Plan the Trade

Thanks CG !
What trade would you have taken today?
What do I have to learn to improve please?

Seems you've already got a good grasp of it all.

Practice, practice, practice...

The one thing i've learnt through the years, is that whenever you put a timescale on anything regarding progress, it's best to double or better yet, triple it!

I don't think becoming a successful trader is an event... it is a process. Everytime i have thought, that i will eliminate some mistake that i keep making, i will start next week - in reality, it takes many months to do so... the market has a canny way of enticing you into making repeated mistakes.

But then, what is a mistake? usually it means a losing trade. If your system implies that it is a loss of 6 pips and a winner is 25+ then to a degree it does not matter. It was your discretion that led you to take the trade in the first place and that will only get better with time and experience.

Some people learn faster than others, but i'm not ashamed to admit that i took my first trades over 18 years ago now and turned fully to TA somewhere around 11 years ago. Yes, i thought i would make it a long time ago, but in all honesty, FF (and the internet in general, for that matter), is littered with threads of traders in despair after 10/12/15 years+ of trading.

Myself and Harold have been battling against some indicator based traders elsewhere on FF, but they are not likely to change due to something that we post. Again, it is a process. I don't believe, personally, that anyone can be profitable using entries based on an indicator crossover, no matter what anyone tells me. I say this, because i spent years trying to make them work myself.

I believe that everyone will follow their own path regardless.

The biggest difference this past year was to change entries to pre-empting the return to trend, taking the trade at prior Supply/Demand vs previously, entering upon a confirmation of return to trend (flag break, 123, trigger, cup&handle fresh high etc... it didn't work... this is exactly the same as using some form of MA crossover, it enters you much later and that means bigger risk.

I was already heading this way using EW... where a 5w move will often retrace back to subwave 1 (the start of the move and thus previous S/D zone). I think i posted about it back in November 2016 on here, but that coincided with Harold starting up his emini thread. I still use this now and it explains nicely why sometimes a retrace becomes deeper and goes beyond the last visible zone, but still returns to the main larger trend thereafter...

A chart says a thousand words, here is what i mean - note the 5w (subwave sets) and then retrace back to top of subwave 1 (labelled 'i') -



If i can enter on a deep pullback, risking a mere 5 pips (which is about the average that i am currently doing on the 40tick Dax chart) vs entering later on a crossover signal, the risk will likely be closer to 20 pips eg.

That means that i can take a position 4 times bigger for the same risk in monetary terms. Lets propose it was a winner and both trades exited at the same point, 40 pips away from the stoploss placement. The crossover trade made 1:1 return (equal to risk - 20 pips), whereas, the PA entry gained 35 pips that's 1:7.. it is exponentially better and the benefits don't end there...

It enables the stoploss to BE (or BE+1 futures to cover comms) after an initial retest. How many times is the trade wrong and it results in that? very often is the answer, vs the late entry... there is no such luxury, thus a wrong trade will lead to a full stop out everytime...

Quite honestly, i read probably 8 or 9 years ago, when i didn't know what the hell i was doing, on a different forum somewhere, that Supply/Demand was the way to make money. I distinctly remember it, but i had no clue what was what and went down the road of EW... boy i wish i could have stumbled across Harold's emini thread back then. I swear i could have saved myself 6 or 7 years of anguish!

I'm currently trying to run my winners for longer, because that has been one reason for limited success that i could see was holding back proceedings. Yesterday was the first time that i managed to overcome my fear and trust my target of fresh highs (trend was long).

Here's the idea - if a return to main trend happens opposite what i call 'blue sky', i will be aggressive with my stoploss chase, as ideally, i want a deeper retrace and the move to start from the original Demand/Supply zone. This is when it is more likely (imo) to go back to main trend and print a HH (or LL if short).

This basically is the same as above when a 5w EW move, retraces deeper, before heading higher... a bit like drawing the arrow back in a bow, or stretching a piece of elastic.

This might all sound complicated, but it is a process that my mind is starting to automatically seek and i'm sure is going to make a big difference. It already worked beautifully yesterday;



Hopefully you can see what i mean about my 'bluesky' comment.... in my mind, i was asking why it should return to trend there as to the left there was no immediate obvious demand. I still took the trade, but moved my SL up to BE aggressively, which proved the right thing to do... later when it looked likely that we might have finished the pullback and return to a fresh high, i left my stop at BE and let it run. Sure, i was cursing the pullback, before it then took off to print a HH, but it proved to be the right thing to do... i think if i had chased PA up as i had been doing recently, it would have been a +9 or something similar and i would have failed to re-enter... that's a big difference.

thank you CG for taking the time to answer me :-)
I really do not know anything about the wave of elliot.
Otherwise I understand a little bit the steps of your trades.
I still make a lot of mistakes in my trades. I will try to correct by following your file plan the trade

No worries, hey, i'm still making mistakes.... too many at the moment, but i recognise them, that's the main thing, once you know where you are going wrong, you can at least then start to rectify them.

As above, i think mine was not running winners, but then the flipside is seeing several possible +7's & +8's come back to BE. Add them up and it only takes 3 or 4 of them to equal a +25 winner, what's right and what's wrong?!

I think that's why i want to concentrate on what i wrote above. I prefer being aggressive with my stoploss chase in general, but when the pullback was deeper, i'm going to try to let it run to the fresh high (or near) before following each finished candle.

Regarding EW, absolutely do not bother investigating it. It is not worth spending the time (imo & i speak from experience) and can often be detrimental to viewing standard PA alone and PA is king. Period.

did a little video on how to track trend and where to find the pullbacks

Those videos Harold did with comments about price action were a game changer for me. Absolutely priceless demonstrations.

Hello everyone

can you tell me it's the arrows are ok?

And can you tell me what other entry would have been correct please.

Great video Harold - and the moral of the story is ignore Market Structure at your peril.

That phrase sounds familia is that you M H?

Yes Harold

I agree -Divergence's video's and posts are priceless and, more to the point -free. You just have to spend the time testing and analyzing your trades.

Are you still using the 1050SC (I think that's what you called it)?

1 pb trade today missed my target by 1 tick and the trailer took it out for 17.

little tricky today had 2 pullbacks 1 won the other lost and when market got rolling to upside I hooked them

I got to what amounted to a couple of +1s

I got a RH at about 5:09 that made up for a -15 and then the rest were basically +1s

0 for me. Only pb entry was the one Ozz showed us. I had a couple of other orders that never filled.

heres 2 pullbacks you missed ozz

top work H .. do you only apply the sl rule to hook trades, i.e. first trade was pb trade where sl was below previous pb:

on hooks always as far as pullback goes 1 or 2 ticks from low or high is good but mostly I don't like stop in middle of candles

thanks Harold appreciate it