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Long time, no write! Yes, I’m here an NOT trading after my BIDU blowup. Working my Seven Step Plan, testing out some ideas on paper and working on my emotions outside of the markets.

My big quest for a system is basically how to tell a trend change / reversal from a shallow retrace / continuation. Quotetracker has a built-in chart type called Renko Charts. This link describes what they are very well. Basically, they are like a PnF chart, only less cryptic IMO. Also, time is compressible, like in tick charts or volume-candle charts, so there’s no information or signals during slow times.

I was playing with Renkos because they provide a solution to the reversal / retrace problem. The trend is defined by the brick pattern. It’s not subjective at all! Choose a Renko brick size (say, $0.10) and you’ve got the trend spelled out. here’s an example I paper-traded in GRMN this morning. I made 10P’s (a P is a paper-traded R for those counting at home):

Nice, huh! The only problem with Renko charts is that they are a trend following method, so in non-trending markets you get whipsawed like crazy (see all the arrows on that GRMN chart? I would have given back lots of P’s through the rest of the day.) I’m trying to play with some different methods to only take signals that have better odds for a trending move. I’ve played with PPO, a stochastic RSI, and choppiness index, but nothing earth-shaking so far. Any ideas on how to cut down on whipsaws would be great!

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My video for wednesday… long live the mighty box play! I am still struggling with the same basic issue I’ve had since I started with futures… which is… win 0.5, win 1, lose 2, win 0.5…. which you might notice, adds up to 0! Either my winners need to get bigger or my losers need to get smaller. One thing’s for sure… I am going to conquer these markets… just need to keep adjusting my habits.

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Here is the video I promised about my TS matrix setup. Feel free to ask any questions.

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Sorry, no time for video today … I’ll go over today’s trades tomorrow, maybe. Another 0.5 here, 0.5 there kinda day. I took a loss toward the end of the day though, which left me pretty much flat. Them’s the breaks.

I also had a request to make a video about the Tradestation matrix, which I’ll do soon.

• TradeStation Forum - Bringing It All Together
  The eotpro tradestation forum thread
  (tags: tradestation)

I show a couple ideas I’m playing with in this video. I made a new scalping entry indicator that I’m just watching for now. And, I’ve found an indicator that tracks the major trends well enough that I don’t need to draw trend channels anymore. Pretty nice. Trading today was kinda tough, because of the low volume and the fact that we were stuck to the vwap most of the time. I made a few trades that were all for like .5 or .25 pts. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

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This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com

Last week I tried trading without my training wheels. I removed everything but volume, and tried to determine what the market was doing. I had mixed success, but didn’t blow up or anything.

On Thursday I was searching the net for information on the Darvas Method. I ran across one of the more thoughtful posts on ET.

To quote Duref Mudgins, “NOTHING FUCKING WORKS ALL THE TIME. WHEN IT WORKS, YOU USE IT. WHEN IT DOESN’T, YOU LOOK FOR WHAT IS WORKING.”

The main reason the training wheels worked for me was that it kept me on the right side of the trend. So this week, I did my best not to fight the trend. Let’s see if next week, I can do a better job of riding it out.

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• Tori Amos Bootlegs
  (tags: tori Music)
• TradeStation Forum - Tips on Posting
  Tips on how to make good posts in the TS forums (with regard to formatting and attachments etc.)
  (tags: tradestation)
• TradeStation Forum - Fractal Dimension
  Fractal dimension TS code
  (tags: fractal tradestation)

Up 2 ES pts today, which is fine I guess… but… I really think the main thing holding me back right now in ES is my lack of appetite for risk. I have been trying to stick to a 2pt stop loss or better. But, many good trades simply require a larger stop than that. So, I spend a lot of time on the sidelines watching other people make money. It may be that I need to just accept 3pt stops so that I’ll be eligible for more moves. If I do that, though, I really need to make sure that I’m making more profit per trade to match the increased risk. I’ll have to think that over.

Even though there wasn’t much volume today, I thought it was a pretty fun day, with plenty of opportunity. Hope you had a good day, and a good week.

Hopefully next week I will get back into stocks a little more. I’ve been staying away from them while things are so volatile (I’ve noticed some other blogging daytraders having trouble this week, which confirms my thinking, as far as I’m concerned!). I’ll feel better about my 2 ES pts if I also have mad stock money flowing in!

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This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com

If you want to read How I Made Two Million Dollars in the Stock Market for free, check out this link. I used the @spam.la (thanks again Richard) email address to get it.

Edit: It looks like I was suckered into thinking you could actually get something for free. Prospectus pointed it out. Either those are the shortest chapters in the world, or the whole book is not there. Click here for the next chapter (LOL).

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I wrote an article about the Box Play. It’s long-winded, but whatever. Decided to go for .pdf rather than make a long post here.

Box Play Manual

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Check out mothaFucka and The Blind Man! This dude has talent.

You gotta love the name.

This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com

This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com

I blew up 30% of my account today. I made some trades earlier in the day, a few -1R losers, you know, my usual.

I tried to scalp some BIDU after the close, making the spread. It was working pretty well–I had one good win and one scratch. I was long 30 shares when the earnings news came out, and BIDU collapsed. I tried to sell, but my platform’s servers apparently stop at 5:00 ET, and my order was stuck, unfilled, but I couldn’t cancel it either to try to sell.

I finally reached someone by phone, and they sold my shares around 319. That’s a $450 loss on my $1700 account.

It was dumb of me to be holding into the earnings report. It was not my fault that the order server screwed me. Still, I am responsible for my trading results, and I don’t blame anyone but me.

I look at this hole, and I think that it will take me years just to trade back to where I was when I started, and that assumes that I’m profitable from here, which doesn’t seem too likely from my past experiences.

On the other hand, I could re-fund to my original level fairly painlessly by adding more cash to my account. I even got a cash award at work recently for $300, which almost offsets this loss. But if I can turn a $2000 account into $1300, I could also turn a $200,000 account into $130,000, and that would ruin me. I’m playing small deliberately so that mistakes don’t ruin my life. But a loss of this % is still devastating.

I feel, again, like quite a failure. I have no discipline, because I keep trading when I should be following my dumb 7 step plan. I hate my job, and so I force trades to have something to enjoy during the day, something to put my heart into. But this isn’t what I want. :(

Maybe now this pain of losing will be greater than the pain of change, and I’ll finally get my head together, start from the beginning and get discipline, a system to follow, and have a chance at success.

Thanks for reading.

This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com

This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com

I started this week with a plan, and with the exception of Monday have failed miserably. I haven’t lost much money, but my trigger finger has been too quick. Its the same old story.

Its time to forget about trading, and enjoy myself. I invited DT, but he’s too dominant for this sort of thing.

The blogorazzi snapped this photo of me last year. As you can see, 99% of the world is more dominant than me.

This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com

I enjoyed my trend channel stuff much more at the higher level, today. MUCH more. Far fewer adjustments to the channels needed.

I didn’t have time to show gold in the video, so here’s gold:

Pretty choppy all day… the one good opportunity was the break of the up-channel around 8:30 Central time. By 9:38 when the downchannel was defined, we had a single low-volume push down to toward the low of the channel. Since pushes down on down channels should be high-volume, I started getting ready for the next up channel to form. Instead, I got pseudo-random chop for the rest of the day. Oh well. So much for those trending commodities, huh?

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