Trading Naked - Part 2
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Bloodhound
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Morning everyone,
Hope some managed to get the cable ORB. I didn't sadly! Here's one I took last night though on M15 which has worked out quite well. I think the time of day for taking the trade was probably questionable but the PA looked excellent IMO - break of a level, retest and then a LrH below the level. Woke up this morning to see things trucking along quite nicely.
All the best
Rob
Hope some managed to get the cable ORB. I didn't sadly! Here's one I took last night though on M15 which has worked out quite well. I think the time of day for taking the trade was probably questionable but the PA looked excellent IMO - break of a level, retest and then a LrH below the level. Woke up this morning to see things trucking along quite nicely.
All the best
Rob
Bloodhound
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And one that didn't work out so well!! The original TP was hit which was fine but then a brief move up at 9.45pm last night, combined with a 15 pip spread??!!!?? meant I got stopped out by a couple of pips - predictably GJ then dropped 300 pips......
Bloodhound
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Cable M5 looking nice for a retest of the breakout level?
foredog
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Just sat here wondering why my order at 16337 didn't trigger....guess who put in 16637!!!!
Sums up my week!
Bloodhound
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TP hit and half off the table
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Bloodhound
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Just sat here wondering why my order at 16337 didn't trigger....guess who put in 16637!!!!
Sums up my week!
If it makes you feel any better the original stop I placed for that GJ trade above was at 430 something.....
Bloodhound
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Win some, lose some. Other half stopped out at b/e +1. Now looking for a LrH to possibly form below the ORB level which would signify (to me) weakness for price to travel higher.....
Bloodhound
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Interesting times for cable this morning....
Bloodhound
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Picture perfect stuff this morning IMO. If only it was always like this!!
Bloodhound
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Possibly could have a but more out of this one but was struggling to find a logical place to lock some profit in so placed my stop in the range just above the 0.9 level.
Bloodhound
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LrH off this zone might be nice for a shorting opportunity?
Bloodhound
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Eurjpy
Following on from my last post about this pair it has now decided to move off in the other direction so back to watching and waiting.....
Following on from my last post about this pair it has now decided to move off in the other direction so back to watching and waiting.....
mb325
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Oil 5m/15m
Hello all,
When cable is being boring I tend to turn to crude which i've found can lend itself nicely to this style. If my approach seems inconsistent it's because I probably only look at it a few times a day and so miss a lot of trades i might have made if i was trading only this market!
Hello all,
When cable is being boring I tend to turn to crude which i've found can lend itself nicely to this style. If my approach seems inconsistent it's because I probably only look at it a few times a day and so miss a lot of trades i might have made if i was trading only this market!
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mb325
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And indeed as i was preparing that post missed out on this!
Perfect setup for me as price comes down into a support zone, forms a nice LH which lets you have a nice tight stop (i'm considering switching to a fixed stop distance instead of logical as if its not gonna go your way straightaway its better to be out), and then bombs.
It just came back up and retested the BO level but there was a possibly 80+ points there for a risk of 35 points.
Perfect setup for me as price comes down into a support zone, forms a nice LH which lets you have a nice tight stop (i'm considering switching to a fixed stop distance instead of logical as if its not gonna go your way straightaway its better to be out), and then bombs.
It just came back up and retested the BO level but there was a possibly 80+ points there for a risk of 35 points.
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Bloodhound
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Great charts Mitch and nice to see the principles being applied to a different market. Looking at that last chart would you have been looking for a TP around the consolidation from the last move down or are you looking to have fixed TP's?
mb325
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That's something I've got to try and figure out and define a plan for, as at the moment i'm really concentrating on entries. I'm leaning towards taking half off at 1R or even 2R and letting the rest run, maybe aiming for the most obvious point of S/R.
Bloodhound
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Hoping for some advice from experienced traders
At the risk of derailing this thread, although I hope what I am about to say / ask may be extremely relevant given the discretionary nature of trading based solely on support and resistance, I wanted to discuss 'filtering'. This comes from a discussion I had with a trader yesterday and also from a current discussion on another thread and has got me thinking.
A long time ago I used to have aspirations of playing guitar in a rock band. For years I practiced and, without wanting to blow my own trumpet, I got quite good. Anyway, during the course of my time playing guitar, I remember reading an interview with Clapton (I think it was) who said that what denotes a good guitar solo from a bad one is not the notes that are played but the notes that aren't. As I developed as a guitarist there were many 'turning points' along the way where suddenly stuff that a few weeks / months before had seemed impossible, suddenly became second nature - be they learning a new scale through to an advanced technique etc. What I did notice, and I was very much an improvisation based (discretionary!) guitarist, was that when it came to playing live on stage the more experienced I became, the less I actually played during a set but, conversely, the better my peers felt I had become as a guitarist. I'm sure the analogy to trading is already pretty obvious.
Trading by price alone is, by its very nature, a pretty discretionary form of trading IMO. Set-ups can be learnt, levels pre-drawn etc. but, at the end of the day, it is 100% at the trader's discretion which trades to take and which ones not to. Since I started trading this way I know I have started to 'filter' even my M5 cable trades to some extent. To give an example - if cable has made a big run one day I may avoid trading her M5 the next day as I am 'expecting' there may be at least a day's worth of consolidation on the cards. Another being that, if I were trading a break of resistance I would probably look for clear air of about 15-20 up to the next resistance level to avoid a possible bounce back through my stop.
Of late I have been trading a few other pairs using M15 but essentially using the same levels, set-ups etc. that I use on cable M5. Now some of my M15 trades are working and some aren't - with the benefit of hindsight one thing I have noticed (and please don't laugh at my naivety) is that in the main the M15 trades that work tend to conform to H1 / H4 trend direction. (This is not so much the case on M5 as it is, to my mind anyway, a very different timeframe.) I have also found myself gravitating on M15 to SbR and RbS levels rather than any old support or resistance level, regardless of what timeframe it is derived from.
Anyway, to my question. All over this forum (and other forums, books etc.) there are people advocating 'taking every set-up' etc. regardless of what one may think about it, but then I read somewhere recently that instinct is a powerful tool in trading and that one shouldn't simply take every set-up as it appears. Now the question is, some trades work and some don't - even 'the best' set-up will fail, so should one, to an extent be trading on instinct / gut? Sometimes when I scan through my charts a set-up just leaps out at me and screams 'trade me' (AUDUSD from Thursday being a classic example) - should one aim to avoid any trade that doesn't provoke that thought / emotion etc.? We can couch our entry methodology in rules such as trade with the H4 trend etc. etc. but, quite often, those trades fail as well, but the trades that jump off the chart at one, which may not have quite ticked all one's rule boxes, work. Why is this? In musical terms I know that, if a song were being played in G, overlaying a guitar solo in F is going to sound terrible, so maybe there is a contextual issue in trading that my eyes are seeing but that I'm not managing to define in terms of a set of rules to hone my entry methodology. What is the best way to overcome this problem (if indeed it is a problem) - I am guessing that it is a case of analysis of trades after they have closed to look for common themes between the ones that worked and the ones that didn't. Should I actually care as I am in fact a firm believer that the set-up / entry is irrelevant and that it is how one deals with the trade once it is triggered that will define whether one is profitable or not?
I would be very grateful for any thoughts anyone has on what I've written above. Maybe I should stop thinking so much about it and just accept that I will have winners and losers just as night turns to day? I just wonder whether Clapton's take on playing guitar may not have a lot of relevance to trading.
I hope I haven't derailed the thread - to me anyway, this style of trading isn't simply a case ticking boxes and pulling the trigger. It interests me as I have seen this moment when one has a chart screaming 'trade me' alluded to a number of times by both beginners such as myself and experienced traders and wonder what it's all about.
Hope everyone has a great weekend.
Rob
At the risk of derailing this thread, although I hope what I am about to say / ask may be extremely relevant given the discretionary nature of trading based solely on support and resistance, I wanted to discuss 'filtering'. This comes from a discussion I had with a trader yesterday and also from a current discussion on another thread and has got me thinking.
A long time ago I used to have aspirations of playing guitar in a rock band. For years I practiced and, without wanting to blow my own trumpet, I got quite good. Anyway, during the course of my time playing guitar, I remember reading an interview with Clapton (I think it was) who said that what denotes a good guitar solo from a bad one is not the notes that are played but the notes that aren't. As I developed as a guitarist there were many 'turning points' along the way where suddenly stuff that a few weeks / months before had seemed impossible, suddenly became second nature - be they learning a new scale through to an advanced technique etc. What I did notice, and I was very much an improvisation based (discretionary!) guitarist, was that when it came to playing live on stage the more experienced I became, the less I actually played during a set but, conversely, the better my peers felt I had become as a guitarist. I'm sure the analogy to trading is already pretty obvious.
Trading by price alone is, by its very nature, a pretty discretionary form of trading IMO. Set-ups can be learnt, levels pre-drawn etc. but, at the end of the day, it is 100% at the trader's discretion which trades to take and which ones not to. Since I started trading this way I know I have started to 'filter' even my M5 cable trades to some extent. To give an example - if cable has made a big run one day I may avoid trading her M5 the next day as I am 'expecting' there may be at least a day's worth of consolidation on the cards. Another being that, if I were trading a break of resistance I would probably look for clear air of about 15-20 up to the next resistance level to avoid a possible bounce back through my stop.
Of late I have been trading a few other pairs using M15 but essentially using the same levels, set-ups etc. that I use on cable M5. Now some of my M15 trades are working and some aren't - with the benefit of hindsight one thing I have noticed (and please don't laugh at my naivety) is that in the main the M15 trades that work tend to conform to H1 / H4 trend direction. (This is not so much the case on M5 as it is, to my mind anyway, a very different timeframe.) I have also found myself gravitating on M15 to SbR and RbS levels rather than any old support or resistance level, regardless of what timeframe it is derived from.
Anyway, to my question. All over this forum (and other forums, books etc.) there are people advocating 'taking every set-up' etc. regardless of what one may think about it, but then I read somewhere recently that instinct is a powerful tool in trading and that one shouldn't simply take every set-up as it appears. Now the question is, some trades work and some don't - even 'the best' set-up will fail, so should one, to an extent be trading on instinct / gut? Sometimes when I scan through my charts a set-up just leaps out at me and screams 'trade me' (AUDUSD from Thursday being a classic example) - should one aim to avoid any trade that doesn't provoke that thought / emotion etc.? We can couch our entry methodology in rules such as trade with the H4 trend etc. etc. but, quite often, those trades fail as well, but the trades that jump off the chart at one, which may not have quite ticked all one's rule boxes, work. Why is this? In musical terms I know that, if a song were being played in G, overlaying a guitar solo in F is going to sound terrible, so maybe there is a contextual issue in trading that my eyes are seeing but that I'm not managing to define in terms of a set of rules to hone my entry methodology. What is the best way to overcome this problem (if indeed it is a problem) - I am guessing that it is a case of analysis of trades after they have closed to look for common themes between the ones that worked and the ones that didn't. Should I actually care as I am in fact a firm believer that the set-up / entry is irrelevant and that it is how one deals with the trade once it is triggered that will define whether one is profitable or not?
I would be very grateful for any thoughts anyone has on what I've written above. Maybe I should stop thinking so much about it and just accept that I will have winners and losers just as night turns to day? I just wonder whether Clapton's take on playing guitar may not have a lot of relevance to trading.
I hope I haven't derailed the thread - to me anyway, this style of trading isn't simply a case ticking boxes and pulling the trigger. It interests me as I have seen this moment when one has a chart screaming 'trade me' alluded to a number of times by both beginners such as myself and experienced traders and wonder what it's all about.
Hope everyone has a great weekend.
Rob
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morgan_edge
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Your eric clapton (?) quote reminds me of a line I remember from 'the Simpsons' where Lisa chides a man who is furious at having to listen to a freeform jazz saxophonist: "You have to listen to the notes [he's] not playing!" she says. the man retorts "pffft....I can do that at home!"
I suppose the idea of taking every trade regardless is possibly more suited to a very systematical trader where their ideas have been backtested to death. They know their stats and their expected returns and now let their system do its job and take the trades based on the criteria they have defined, whatever their 'traders insticnt' says.
There do seem to be trades that 'jump out at you' I agree. In my earlier days I would trade my live account and slowly lose money, and then a trade would just JUMP out at me, and id quickly log into my DEMO account and place the trade which inevitably worked! Talk about backwards trading! Save the 'good' trades for the demo account! , lol. I guess in an ideal world you would only take the trades that 'provoke emotion' as you say, although, that then opens up a new psychological battle in terms of resisting temptations for trades that look 'quite good'. Then you watch it meet its profit target without you, start questioning youself all over again etc etc.
Also, as you say, seeing as you believe that the entry/setup is irrelevant anyway, then this whole issue is kind of a moot point for you, no?
I suppose the idea of taking every trade regardless is possibly more suited to a very systematical trader where their ideas have been backtested to death. They know their stats and their expected returns and now let their system do its job and take the trades based on the criteria they have defined, whatever their 'traders insticnt' says.
There do seem to be trades that 'jump out at you' I agree. In my earlier days I would trade my live account and slowly lose money, and then a trade would just JUMP out at me, and id quickly log into my DEMO account and place the trade which inevitably worked! Talk about backwards trading! Save the 'good' trades for the demo account! , lol. I guess in an ideal world you would only take the trades that 'provoke emotion' as you say, although, that then opens up a new psychological battle in terms of resisting temptations for trades that look 'quite good'. Then you watch it meet its profit target without you, start questioning youself all over again etc etc.
Also, as you say, seeing as you believe that the entry/setup is irrelevant anyway, then this whole issue is kind of a moot point for you, no?
Bloodhound
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Thank you very much for the reply and clarifying what I think may have been confusion on my part between the systematic and discretionary trader. I think what you say about avoiding the 'quite good' trades is probably one of the hardest bits about trading with a fairly non-systematic approach and I would be lying if I didn't admit that I still endure a daily psychological battle with myself on this issue - I hope time and experience will help to counter this! Interestingly (and as a complete aside) I found getting hold of a couple of 23" widescreens and physically stepping back from my chart before placing orders has helped a lot in 'filtering' out some of the poorer set-ups etc.
Having had a think about your reply I wonder if these moments when a trade jumps out at one are actually simply moments when price action displays a visual picture that our subconcious remembers as being one with a high degree of statistical success aligned to it. Maybe it should be 'trade what you feel, not what you think'!!??
With regards to my 'irrelevant' statement. I know I have mentioned this before and I think, with hindsight, that it has been a very poor choice of wording on my part. I do believe that having strict entry criteria is extremely important - what I think I should say is that I place considerably more emphasis on the 'what happens next' part of the trade and how I react to the way price behaves once I am in a trade.
All the best
Rob
Having had a think about your reply I wonder if these moments when a trade jumps out at one are actually simply moments when price action displays a visual picture that our subconcious remembers as being one with a high degree of statistical success aligned to it. Maybe it should be 'trade what you feel, not what you think'!!??
With regards to my 'irrelevant' statement. I know I have mentioned this before and I think, with hindsight, that it has been a very poor choice of wording on my part. I do believe that having strict entry criteria is extremely important - what I think I should say is that I place considerably more emphasis on the 'what happens next' part of the trade and how I react to the way price behaves once I am in a trade.
All the best
Rob
