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…
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!
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.
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.
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.
… 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.
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.
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.
Had to do the video one day late, as I was exhausted on Friday by the time I quit trading. I had stayed up all night the night before fixing up the website. Turns out, I was overdue for a wordpress update since spammers had found a way to put hidden links in all my posts. I would encourage all wordpress bloggers to check their header.php and footer.php every now and then for code you didn’t put there.
Anyway, trading-wise, Friday was a pretty good day. My ultra-conservative signals didn’t fire too many times, but when they did it was a good opportunity. Very nice.
I come in at about the 46 minute mark. But you may want to watch Bill and Glen’s sections. Glen previews a new scalping method he’s working on, which looks pretty cool. Here is a link to the streaming video:
It was great that there were so many questions. I enjoyed the Q&A part. On the other hand, there were so many questions that I only got to show off a small fraction of the elite package I’ve made available. I was able to go over quite a bit more at my first seminar.
I downloaded the latest tradestation build tonight, and played with the simulator and new matrix features. I’m pretty pleased with the new stuff. I know a lot of folks say “too little, too late,” but I have actually been pretty happy with TS.
I made three trades today, and quit around noon. Not a bad lifestyle. It was 1 loss and 2 wins, as you will see.
I am getting pretty happy with my current setup. It incorporates several old and new ideas together in a way that gives very few signals with (seemingly) high probabilities of winning. I have yet to convert it into a strategy to test. The problem with “testing” my manual trading strategies is that my exits are very discretionary even if my entries are mostly not. But, I could go for a simple money management scheme and at least get a feel for what the entries test like that way. We’ll see. It’s only just now possible to even try it, thanks to the ‘elite functions’ opening up the needed indicators for use in strats.
Speaking of the elite series: The ‘elite’ set of functions and indicators I’ve released through eotpro is growing at a nice pace. To date, there are 7 more functions and 6 more indicators planned for the May release, and I know of a couple more I’m trying to fit in. Thanks to everyone who has subscribed, or is considering it. I hope you are enjoying all the new freedom it affords you when piecing together indicators and strategies. I know I am!
