my journal 2

This would be a perfect time to go LONG on CL. On weekly low, december's low, time is right, it's highly oversold... but I don't have the margin.

See? What did I tell you... but hell no, I had to get long hours ago, on the EUR.



And now the EUR is not doing anything at all and my position will be unprofitable as usual, because I didn't wait for s/r levels to be reached, on any of the futures I am monitoring. And yet it is a daily event. Only I feel like I'm going to miss the action if I don't enter immediately, as soon as I get home from work. This doesn't happen on the chart, because time is on a different dimension there: I can stop it and I can make it go forward. So there's no anxiety, no feeling of potentially missing something, feeling that you have when the chart in front of you is moving on its own, and not just when you make it go one week ahead by clicking a button.

If there's something, a lesson that I should retain from becoming profitable at the chart game, is that s/r levels, and I mean the exact s/r levels that you have plotted on the chart, will be reached. Not always, but often enough to make it worth waiting. And that is why I should wait. I should retain this lesson. And if I will, my trading will become profitable. I need to learn to wait. Not weeks like on that chart game, but hours. I need to be able to watch the chart and wait hours (or insert my limit orders as I wrote this morning).

Here's a couple of interesting quotes from Market Wizards by Jack Schwager, which I've been reading, very slowly. Today I've read another two pages and I finished the second trader, Bruce Kovner.

The number one thing i noticed about him and the first trader interviewed by Schwager, Michael Marcus, is that they do both technical analysis and fundamental analysis. And since they're so successful, I was thinking that maybe I should do something about fundamental analysis as well. But in this field I believe that nothing is better than a little bit, because a little bit of news could totally screw up my sound technical analysis (poorly implemented but sound). So, since it's not easy to even start studying fundamental analysis without screwing up my trading, I will probably do nothing rather than study it superficially (since I don't have enough time and energy to do it seriously), but I've at least learned to check out this briefings page once a day:
http://www.dailyfx.com/calendar/

Not because I will understand any fundamental analysis from it, but because I'll know why and when the market will violently swerve up and down for a few minutes, or understand why the market is not moving (prior to some news). This does not screw up my technical analysis, and it adds some useful knowledge. Of course I will go nowhere near interpreting anything about the news being released at those times.

Anyway, here's the two quotes I appreciated by Kovner.

The first one, on the stoploss:
Kovner on stoplosses: the classical definition actually, nothing surprising. But it's good because it makes me trust the concept of stoploss more.

Kovner on false breakouts and technical vs. fundamental analysis:
It's a very dense book. I would say my favorite and most useful even trading-related book. On the other hand, the most useful trading resource to date still is.. the chart game.

Hi Travis
Have a nice one.

Yeah, thanks, I hope I'll have a good one. Thanks for stopping by.

Ok, now that I am pretty much profitable on the Chart Game, I will try the trade navigator by genesis, which is slightly different and closer to real trading.

1) I will trade the futures I trade for real
2) you can't make time go by with one click but have to wait for time to pass by itself (e.g.: you can't push a button and make it advance by one hour), whether fast or slow (you can set that part)

If I'll be able to succeed at my own futures, at a faster pace, but without being able to fully control the timing of each bar, I'll be even closer to being profitable at discretionary trading. Then I'd have to slow down what I'm doing, if that's possible. Eliminate my compulsiveness and so on.

I tried the genesis software, for the second time, for half an hour, and I don't like it.

First, it doesn't allow me to see data from further than 15 days, and this is a problem because I remember what happened in the last 15 days.

Second, I don't think it's very well made. It's not good software. It's not awful, but it's definitely not excellent. IB's TWS is like the space shuttle compared to it. Chart are hard to configure... it's a mess.

The chart game, with much less pretense, achieves more and better. That guy is a genius and a perfectionist. And that web site is very understated. It's the best trading resource around, but doesn't get credit for it.

Here's a couple of interesting quotes from Market Wizards by Jack Schwager, which I've been reading, very slowly. Today I've read another two pages and I started the third trader, Richard Dennis.

On trading secrets:
On luck and probability: