Keep Calm and Don't Move Your Stops.....

A little risk management saves a lot of fan cleaning!

The Purpose of Life is Joy!!

Thursday, December 8, 2016

-1.0%.....-1.0% for the week

So today was a fail in the sense that I made the same mistake twice. I was long with a ten tick stop but needed 11-12 ticks. I thought I had moved it the needed couple of ticks but when I turned loose of the mouse, I guess I moved my hand or something. Anyway, I had a ten tick stop, which got hit almost immediately. Thing was though, it was to the very tick. Exactly ten ticks. The premise of the trade was still valid so I took it again. With the same ten tick stop thinking now way it revisits that level again.....sure enough, another exactly ten tick stop out....on the very next bar.

First trade was with full size resulting in a .50% loss, second time was with a single lot bringing me to about .70% loss. After a bit, a double top formed and I got short after it stalled and that did a one tick wonder and reversed for another quick hit. Total now is about -.85% plus commissions and I'm getting close to -1.0%. Finally decided it would go back to the weekly VWAP at 50.89 and got long on the break of the double top but that is not in my trade plan and the risk was very high in terms of ticks so I just closed it out at +1 or 2 ticks. Net after commissions was about -.95% so I've rounded to -1.0% to keep it even.

Pass or fail. Direction, pass. Entry locations, pass. Planned exit locations, Still unknown but I think a pass. Stop Execution, FAIL.

I've made some charting changes after watching the last few days. I've reduced my input to three charts. A daily with trend indicator, a 30 minute with the same trend indicator plus weekly VWAP denoting value areas and a 5 minute with the same trend indicator. The idea is to simply trade in the higher time frame trend direction.

Today the 30 minute chart was in potential reversal mode while the 5 minute chart was in full long mode. My first trade was a short that went around 10 ticks or so but because the 30M was in transition, I elected to move to BE and let it play out. I had a feeling the buying I saw come in was real and would drive price up beyond the 5M break down zone and it did.

After that, longs only until it started looking weak again. This idea was wrong and had I not been stupid with the stop placements earlier, I would have still been in the longs and let the short idea pass me by. I think so anyway.

Regardless, I feel better about the WAY I lost today than I have in the past. Two reasons, I was reading the market much better where last week and the few weeks prior, I've felt sort of blind to what the market wanted to do and secondly, the losses were execution errors and not analysis errors. Both of these are encouraging to me as I've been loosing due to analysis errors a lot lately which has certainly affected my ability to hold a trade long enough to have it play out.

As I'm writing this, the longs seem to be working and there was a chance to get in but at -1.0% for the day, I am done. I will not go on a losing binge and blow out 2-5% in a single day. I would puke my guts out over that I think.

Almost done with school. I have 2 weeks left for the class I am in, then I have to study for a CLEP test and then I am done. Should be finished with the degree sometime in Feburary. Its been 30 years in the making and I am looking forward to it being complete!

Once that is finished, I have to study for my continuing education test to renew my mortgage license. Everything is on hold in that arena until its done. Should be done sometime the week of the 19th I think.

All the christmas shopping is done with the exception of two small gifts for the niece and nephew. I hate christmas shopping and so does my wife so we do it throughout the year when there are sales. Usually we are done by Thanksgiving.

We will probably go to San Diego for the New Year, they are having a large firewords display this year and we all love fireworks. Should be fun!

One last thing, I passed 50,000 page views on my blog yesterday. Not sure who's reading but since I don't promote it or link to it anywhere, I guess thats kinda cool. It means nothing other than a few people like watching me struggle!

Take care. One more trading day in the week.