Thursday 6 January 2011

Every Day's Stats Matter

Only today matters. Not yesterday's results, not tomorrow's hopes. Just today. It's all the todays that you put together that make up your week, your month and your year. It's the todays that mean the difference between paying the rent, adding to your retirement fund and buying petrol for your car. It's the todays that buy your house, that buy that car and that educate your kids and provide for your loved ones. TODAY.

When I trade, I focus on only today. Yesterday is old news. Have I done my job effectively today? Am I doing my job effectively today. Bar by bar.

Flo put me long the ES @ 1273.25 and scaled out on the way up. The close down @ 1275.75 showed divergence so exited the last third there before Flo did (HT) and prepared for the Gap trade as I tweeted an hour and a half before the RTH open. I was waiting for the Jobs number to pass before positioning myself.

I talk a lot about the Gap trade because it's a very easy trade to understand and do. Also, you can backtest and get clear statistics which should give you the confidence and information you need to trade it. And finally, you usually only have to work a short time to hear the Ching Ching. The way I use context brings the win rate to over 80%, which is very amazing. It allows me to confidently trade size and take smaller bites per contract. I'm doing more work on automating this. MarketDelta allows me to access VA and POC prices and I want to try and explore that.

The ES Gap trade did not eventuate for me. Market looks like its waiting for tomorrow's jobs number and to hear Bearded Ben, but taking some money off the table just in case. Discipline is important and sometimes what you envision does not happen.




6 comments:

  1. Couldn't agree more on the importance and significance of the "now". Talking of gap trades - You had done a webinar on the gap trade once. Is that still available on line somewhere? I had difficulty accessing that when it was posted. Regards.

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  2. I was referring to this webinar on Sep 23.
    http://www.screencast.com/users/electroniclocal/folders/September 23rdWEBINAR - Is this audio only?

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  3. Geo, I think it could be your video player not having the codec needed. If you use the GOM player (free from http://www.gomlab.com/eng/GMP_download.html ) you should be able to see the video.

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  4. Thanks, EL. I was using Windows Media Player - perhaps it was unable to download the needed codec. I did not try alternatives because the title itself said electroniclocal_sound, so I thought it was perhaps only audio.

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  5. Hi Tom, judging from your chart it kinda looks like your first scale is at 5 ticks (1 range bar), second scale at 10 ticks (2 rb's) etc etc and that you move your 3rd lot to 2 RB+1 ticks top after the second scale out. Is this correct? Do you change this depending on market volatility?

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  6. SpiBok, I change the scales according to context. The 1 and 2 range bar scales are a starting point in Flo and/or the front end but I usually change the second scale as the trade matures. Last scale is either optimised if I'm trading Flo Hybrid and I override it as required by what I see in the picture. I like that first scale fairly quickly to provide a cushion for the losing exit.

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