Call me Vidvad - I day trade futures

when you use RENKO HA hybrid, is the data to calculate MA taken from Renko bars or HA bars?
Thanks you very much.

Hi Vidvad seen you around never saw your thread, its been eye opening for me.
Been at Rocky's thread but for some reason your reasoning sticks better.
So keep up the good work!

If you would trade London or Asia session what futures would you recommend to trade and what brick size etc?

Im been looking at Gold and Euro, been using 10 renko for GC, and used 2 for EU.

I was looking for USD JPY but my firm doesnt offer it to me.
Sometimes ES/NQ do move during London but rarely.

Anyway kind regards and hope you have some insights for me.
Otherwise i have to stick with NY.

I presume the data used to calculate the indicators is taken from the base renko, as the HA candles are themselves an additional indicator applied to the base renko data. I am not 100% certain, but I am almost that certain.

If I were trading Asia I would probably want to stick with the 6J contract which is the Yen futures. Your firm may not offer USDJPY, but check to see if they offer 6J.

If I were trading London or NYC using the rocky method I would probably stick to the NQ.

Brick size will vary from time to time based on market volatility. If you have found brick sizes that work for you in the markets you yourself are trading, then you should trust your own judgement and use those until your results become less than satisfactory, then visual trial and error is the best way to determine which data size gives you the visual signals you are looking for.

Ty for the insight, no they dont have 6J they do have 6b, 6E.

Kind regards

None of the currencies really move like they used to on a regular enough basis for the rocky method to work well on them. Even when I trade the 6J, I am using more of Stacey Burke method using timing, levels, and the behhavior of price at those important levels when it occurs within one of the three main timing windows.

The rocky method, at the moment, is best applied to the NQ or maybe the YM.

For the ES and the currencies, you will likely have more success using time based candlesticks, learn price action and what a buy/sell signal looks like when price is at a pivotal level such as the daily, weekly, monthly open, the daily, weekly, and monthly close, previous day and week highs and lows.

Got it , Thanks.

Btw do you use a ATM bracket if so what are you settings?

is it 20 ticks SL, TP 41 and move SL to +5 when hit +25 ticks ?
To me this seems so small or am i wrong here?

How are you able to manage those bigger moves or you dont ?

I rarely hit for the whole move. For the ES, for example, I usually have a fixed TP of 4 points up to 10 points when the market volatility is high. My avergae take profit on ES is probably 4 points, which is only 16 ticks.

I always use an ATM bracket.

Someday I may take the time to explain why, imo, this is the best trading video I've ever seen.

I am sharing it here because it has had an incredibly positive impact on my own trading.

Some will no doubt ridicule the notion that a video about a family of successful roulette players (Gamblers!) could have anything of value to a day trader. I will only say that, imo, if this doesn't hit you hard with a very crisp and clear "Aha!" then you are either already trading from a carefree state of mind or you are not ready for the scales to fall from your eyes. That isn't meant to demean anyone. On the contrary, the message I took from this story is essentially the very same message that I pretended to take from Mark Douglas's Trading in the Zone for years. I say, "I pretended" because though I gave it lip service, I had never truly experienced what Mark Douglas calls "trading from a care-free state of mind."

As a result, I have bounced from method to method, tweaking time frames and bar types and indicators. I thought I had conquered my ego, and although I had managed to tame it to a large extent, I had not done so completely. The story of this family of gamblers stands in sharp relief and clear contrast to my own past and present follies in my attempt to become a consistently profitable trader.

It is only recently that I have finally, after many, many years experienced trading from a care-free state of mind, which means I can place my orders according to my rules without hesitation. I do not have any emotional reaction to ticks that move against me or ticks that move in my favor. I feel no let down when a trade results in a loss and not even the slightest elation when a trade results in a profit.

I can't say that this video will have the same affect on you as it had on me.


The Roulette Players Who Actually Beat Vegas Casinos

I have since found a longer documentary about this man and his family's success. The "Aha" moment came from watching the shorter version I linked above. However, there are two quotes from the longer version that point in the direction of what truly shifted in me when I watched video above:

"If you trust me and trust the computer and bet only the numbers I tell you. If you follow the rules. If you are patient and think in terms of weeks, months, never tonight, or even tomorrow, you will make a lot of money and live a life very few young people can afford." Gonzalo Garcia-Pelayo's advice to his children as he persuaded them to temporarily leave behind their university studies to join him on a family-based roulette team.

"It was easy to lose one day. Easy to lose two days. But almost impossible to lose at the end of the week. When we have streaks of bad luck it is impossible to stop them. All we could do is to keep on playing. The more you play, the more advantage you will have." Gonzalo Garcia-Pelayo

My final thought on this for now is this: In order for this story to affect you the way it has me, you must then

1) accept that your methodology has a profitable edge, and
2) you must commit to using your methodology as part of a trading plan that has a predetermined stop loss for which you have rules to manage it, including a rule that you never move your stop loss to increase the initial risk of your plan; and
3) your trading plan has a predetermined take profit that you never make larger than your initial planned reward.

Everything I have written here is from my perspective, my experience, and is therefore simply my own examined and, for now, my own settled opinion. I understand and accept that others will have opinions on these matters contrary to my own. I have no desire to expend any mental or emotional capital defending my opinions or arguing against the opinions of others that differ from my own. I'm just sharing what for me has been a very significant development in my trading journey.

Vidvad...thanks for sharing the video. It really shows Mark Douglas principles in action. It always seems to come back to finding an edge and consistency with ones rules. We can be very tricky or our own worse enemy and staying consistent with our rules can often be a challenge

Great post Vid !

I am so happy you found your "process"

All the best
Blue

For me, the big takeaway was the willingness and ability to take the loss, and to take a string of losses, without wavering from the system. In roulette, once you place your bet and the wheel is spinning, there is no cutting the loss, moving a stop to breakeven, etc. It is win or lose, and there is nothing you can do about it. You don't know which spins will win and which will lose until the ball comes to rest. The only control you have is deciding whether you will bet at all, and if so, will you follow your system even when variance kicks in and you have a losing streak?

Trading financial instruments, whether forex, futures, stocks or options, gives too much illusion of control to the trader. What the story of the Palyos revealed to me was that I too often fell victim to my own attempts to exercise that illusory control.

This is a more thorough documentary on the roulette team profiled in the video linked above for anyone interested.


Gonzalo Garcia-Pelayo: Roulette Assault - Breaking Vegas

What follows is not my original thoughts. I do not wish to cite the source as the source itself has information in it that I think is contrary and at cross-purposes to the nuggets of gold within it. But if someone recognizes what is posted below, please know I am not trying to plagiarize and claim it as my own. I am posting it because I find these thoughts helpful in bolstering my newfound trading discipline. Also, while what follows is taken nearly word for word from someone else, I did amend and edit some portions for clarity or to explain a point more fully. But again, I take no credit for originality. I will have at least one, possibly more posts from this source.

_______________________________________________________________

When it comes to trading discipline there are three aspects to consider: Identifying opportunity, executing trades, and accumulating profits. Each are, however, hindered by emotional pitfalls and traders will find it hard to succeed unless these emotions are managed, ensuring that they do not interfere with the execution of the trading plan.

One of the ways we can address these emotions is to create rules and these rules help us identify opportunities, execute our trades, and manage position size and risk.

Such rules take away subjectivity and help our emotions from getting drawn into irrational market behavior.

Having these rules, however, is not the complete solution.

If we hit a series of losses following our rules we start to doubt them.

Such losses can create irrational blind spots in our cognitive reasoning.

The more we're hit by losses the less likely we are to follow the rules.

This comes despite knowing that the market is itself irrational, that it cares nothing for the moment-to-moment variance of our edge, and variance will accompany all trading systems in the form of both winning streaks and the inevitable losing streaks. Sticking to our plan assures success. But when we do hit that inevitable series of losses, traders have a tendency to abandon their rules in short order:

What has happened!?

I was wrong!

Let me tweak the rules to try to eradicate these losing trades from happening ever again!

Thanks Blue!

And, Blue, my friend, I appreciate your framing my breakthrough as one of process.

I'd like to stress to others reading this journal that my breakthrough has nothing to do with any particular trading method or system. In fact, I am convinced that I could now take any method that has a demonstrable and back tested edge and I could trade that method with discipline and with a carefree state of mind.

The reason I can now do so is, of course, that I have finally accepted what Mark Douglas has been trying to get through to me and others for so many years now: Trading really is simply a Probability Game. Concepts such as "right" and "wrong" or "win" or "lose" no longer have the same impact on me that they had had even up until just a few days ago.

As a Probability Game, success at trading, measured as the continuous building of an ever increasing and positive equity curve, is achieved by defining and following a process. The method or system is secondary.

I've given "lip service" to these ideas and concepts for a long time. I'm almost embarrassed that I did so without ever realizing that until now, I myself had not truly accepted them in my own mental and emotional trading framework. I do not think that I led anyone astray. The ideas are sound as sound can be. But I did mislead myself, and therefore others as to my own adherence to and practice of Mark Douglas's principles.

I feel as though I am reborn as a trader.

I first watched the video I posted above that had such an impact on me last week on November 13th. It shook me to my core and I took a few days to really examine myself and my beliefs about the market and trading. This is what my equity curve looks like since committing to the process of trading my method, sticking to my stop loss and take profit levels, and trading from a carefree state of mind.



I purposefully cut of the account balance axis. It doesn't matter whether I am trading a $10,000 account or a $1,000,000 account. What matters is the very real and very positive impact this has had on my trading. One of the biggest changes for me is that I used to stop trading for the day once I was up a few hundred dollars. I "didn't want to give it back." My trading window is 8:00 AM until 10:30 AM Eastern, and I'd stop taking trades even if I still had hours left in my trading window.

That was a symptom of my lack of commitment to the process. If I have a profitable method with a positive expected value over the long haul, why would I choose NOT to take every instance of my edge that occurs within my trading plan's defined trading window? I will tell you why: It is because I didn't truly trust the process. I paid lip service to being process oriented and not results oriented and yet, in hindsight, I see I was utterly yolked and enslaved to the results of my most recent profitable trade.

That incredible equity curve this week has been the result of my commitment to following the process and taking all the trades that set up according to my defined set of variables that identifies an opportunity. I have had more losses this week than I usually experience. But I have had far more profitable trades than I have ever experienced within four trading days. And what's more, since I have committed to the process, I have committed to my 2 to 1 profit to loss ratio, so my profit factor for the week is actually greater than 2 (2.37 to be exact!)!

This is the message in my Topstep platform today:


This is my journal, and I am not posting any of this to brag. If anything I am greatly humbled due to my new self-awareness of just how much I had previously been fooling myself.

Congratulations my friend, keep it up! Yes, yes, keeping the same approach is very important!

Way to go Vidvad

Thanks, Ed, what a trip you and I've been on together!

Done for the week and today was my lowest performance of the week. Very much a trading range market in the NQ today and the result was a bunch of -1Rs and a couple +multi-Rs.

The net result for the day is a touch short of +1R day. I trade five accounts with Topstep, with one account being the leader in which I Place trades and the other four accounts "copy" the trades in the leader account. Due to slippage the accounts are rarely exactly the same realized P&L. Today, as an example, the five accounts finish with a profit of $229, $269, $229, $249, and $239 respectively, or +$1215 for the day. A full 1R day would be +1250, so an average of $7 short across five accounts.

"Not bad work if you can get it," as the saying goes.

My R, or risk unit, is $250 as I am still trading just one NQ contract per trade. At the end of my trading window I manually lock myself out of the accounts so that I cannot trade them again until the next market open. I did stop and lock myself out a little early today as it was nearing the close of my trading window and Topstep requires five days of $200 or more in profit to request the next payout. Since I was +$200 in each account, and since there was probably only time for one more trade before the window would close, I decided rather than risk losing a profitable day toward my next payout I'd close early for the week.

Next week is another week. I'm feeling very good about where I am and how far I've come this week. Over the weekend I am going to look at some o fthe other instruments I like to trade and I will add one as a "backup" for days such as this were the NQ is trading like a bucking bronco stuck in the stall with the gate locked shut. I will still keep NQ as my primary instrument.

The instruments I'll be looking at will be Bond, Gold, Oil, and Yen futures.