Alifari's Trading Journal

Identifying Highs & Lows is essential part of my trading. It saves me from being on wrong side of market majority of times. Lot of traders get stuck into conventional way of drawing highs & lows, but fail to understand its not about perfection, its about understanding market pulse by taking guidance from past swings, concentrating on current price action and predicting probability of next market move.

EXCELLENT ARTICLE : http://traderfeed.blogspot.com/2017/...n-trading.html

Context matters in terms of behavior as well. How we behave at a funeral will be different than at a party. How we speak with a child differs from our speech with a group of adults. The same words can be interpreted differently depending upon the situation: texts derive meaning within contexts.

This is an important market lesson as well. Some traders look for "setups", patterns that give them a probabilistic edge in trading, across a variety of market conditions. As Ivaylo Ivanov points out in his recent book, this is a major mistake. The patterns that set up in a bull market will be different from those in range conditions. What makes his text interesting is not just the 10 setup patterns that he illustrates, but the understanding of when each of those is relevant.

Suppose the market opens with a flurry of buying activity, followed by some selling. We could look at that in isolation and use the pullback to join the upside. If, however, we step back and see that the market is unable to surmount its previous day's high even with the early buying, we would likely interpret the situation quite differently and perhaps take the opposite trade for a return into yesterday's range.

Similarly, a breakout from a range that occurs with elevated volume early in the trading day is often interpreted quite differently from a breakout during midday hours. Early in the day, we have the most liquid market conditions and the greatest activity from large market participants. Ideally, we want their activity at our back, not in our face. For the day trader, time of day is an important element of context.

At a broader level, suppose we notice a wide array of risk assets moving higher, including U.S. stocks, overseas shares, oil, high yield bonds, and emerging market currencies. The macro participant views such "risk-on" behavior as part of a single trade related to global growth and will view the situation quite differently from one in which one of those assets moves higher in isolation.

Many poor trades result from becoming so narrowly focused on the price action of what we're looking to trade that we fail to step back and appreciate the context in which the action is occurring. That's like jumping into a conversation wanting to speak what's on your mind without taking into account what's been going on in the conversation to that point. When we place texts in context, we achieve understanding. The best trades set up when a smaller picture lines up with a larger one.

ANOTHER USEFUL ARTICLE: http://traderfeed.blogspot.com/2016/...r-trading.html

What is a trader's practice?

For the active trader, it's studying the previous day's trading, replaying markets, identifying best and worst trades, and cementing lessons learned.

It's also seeing how the coming day is setting up across markets and in premarket trade, developing what-if scenarios for trade ideas, and rehearsing the day's goals.

By the end of the week, the prepared trader has five days of experience. The trader who is not practicing has one day of experience repeated five times.

Success is a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day. —Jim Rohn

When you know what has to be done, do it; put your excuses on hold, not your dreams

"Focus more on the structure and bias of the market, rather than looking for setups. If you are clear on the structure and bias, trade opportunity will reveal itself"

Here is a Price Alert & Dashboard I have created in Excel with my limited knowledge.

The prices are automatically updated, if you have MT4 Platform opened.

The purpose is to create a visual dashboard, whereby entry levels for different strategies across various pairs are available at one glance in one sheet, instead of creating price alert in trading platform for individual pair.

Since I use various strategies across various time frames. I have created 1 Worksheet for each strategy such as SD, FTB, QMC, QMR, 123-50%, 123-75%, Nose, DRT, FB, SR. Then I enter my desired entry level for each strategy and once price is less than 10 pips of entry price the cell will change color to red for sell and green for buy. You could change alert pips level according to your choice by editing option in Conditional Formatting.

The second Dashboard AUDUSD-C is created to view alert levels for individual pair for all strategies across all time frames. This will assist to see confluence among various strategies.

The third Dashboard AUDUSD-D is similar to AUDUSD-C, but the prices are hidden and only pips distance is shown. This is beneficial when you want to have a quick glance, as to which strategy is close to entry level.

Further enhancement will be made, if required.

Nose pattern chart example

This really makes sense. Would love to learn more about this.

So, I would ask, how do you define bias and market structure, exactly?

For e.g. I look at Swing High/Lows (HH's, HL's/LL's & LH's) but pretty sure I'm missing something in the understanding of that, which could clarify Market Structure to make more confident actionable decisions based off that.

So, again would appreciate your input of how YOU do it and what else you do, besides the above, to establish said Bias and Market Structure.

Having studied ''Supply/Demand" trading, I focused on setups, like you said. Trying to understand what is a 'valid' setup or creating rules to filter bad from good or something else to enhance the odds and increase the probability. So, I really like this idea that if we understand Market Structure or have some other way of identifying our Bias then the setups, like Supply/Demand zones will just be the means of going with that flow.

Appreciate more input on this topic


Thanks, in advance

First of all the quote you referred was not mine, I read it somewhere and liked it so I posted it here. Since I trade various strategies and there are different entry & exit criteria for each strategy, so some of my strategies are based on market structure and bias, others are based on S&D, SR, Price Action etc. where I don't look for bias or structure and simply trade based on my rules. As such I am trying to answer your queries based on my trading approach.

So, I would ask, how do you define bias and market structure, exactly?

According to me Bias = Direction - Which way price is likely to go in future based on past data (both short term & long term). To identify future direction, I look for Highs and Lows, Impulsive and Corrective Moves, Average Up Swings vs Average Down Swings, Higher Time Frame Levels (W1 or D1) in comparison with lower time frames levels H1 or M15) etc.

According to me Market Structure = Pattern. By analyzing historical patterns, both complete and incomplete, one can get into a trade in between a pattern formation and ride it until that pattern is complete. On the other hand one could wait for a pattern to complete and enter thereafter.

The bottom line is I don't complicate things by going into terminologies of how others interpret a certain price behaviour or pattern. All I do is open a price chart and start looking for repeated patterns or price behaviour, which have worked in past and provided reasonable Win Rate with good Risk to Reward Ratio & Trade Frequency.

http://https://youtu.be/_f-qkGJBPts