Plan the Trade

Both styles are legit so for now, I am focused on both with breakout being the driver for pullbacks. Both require gauging the speed/force so it is the same skill applied with a twist :- Sorry for the long post. I get carried away :-(

Both are valid

Looks interesting. When is the go live date?

Once I complete two rounds of full 2018 market replays....the boring but necessary stuff :-(
I already have a live account so i might start soon with 1 contract and take it easy. With just one trade I will meet (or lose!) the daily goal of $250/contract

Has anyone tried griding or interested in exploring with me as an aggressive strategy? if not, any volunteers to be a critique in whether this is borderline martingale. I am not seeing a whole lot of downside risk especially when using FIFO to our benefit.

With 25K account size, max contract allowed with day margin is $25K/500=50. Let's spare 50% of account just to make it a little more conservative so 24 contracts max allowed. With 24 to play with, at strategic locations, place 12 Buy Stop above current price and 12 buy limit order below pending orders with fixed xx TP and no SL at xx-yTicks as grid space. y = number of contracts per position to cover for trading costs and to ensure our max open position does not balloon up.

Possible scenarios:

1. prices heads straight in our direction of hindsight taking off TPs along the way. Stop when daily goal is met. Boom !
2. prices heads straight with no retrace and against our direction of hindsight adding more open positions. Use Flatten when daily loss has reached
3. prices churns up and down in a range. This gets interesting as it requires some maneuvering within the range. how? try it with FIFO force-closing out max loss at each TP keeping the max loss at par and aid us in building realized profit as price goes up and down. The key is the ADD a new pending order at the same level everytime a TP is hit. With this, the distance to recover quickly from realized and floating loss becomes less and less

using 4contract on a 100K can easily generate 10K per session or flatten at daily loss capped at 5K. Especially good during Asian session like today.
Anyone see any downside that I am not seeing?

Correction: replace buy limit with buy stop orders for all pending orders. We want price to return to the pending order level in our direction instead simply adding to losers so we only use "buy stop or sell stop" pending orders to guide price to come to us.

Edit: like this in the image during Asian and then add more and then voila !

Having 24 contracts open on a 25k account will play on your psychology like nothing most people have ever experienced. Once fully loaded, your grid will shift your account balance by nearly 2% for every 4 ticks it moves. Even when it is going in your favor, it will play with your mind and you will make bad decisions. 24 contracts is $120 per tick. As fast as NQ can move think about your thought process during those moves. Earlier this morning, it moved 24 ticks in less than a second. $2,880.00 against the current trend in less than a second. Even if you are up when that happens, it will cause panic. Most likely you will hit the close button which will exit the trade with a market order. Expect slippage. How much will vary depending on time of day. Asian session like you have illustrated in your post, expect a ton of slippage. DOM is showing only about 1-5 contracts at each level right now.

From here down is directed towards everyone not just V. These are my thoughts and I hope they can help you.

There is an infinite loop that you can get caught up in. I have done it many times in the past. It's called analysis paralysis. It's when you have so many ideas running through your head that you get stuck in the process of evaluating those ideas and never get to do what is important which is trading. The quest for perfection only leads down three paths: 1. Analysis paralysis. 2. Frustration. 3. Insanity There are no other roads on that quest. Yes, you should continually try to improve your trading technique but you shouldn't do it at the expense of missing out on great opportunities like we have right now in the markets.

The prevailing thought process in this thread seems to center around very limited trading times and quick in quick out style of trading. While that trading method works it can be extremely stressful. I would encourage anyone reading this to do one thing today. Zoom out on your charts. Take a look at the bigger picture on the same time frame that you are using now. I fully understand that most people cannot trade the US session because of other commitments. So, let's talk about Asian session and how it is moving right now. A single contract short trade not long after the market reopened could have yielded as much as $800 (give or take). About 40 points. It did that within about 1 hour. Then it got set up for a nice long trade that if you would have been in with just one contract and held it through the night, you would be up as much as 100 points or $2,000. Even if you missed the long trade through the night and only caught half of the initial move down, that's an extra 400 bucks in the hip national bank almost every day. Probably closer to 200 when the markets are moving more normally. How much of a difference would 200 dollars make for most people? An extra 50 grand a year to pay off debt or to save or to build your trading account would be incredible. That's with just 1 contract. What if after every 10k of growth you added just one contract. Exactly. The results are insane. Just 40 ticks a day on average could easily get most people to walk away from their day job after just a year or two. All you have to do is get to that point in your trading. How long that takes depends on you.

I guess what I am trying to say is this:
1. Watch out for analysis paralysis.
2. Be patient. Don't look to become a millionaire overnight.
3. Don't over leverage. Small steps become giant leaps over time.
4. Don't get caught up in looking at a small window of time in these markets. There are opportunities around the clock.

Hopefully you found this early morning rant useful. Hope everyone has a great day.

Good luck everyone!

good start:

Well said Magnumfreak, 40 tick a day with 1 contract ,in a year my life will change big time. I don't think many of us are not fortunate enough to open a 25k account.

nice day:

Easy money with absolutely no analysis paralysis. I will respond to magnum. I think we all need our daily morning doze of advice to keep us true to our core objective.

here is mine...

I am still consistent each day. A few small scalps and walk away.
Lots of good conversation on this thread.
Plenty of ways to make NQ work.

i hate the labels.. makes it look confusing. is there a way to change colors on the filled arrows?

Thanks for sharing your thoughts Magnum. I am sure everyone would join me in expressing their appreciation. This should be a sticky for sure :-)

Regarding my proposed style and exposure/slippage/mental aptitude concerns, they are all valid in a traditional griding scheme. Mine really is not griding (i.e. set and forget). It's more of a pyramiding. I will never have 12 or 24 open contracts at any given time because my TP which is less than grip space will add and remove exposure dynamically so whatever is your position size capacity times maybe 2 or 3 in certain scenarios (I use this style ONLY when I have realized profits banked and increase exposure upto the point of draining 50-80% of realized profits say above the 40T daily goal). My struggle (being the student of millipede) is always to exploit the move to it's max capacity. So when I look at NQ, put a HH/LL indicator on her, there are up/up/up and dn/dn/dn moves happening nicely or 10-15 30 second candles. retrace/pullback/breakout cycle also happens nicely. More can be achieved with relatively same or lesser risk (i think zero risk as after a certain point, I am ONLY playing with market's money and preserving my capital). The key is to start conservatively, build 40+T and then notch it up but only when market is favorable. You are right about Asian. Yesterday was my first time watching NQ and she moves very nicely during Asian as well. I made more than 30K trading 4 contracts in 2-3 hours so it is definitely doable without any strain on mental capacity. Folks add to losers... which is a disaster. We need to add to winners via Buy stop or Sell stop orders and TP to close out all floating losses and once the move picks up, it's all about ringing the register 10-15 times to propel profit taking :-)

changed colour on the filled dots, even more confusing now..

can you show me how you change the colors? screenshot please? at work so can't pull up sierra

While you are looking into this, I could not find a way to change the connecting lines of arrows based on PnL... making it hard to pinpoint without labels which ones are profitable and losing trades.

Couldn't take screen shots while global settings windows open.
here it is done.. go to

Global settings/Graphics settings-global/chart trading order fills entry exit connecting lines.