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, June 29, 2017

Bye Bye Bye CL????

My love affair, if you can call it that with CL is slowly but far more rapidly most recently , fading away. The beautiful moves it used to make every morning are slowly becoming a thing of history. In its place at least for the moment (am I becoming a player?) is NQ, It moves more or less like CL of old, has a smaller tick value which leads to better risk control and once in a while, a lot more size potential!

Today I made my first official NQ trade. Yes I had a couple earlier in the week just to test the waters but today I made it my priority instead of CL. Of course, I got stop ran with a subsequent nose dive to the target! But instead of cussing it out like I have been in the past, I just laughed and let it go. I did try to get a fill at resistance but it missed printing me by one tick before hitting the target zone.

This trade was a potential 110 tick trade per contract and I would have been at max size had I not been stopped out. I went in small with the intention of sizing up rapidly if it went in my favor but it one ticked me in and reversed to the stop and then reversed to target. Nice....

All that said, that trade felt better than most of the CL trades I've taken in the last few months. I like the way the tape moves, I like the trendiness of it, etc. So I think I will work with NQ as my primary instrument at least until it begins acting different. I think I held on to the idea of CL way to long. I might even look at some of the other not so obvious instruments to see how they move. After all, I'm not supposed to marry the thing, just trade it and I've been married to CL for to long now. I mean, NQ has moved 150 ticks and CL has barely ground out 20 or so in the last hour....please....

Cheers.

Oh, here's a chart and a video




7 comments:

  1. congrats on the move to NQ, you player you hehe!

    in case things get busy enjoy the holiday!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yeay, welcome welcome to NQ

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There are some nuances I am still working out but so far so good.

      Delete
  3. There is some truth in what you say, conversely I have long been accused of too much System 1 Thinking and not enough System 2 Thinking to which I sometimes but not always plead guilty.

    I have stubbornly and reflexively held onto CL as my main instrument for a wide variety of reasons and only now applying some system 2 thinking to my ongoing frustrations with CL and its annoying habits. This System 2 thinking has led me to consider only recently replacing CL as my main instrument and therefore, my negative recency bias is the fruit of many months of frustration. I have no intention of completely abandoning CL entirely, only reconsidering when and how to trade it. Mostly inventory days I think and generally on a enter and hold basis as those days can (but not always) lead to decent trends lasting most of the day.

    NQ feels like the CL of old, at least in recent days that is. In looking back at many months of data, I see where the most recent week and a half are around triple the normal daily range. So removing the recent bias towards larger moves, that leaves a ADR of around 150-200 ticks which is about what CL's used to be whereas now it is less than 100 ticks for the entire daily range and usually most of that is put in during the overnight session. I have considered trading the overnight but I am not at my best during those hours and I feel it would be much worse in the long run.

    I think going forward, I will no longer be married to a single instrument. Instead, I will be on the lookout for trading opportunities across the entire futures spectrum for day trading and forex for longer term position trading.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Indeed, a lovely short set up on the daily chart for sure...I've been out of town for 4 days on a long holiday weekend. So no trading for me the last few days. Haven't even looked at a chart until just right now since last Friday. It's been real nice actually not worrying about trading....and I think I shall continue this not worrying about trading. Just follow the process and let it happen however its going to happen. Less worry, less stress, fewer trade should equal more money...

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.