Insight into my trading

thecoach

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Dear Trade2Win Readers

I am starting this thread to give people an insight about my trading and my journey as a trader. If there are any questions coming up, please ask them straight away, I am looking forward to this experiment.

So, who I am: I am a guy trading now since about almost 10 years. During this journey I travelled a lot, built my own trading room for friends of mine and other traders I met, started to teach how to become a successful trader to some other people. But mostly I am still just interested in learning every day more from the markets and become better and better every day. As well I started to run some client money two years ago with a more long term approach. So how / what I trade:

While as I did a lot more of daytrading in the past, nowadays I daytrading only about 1-2 days per week. I only daytrade the SPY. Check for example last week. I did some trading on monday, ended up sligtly negative. Tuesday then was a nice winner. Didn't trade till friday and friday was a nice winning day again. Late me take friday as an example about my approach to daytrading: nice consolidation at highs, your read on CNBC that some bank (think was JP Morgan or so) is hardcore-rising its target for the S&P, all internals are supporting the long side and boom, nice breakout above the highs of thursday and wednesday. I remember Tuesday last week, friday was way easier for my style of trading, tuesday we had some strong selling in AAPL, hate that, techs are always a leading sector, always hate to trade again TECHs. Alrigth, so for about my daytrding, more to come. As you may already see, environment respectively internals are the most important factor to me, also the daily chart (when I first visited a friend of me trading in a propdesk in Chicago I first didn't understand why intraday scalping guys always have a daily chart on their screens) and the strcuture of the market, is it trending, consolidating etc.

Alright, here then my second approach to trading. More of a swing trading style, holding overnights etc. Mostly I trade breakouts from consolidatin patterns. RS/RW (Relative Strength and Weakness Principles) so what of important in this approach. I first anaylize the actual environment and rate it (long/short and then 1-5 for either long or short). Then I start opening positions ACCORDING to my rating of the general market. Some stock I am holding right now would be FTR. May not the best example, but still looking nice on a daily chart and basically supporting what I wanna see. Was just able to push above its 4.4 gap resistance from 14.02.2013 (February I mean, just not getting used to us-date-writing-style). Has a pretty nice short float of ~ > 20% and this last up-push on a daily chart occured on new momentum highs and price-volume relationship looks still nice to me on this one. Steady volume on up-move and wasn't able to break down after the strong volume on 07.05.2013. I strongly appreciated false kind of breakouts in either direction. You probably know the saying from fake moves come fast moves, mostly into the other direction.

Alright, those some insights. More is gonna come next week. If there are any questions coming up, please feel free to ask anytime.
 
Why into Risk and Money Management

Just this one still was important to me: This is my approach to trading. First you have to learn the skills to master the markets. Then it all comes down to risk and money management and of course mindset (the lower the TF you trade).

I am going the same style in my teaching. I hardly ever start teaching someone how to daytrade (had some exceptions when someone trades in a desk or has years of experience in daytrading). First you have to understand the swings on a daily chart, how to use internals, market sentiment etc. The first thing I usually show to people is how to swing trade the SPY and how to find low-risk-entry-points on a daily chart. By showing L2 windows and 5-min-charts you gonna confuse people and when you gonna start daytrading you gonna hardcore overtrade anyway, and yeah, your broker is gonna love you for that! Trade less earn more is a saying I strongly stick to, especially if someone is new to trading. Don't get catched in the random movements of the market.

As well, one other very, very important point is no think in $. Especially if you start having bigger targets in terms of bux, like may you wanna make 3Gs on a good day, thinking in $ is gonna be your enemy numero uno. This is true for swing trading, but still way more for Daytrading.
 
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It would be nice if you are sharing the aim of your trading like the number of pips which you reach on consistent basis so that other traders may gather some ideas.
 
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