Do you have an "edge" in your trading?

It is difficult to determine what is a trading edge. I think follow the trend is important. Although sometimes you are in the right direction, but it may have pull back and make you stop out. And sometimes when you wait for a pull back, it may go away. Trading is not easy, I am still learning.
 
The only thing I could say in reply to this is have a big stop loss and dont interfere with it
Dont get greedy have an exit point in mind and stick to it. (Fibonacci comes to mind)
Have a set number of pips you aim to make each day/week or month.
Dont get carried away doing multiple trades if you are having a bad dayhttp://www.trade2win.com/boards/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif
Aim to do no more than 3 trades in any one day, preferably only one:)
 
hokid said:
It is difficult to determine what is a trading edge. I think follow the trend is important. Although sometimes you are in the right direction, but it may have pull back and make you stop out. And sometimes when you wait for a pull back, it may go away. Trading is not easy, I am still learning.
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That was in my opinion one of the best posts in this thread so far. It goes all he way to addressing what I was saying in an earlier post (and with far less verbosity) about the relative simplicity of what it is we are actually about.

Working the pullbacks is one of the skills. Recognising when the 'pullback' is actually a reversal is just another little edge. I guess that's it. It's not just an edge, but lots of little edges all adding up to better than average; better than random.
 
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new_trader said:
It would make no difference if you let the ‘cat out of the bag’ because they wouldn’t understand what they were seeing and whether ‘it’ comes from bags or some other unknown place. They would see four legs, a tail, a pair of ears and eyes and convince themselves they were actually seeing something else. Perhaps a dog or horse or even a wildebeest! They would form knitting circles and try to come up with an answer by committee and you can bet your edge the answer would be anything but a cat…LULZ it is!
Click to expand...
Newer members please note; More animal analogies. They’re useful in that they don’t actually convey any useful information yet can be assigned significant gravitas by a skilled enough operator (of which there are none currently active on this site). Where they’re useful in camouflaging lack of knowledge, and experience is that they provide ample opportunity for ambiguity and bags of room for manoeuvre as you can never actually be held to account for anything remotely related to the world of trading within them and, here’s the icing on the cake, nor the converse. There is absolutely nothing there at which to shake a stick. We shouldn’t worry about our time being wasted as presumably we all have plenty of it to waste in the first place by simply being here. However, the thing is, these analogies didn’t work the first time and once the charade was discovered, the proponent was given a thorough drubbing and finally expelled from the kingdom. They have become part of the folklore of this site and reference material for jokes and humour, as have most of those members most closely associated with the Chief Bullsh!tter. Most of these have since had the sense and good manners (and shame LOL) to dissociate themselves from the site. Those that don’t possess even this degree of awareness remain, trotting out the same old analogies hoping they can net a new bunch of newbies.

It didn’t work the first time and they still don’t. But it doesn’t stop this crowd carrying on doing what doesn’t work. Bless. Somebody has to take the other side of our trades. LOL.

There’s also something psychologically disturbing about the ability of a member of a class (the class being t2w in this case) not recognising it’s membership of that class and pointing at that class and condemning them to something or other without the realisation that it is a member of that class.

On the other hand, it’s quite understandable that NT would keep with the animal theme, it’s what he’s comfortable with, given he was Chief Wizard’s self-proclaimed (and rather embarrassingly for all, self-appointed) Chief Poodle.

He still bears the scars of having thrown in his lot with them and having scampered ‘over there’ wearing his best purple collar, to find he was not accepted into their inner circle (or couldn’t stump up the dosh, whichever) and was left whimpering and scratching at the door of the premium lounge. I think they throw him a bone now and again.

Poodle, if you do see your master again, do give him my regards and tell him I recommend buying better equipment as those discount warehouse drogues are an accident waiting to happen. They’ll snap a mast with the first stiff breeze.
 
Connie Brown...The Degrees...To whom it may concern,

Keep trying...even use google if you have to. Best of luck with your trading.
 
TheBramble said:
That was in my opinion one of the best posts in this thread so far. It goes all he way to addressing what I was saying in an earlier post (and with far less verbosity) about the relative simplicity of what it is we are actually about.

Working the pullbacks is one of the skills. Recognising when the 'pullback' is actually a reversal is just another little edge. I guess that's it. It's not just an edge, but lots of little edges all adding up to better than average; better than random.
Click to expand...

Couldn't agree more.
That is the crux of the matter
You've nailed it with that comment
 
I have to say, I find it quite disturbing how much unqualified generic advice there is on this thread. Not only that - but there's also the back-patting that goes on with people agreeing with it.

There are many ways to trade, I am sure the HFT boys will have a laugh at "Trade no more than 3 times a day". I think Paul Rotter would laugh at it too. A friend of mine that day trades a fund regularly has 20-30 positions on. Another friend only ever has 1 or 2. Horses for courses. All these generic statements are just regurgitations of what's online. Wouldn't it be nice to back this kind of thing up with a bit more detail?

"Follow the trend" is a very generic statement. Is it given as some sort of panacea? Certainly, the person that wrote it is not day trading the ES. If they were, then they would certainly be losing money. If you trade a market like the ES and you can't trade ranges, then you are going to lose your shirt. Sure - 1 out of 5/6 days is a trend day - Friday was one. More often than not - on the first move to within 5 ticks of the overnight high, you are going to be making a move down before you will move up. The 10th Jan is a lovely example. By 10:00am we were down to the overnight low, it pushed through it 1 point and reversed. From there it moved up to the overnight high and bounced off that into the close. This was the total action for the day. Just one 10 point trading range.

That's the rule, now the exception - yesterday - Friday 14th 2011 , the ES opened down from the prior days close, sold off just one point and then reversed up. I was watching this on the Tape at that point, I could see what happened but sadly, I hesitated. I'd let the market move 6 ticks up and for me, that's too much. So, I kicked myself and passed on the long entry.

There was news at 9:55 and 10:00. The 9:55 news saw a very nice sell off and at that point I got long at 1279, which was 4 ticks away from the bottom of that sell off. The market was erratic, there was a bit of slippage and I was pretty happy with that entry. The plan was to stay in through the 10:00 am news (not as high impact as the 9:55) if we got a big enough move to the upside. At 9:59, I bailed with just 1 point as I didn't think this was enough buffer.

I stayed watching the market for a while after that - but even though looking back, Friday was an 'obvious' trend day, it wasn't that obvious to me at the time. Certainly, the way it kept pushing up, then moving sideways made it less than obvious to me, so I called it a day. Had it been a range day, I'd have expected a move back down at 1284.25. There was a swing high there but nothing to convince me it was going to be significant, so I passed on shorting it.

Of course, I could sit here kicking myself for not taking that first long. In retrospect, chasing that trade would have been beneficial as I'd have been able to scale out and benefit from the trend day. As it is though, I gave myself an "A" grade in my journal for sticking to the plan.

The trend may be your friend but this is very dependent on the type of trading you do and the market you trade. I'd advise taking no generic advice on trading because in my opinion, trading is not a generic skill. You need to specialise.
 
DionysusToast said:
The trend may be your friend but this is very dependent on the type of trading you do and the market you trade. I'd advise taking no generic advice on trading because in my opinion, trading is not a generic skill. You need to specialise.
Click to expand...



There is a lot of truth in this. Even ES and say YM are very different, and benefit from different approaches.
 
DionysusToast said:
"Follow the trend" is a very generic statement. Is it given as some sort of panacea?
Click to expand...

Saying 'the trend is your friend' is only half of the saying.. it's similar to when people wisely intone 'great minds think alike'. The second half of that expression if of course 'but fools seldom differ'.

The trend is your friend, until the bend at the end. Getting on a move is fairly easy, it's how you get off that counts.
 
meanreversion said:
DT, quite a diatribe, are you becoming an angry old man?? :)
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It's not a diatribe - it's merely information to backup a view. Something sorely lacking in a lot of posts.

Would you prefer me to just repeat trading cliches like everyone else? :p

I'll try to dumb it down in the future... my apologies.

For now - would you like the blonde version of the above post?
 
meanreversion said:
Saying 'the trend is your friend' is only half of the saying.. it's similar to when people wisely intone 'great minds think alike'. The second half of that expression if of course 'but fools seldom differ'.

The trend is your friend, until the bend at the end. Getting on a move is fairly easy, it's how you get off that counts.
Click to expand...

Thanks for expanding the cliche for us...

Like I say - it's a generalisation that does not apply to all markets at all times.
 
No, I've never found trend systems to work particularly well on ES, it's very much a day trader's market. For that reason, I don't touch it. I recognise that it's a bit of a driver, but the trends aren't as clean as 'singular' markets like EUR/USD or copper.
 
Correct MR - which is why some other generic advice we hear is also useless.

"Dont try to sell tops & buy bottoms" is another good piece of generic trading advice. In a trading range - what else are you supposed to do? Buy breakouts?

In a trading range, you wait until you think you are at the top of the range and sell it. How you determine 'top of range' is of course part of your e*g*...
 
DionysusToast said:
Correct MR - which is why some other generic advice we hear is also useless.

"Dont try to sell tops & buy bottoms" is another good piece of generic trading advice. In a trading range - what else are you supposed to do? Buy breakouts?

In a trading range, you wait until you think you are at the top of the range and sell it. How you determine 'top of range' is of course part of your e*g*...
Click to expand...

You need to invent a pithy, rhyming aphorism for day trading ES.

Buy the dip, then you will champagne sip?
Sell the rally, increase your tally???
 
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