Friday 5 February 2010

Work Hard for the Money

It was as Donna said today. I traded more than twice as many trades as usual. These employment number days can get very confusing to the guys upstairs if there are different ways of interpreting the data.

Trades 1 thru 4 were continuation trades from yesterdays' downdraft. It was a matter of finding re-entries after closing out. As we were hitting new recent lows I was mostly all in and all out as I was waiting for the market to retrace some of yesterday's losses. I had a nice walk during London's lunch hour waiting for the numbers, finally a bit of sun in London.

Today was a great example of not listening to CNBC while trading. I did for the first time in many, many months. Very bearish numbers and of course one or more big hands covered shorts on the bad news. I would have probably traded better if I did not know that and just followed what I was watching. After an hour of confusion (mine), sanity returned and I turned off the TV and went back to work. Trades 5, 6 and 7 were very short lived. Trade 8 was into the hole. The Order flow then became really clear, probably because the CCI momentum turned at the same time so clearly too. Trade 9 I rode up through KC and his sunshine band.

Trade 10 I should have held so I didn't need to take another trade but I didn't as the congestion and the 6CCI looked like it would break up. It didn't and I was lucky to get in with really clear info on Trade 11 which I exited on the first hammer at the KC low.

All in all, a very tiring day. I had to focus a lot more. I had one eye on Kiki's FloBot as I was very curious how it would perform on a day like today. If you are curious too, tune in on the week-end and I'll post a chat and some stats.

 
Click to enlarge

5 comments:

  1. Hi Tom,

    Thanks for your great website.

    Perhaps you could discuss how you manage a losing trade. You've mentioned that you rarely wait for your stops to get hit when a trade goes against you. QUESTION: How do you decide to exit a bad trade before price hits your stop loss?

    Best,

    Tommy D

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  2. Question regarding Cumalative Delta, why smooth this, you mention that its something you follow yet it has lag, why impose the lag on this real time data?

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  3. Please do give detail regarding the first comment - managing losing trades and exiting before your stop loss is hit.

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  4. On the chart from 5th of Feb you have marked trade number 5. But before that, around 14:12 there was a very similar structure that you did not enter on. I guess there is something in the context that is different, apart from another test of 1063(-ish). Would that be because of the short/long CCI? I am sorry to ask a question like this, but I am trying to understand how important different parts of your chart is to the overall context and to your decision making.

    Best wishes, TB

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  5. That's a chart from Friday?!?!? Doesn't look like it....

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