SeekingLight trading journal - trade notes & thoughts

Since this is public: Hello.

So I originally was posting over to the old, by now rather ancient james16 Chart Thread, as that is really the place "I grew up in" you might say.

I then fought with myself over this, given that the original post and URLs are now pretty much obsolete. The URL now redirects to some weirdo app (basically blackhat SEO to get backlinks through domain name redirection, not gonna support that) and the core of the group has basically split up and moved on to do their own things.

Accordingly, I would rather just have something where I can be responsible for myself on my own, as that has been the case for the last several years either way anyhow.

I do miss keeping a "public" (back then: public to the group community) journal, where I can both go over my trades for my own sake, as well as illustrate my viewpoint on the markets to whomever is curious - in a passive sense.

I have always found it incredibly valuable to basically peek into what others are doing and see if there is anything sensible worth picking up or comparing approaches to.
A lot of things are just not for me in terms of viewpoint or approach (you will NEVER find me putting on "indicator goggles" again, ever and I will likely never turn into a 5M scalper either, though I do like the 15M at times), but some very smart people and very good traders have done some exceptional stuff and sometimes you can glean a few bits here and there and even use that to understand what you are yourself already doing better.

The irony of this kind of thing is that you do need a level of understanding and expertise that lets you get whether someone is doing a bunch of BS or something unusable to you in the first place, or whether its something of value. So in a sense, you only get something out of it if you're already in a good place to begin with.
But it can be quite nice for refinement and advancement.

As a side note: In my experience most people severely overestimate their own progress and position in overall development.

So what I am saying in a rather roundabout way:
This journal is for a good portion for myself, but if someone gets something out of it, then good on you. Its what I benefited from before, and so its only cool if someone else sees something of interest themselves as well.

What this isn't is a "this is me explaining to you how to trade and get that moneyyyy" thread. Which is why its in trading journals to begin with.

If you do have some prior experience with price action and s/r and have a really pressing question, I will do my best to answer it, but I currently don't even know if I will manage to allocate enough spare time to keep this guy going regularly, let alone address all kinds of questions.

I may edit this post as I see fit, same as with any and all posts in this journal.
If I realize that I should be doing this in a different kind of way or in another section, it might shift to that.

For now I just want to start this experiment.
Let's go.

Let's start with a nice example of "thinking ahead".

Soybeans
So we had already been seeing some movement over in Corn and Soybeans have had quite the "bomb out" overall.
Accordingly, when this guy jumped back into old price territory, it became a classic "watch for price re-establishment" candidate.
Pretty much nailed it here.

Spoiler: Bonus points for the folks that intuitively spot the most wound up inside bar before the break higher.

This last Soybean chart makes for a good example of a larger point: The importance of thinking and planning ahead.
I sit down every weekend and try to gain an overview of markets.
I note down potential opportunities, situations under development and crucial watchzones.
I basically draw out an ideal course of trades to come for the next week and update what happened the last.
I record all of this and can therefore compare the before and after, see where things went different than what I expected and where things filled in.

It often makes for an important lesson of how different your bird's eye view / overview of the markets on the weekend is so much more relaxed and macro vs what happens once you get into the whole day-to-day of live ticking markets, newsnewsnews and opnions. A big picture view is supremely important and calm pre-planning and a concept of what you intend to do just absolutely key to overall performance and experience.

USDCHF - 1h situation in the period of 13th to 17th May 2019
After a fairly strong push down I was watching whether USD strength would manifest again.
Other pairs were showing the potential for some USD strength, which was good, but EURCHF was getting pushed around, which was not so good.

The idea behind the setup was that a flat surface had formed around 1.0068ish and should we break out of that and retest, I would give it a go.
We dilly-dallied a bit, I paid up 2-3 points, then trailed as we kinda budged higher a little bit. Seemed to be doing okay, then boom. Knockout.
Restabilized a little bit later and basically did a similiar shaping up against 1.0095 which would/could have been yet another trade, here marked as "second opportunity to get long".

In the end, my attempts to get a bullish USDCHF trade underway became more of an exercise in trade management and patience - which is really THE key competence to gain and ultimate test of whether you'll ever be able to suffer through this stuff long term.

Because, let's face it, trading essentially is an infinite challenge of "can you face endless setbacks and protect the odd sparkle of probability in your favor, in order to push you above neutral long term" (or: "Can you remain disciplined close to 100%ish enough long term to not let your screwups ruin your good behavior outcomes", if you prefer that).

"This could have been your trade" - examples on Gold in the week of May 13th - 17th 2019
One of the exercises I tried to do and establish for myself (even if I never found enough time to do this "out loud" regularly in a public thread) is the practice of going over charts that are in my area of interest (i.e. things that I regularly trade) and go over past data to see if I missed anything while trading and having my focus elsewhere.

When you're watching well in excess of 20 things at once it can very quickly happen that you either run out of maximum open risk (e.g. a total of 3% open at any point in time in only weakly correlated or non-correlated markets as trades) or are just plain too involved in getting into and managing trades on an intraday basis and therefore miss another 1h setup.
Sometimes it is even more plain: As a human being, my body forces me to sleep pretty much every day.

As a routine then, I regularly scan over my charts and inevitably I find setups that I could have taken, but simply missed during the week. With the "This could have been your trade" exercise, I then try to analyse best I can how the setup communicated itself to me as the observer, where the ideal / best-case scenario entry would have been and mark it in the chart.
This Gold chart is one of those examples.

A best practice thought here if you are also trying to tally up the potential risk/reward and profit outcomes: use a pinch of honesty with yourself. Nobody ever takes the best price at the best retracement with the best stop ever always, but for illustrating a "how to take it perfectly" guide to yourself, thats a different thing to draw and chart.
Just make sure not to set always-perfect standards for yourself, as your execution may always strive to be, but rarely "always" be perfect.

Chart note:
The quote on the chart is from me.

Hi SL just to repeat what I said on the J16 thread before I saw your post about your Journal. Saw some of your work on the PF, unfortunately as I was late to the party you had stopped posting.Look forward to seeing more of your work. Cheers

Hi Mallee, thanks for popping in. :-)

USDCAD - Week of May 20th - 24th 2019
This was one where I guess a lot of years of watching ranges, fakeouts and similiar price behavior help not to get too confused or chopped up.
Basically, price has been trapping people left and right for a while now, and it became fairly interesting to watch low failures during the slow grind lower.
Together with some other market correlations, this guy just stood out and gave both an intraday as well as a daily long setup.
I chose to take it as an intraday setup and was fortunate enough to have it rally basically directly towards my target.
As we came within a hair of the area I wanted to see taken out in a very, very linear move, and with regression to a mean likely, I allowed for 10 points of tolerance and took the round number itself rather than the swipe. This was no huge impact on risk/reward itself, but had a huge risk of messing with already open profit if the profit taking were to set in at this point, which was not unlikely.
Profit taking then did ensue at 1.35ish, we retested the daily setup, which led to my intraday trade trailing out.
The daily trade would have simply trailed more leisurely and made it to the later swipe target.

I view this as both an actual intraday trade success(read: the one I took) as well as also a solid daily trade idea.

Hi Patrick,
Good to see you posting, miss your thought provoking stuff from the J16 PF.
Tend to keep away from FF, as I find it is full of pretty toxic or useless stuff (yours being one of the few exceptions).
Nice to find an ex J16er still around.

Kind regards,
Jim

Hi Patrick,

Are you still around?

Hello, Seeking Light, I used to be a member at J16 and watch your market analysis each week. I learned sooo much from your charts. Please let me know your still around!

Seeking Light do you offer mentorship for trading?!