only taking trades with a healthy estimated risk:reward, staying on the right side of a fresh VWAP, etc. If you’ve been watching my videos, you know the drill.

It takes patience to trade this way, for sure. If I felt pressure to pull the trigger every 30 minutes, I’d probably be hurting this week, too. When you think about it, though, the market’s not here to please you or entertain you. You need to trade on the market’s terms, which means you need to trade when it’s willing to give you easy money, and only then. Think about it.

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• TNPI - Do it Yourself .mac v2
  (tags: Mac hack)

… or lack thereof. Pretty uneventful day for me. Not many signals got through my filters.

Anyway, I made good use of the time. Among other things, I’m converting/forwarding/reconfiguring all my various email accounts to get them hosted through gmail. And this time, I’m trying to keep the various personal/trading/business/etc streams of email segregated. This will make my life a bit easier, I hope.

Also, I am considering dropping my dotMac membership. Apple just didn’t deliver on this one, in my opinion. Year after year, I waited for them to add services to it that I would really want. Instead, I mainly just use their mail and AIM address, and–to some extent–their on-line storage. I can get that stuff free elsewhere.

As I mentioned in the video, I have been enjoying the new NiN release, which you can get for free in a variety of formats. Awesome. This is not ambient music like Ghosts was… it’s more like a typical nine inch nails release. And, if they provided a way to pay them anything, I didn’t notice. Hey Trent, give us a freaking paypal button, and at least some of us will use it.

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This one’s for you, Rafal!

This will go into the May release. It’s a complement to the existing functions for identifying divergences. This one identifies hidden divergences.

This is just one more example of how waiting for the best signals can make your trading a lot less stressful. It’s so funny, because not long ago I was taking a lot more trades. Maybe I will feel like that again one day. But for me, the name of the game in 2008 has been relaxation. I have multicharts filter out all but the most promising signals, and I know in advance where my profit targets are. Feels good.

Of course, I (or you!) could adjust the settings to make the signals much more aggressive, or you could run it on a faster chart, etc.

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Just two small trades in the morning… I don’t like trading news-driven environments. The bonds were all out of whack, as can be expected, and it was yet another tight-range day.

This video also discusses a funny moment I had talking with a client today. As many of you know, I code custom indicators and strategies for people (usually eotpro.com clients). Well, this one brought an indicator to me from a vendor, wanting to incorporate it into a strategy. But, there was no function provided, and the code was locked. Now, if this were some fabulous unique indicator, we’d be stuck at this point. That’s one reason I was so pleased to be able to offer the Elite Series add-on to the eotpro indicators… it opens their technology up for use in strategies and custom indicators.

Anyway, this looked like a smooth MA, and it just so happened that the first smooth MA I threw on screen matched the vendor’s indicator almost exactly. So funny… I feel sorry for everyone that’s paying for that one.

For reference, when I want a smooth MA, I always reach for the T-3 average, the Hull average, and the Linear Regression Curve. Usually one of those three will give me what I want. This indicator happened to match the Lin Reg Curve.

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I didn’t take any trades today. I woke up about an hour after the markets opened, and looked at the narrow range, and checked in with the eotpro folks, and said “nah.”

I am still exhausted from my trip to NYC. It was a lot of fun, but I only just got back at 1 AM today and I got very little sleep during the trip to start with. So, I have been more-or-less a vegetable today, and of course I’ve been trying to get my cats to forgive me for leaving them. :-)

Anyway, today’s lesson is one of my old favorites… Keep Swinging! Check out the chart for the afternoon. There are three potential trades on it according to my signals.

Let’s say I traded with 2 contracts. I would definitely have taken the first trade. We had a signal and we were at least riding along Alla’s Average, if not quite trending with it. I would have bailed when Bonnie’s Bars turned red, for a 1.5 point loss per contract. It had come within 1 tick of my first profit target, but didn’t get there. So, on two contracts I’d be down a total of 3 points.

Then the second signal comes. I would not take this signal, since price is chopping through Alla’s Average. But, if I did take it for some reason, I’d take one contract off at the first math line, and bail on the rest to bring the total trade to break-even. After I take a partial profit, I don’t like to let the overall trade become a loser. So, whether I took the trade or not, it wouldn’t affect todays bottom line.

Pretty depressing, no? We have to wait for freaking ever between trades, and they have been disappointments. Check out the rank sum histogram showing WIDE stretches of statistical indecision in the trend, too. Well, at least at this point the math lines are still about 2 points apart. So, the risk:reward on many trades still wouldn’t be too bad. Therefore, keep swinging!

The third trade makes the afternoon. It wasn’t my favorite looking action, but it was coming down from a double-top, and did poke through Alla’s Average, tap it, and then fall again. I’d wait for it to make a new low at 1400.25 to get in. So, you get in with 2 contracts, and bail on 1 for 2 points of profit, and the other for 4 points of profit. That’s a total of 6 points, giving you a net profit of 3 points for the afternoon.

$150 isn’t great for three hours of work, but the action was really sucky today, and I’m proud that we came out ahead in a pretty easy and methodical fashion. I’m still brainstorming ways to code “trending against alla’s average” so that my entry will pretty much be entirely mechanical. But, so far, no dice. It’s a complicated concept to turn into an algorithm, in my opinion.

I didn’t even get to turn on my platform today, so I have no idea how the markets went. But, according to Jessica, I don’t merely offer market information. No sirree. I am also a lifestyle advisor. So, here’s a tip from me to you: take a day or two off every now and then. The markets will still be there tomorrow. Get a swedish massage. Or alternately, massage a swede or two.