Trading the e mini nasdaq

Looks good Binnie. Just wondering if the Close might be more productive than the hour after lunch?

The two index values are different though, so you would need to adjust tick's and range to suit...

Well you could always just trade two contracts.....
Btw I hear some people say that TF trends smoother, but I don't know if that's true...



Also, that's why on the old thread I asked if someone could list what trends when. When the Nikkei trend and when does Gold trend?

I just realized that big part of H's success is that he comes to new session with 100% confidence. Ie after lousy price action on regular session he just took new chance later. It is striking for me while I sometimes come to new session to not to lose rather than making money and grabbing something. It's a big difference and I have been making lots of work changing this in my own trading and I am happy to say that I have much more confidence now without going over tyevtop

I don't know if D has natural attitude or if it has grown with success, but it is easy to hear and see the attitude in action in H's videos.

Whatever he's vaping, I want some .

I was never a good candidate for trading in the first place. I'm a bit of an OCD type. Don't like mess, or noise, or crowds. A bit of a perfectionist. With an anxiety disorder to boot, trading has been the biggest challenge i could ever have imagined.

Mark Douglas writes about this in his books.

The perfectionist traits meant that i have always tried to find a method that is as close to 100% successful as possible - less trades but great success rate and thus i've moved from method to method, morphing one into another, but always with the same outcome, some success and then an over-reaction to losses, meaning overall breakeven.

If you stop and think about it, most systems, if successful, give you an 'edge', but if you watch for set-ups in the morning, one successful trade, two successful trades, but do not participate, you will naturally take the 3rd losing trade. Then go back inside your safety zone, nursing your loss and watch again, one winner, two winners, regain your confidence, thus trading that 3rd losing trade again.

You have to overcome this and trade every single set up to become profitable. Recognise it, validate it, trade it, without fear, come win, loss etc being fluid is key.

This dogged me for a very long time, and has been a big battle for me. All of my natural character traits, mean that trading is not suitable for me, however, that was never an acceptable answer.

I am sure some others will never suffer the same problems as i have, but most will.... it is the single most common factor that stops profitability.

Of course, there is a fine line between over-trading and poor discipline and that of fluidity and confidence.

I have a very low pain threshold for losses, but incredible 'bouncebackability'!

Grab a bit while it's there, grab a bit more, build confidence.

I can not tell you how many times i've let a decent little profit disappear and become BE, after my EW analysis was wrong. Going for that big one. It might happen every now and then, but in the mean time, several small winners would have amounted to the same, but with the one big difference - winners breed confidence... all of them wins turning into BE's is similar psychologically to taking losers and that causes the opposite, the tendancy to go into one's shell and thus the same old usual problems...

Every trader goes threw same struggles no ones exempt. Our brain trusts nothing not even ourselves. That's where the rules come in they help us over come the mental struggles by just enforcing them. some would say rules are meant to be broken now that's a dumb rule

Very good post, CG.

I think most of us want very high win rates, and just a very few achieve it, H being a shining example.

As I've mentioned before, my "solution" - influenced by meeting the legendary Ed Seykota, a very unusual guy (please forgive the name drop!) - is to stress my methods by assuming I will only have one third winners, one third b/e (I class anything between + & -2 a b/e), one third full losers. If it's still worthwhile, then I consider it tradable.

In reality, my average loser is <1R, I do have a lot of breakevens, and although my average winner is <3R, there are usually more than 33.33% of them ... & just occasionally I have a month with a very high win rate (my best quarter ever is 86.1% winners over 116 trades... but that was definitely an outlier).

I reread Douglas' check list (the one with not needing to know what the market will do next etc etc) several times each year, and I continuously work on myself to manage emotions. I was happy that I did indeed take that last +34 trade on Friday... many times earlier in my trading career I would have just walked away in disgust.

For me my edge if you can call it that is how I look at market structure so if price makes a new low and I take pullback near area of last LH if price takes out that lower high I move stop up to +1 and wont take a hit bigger than -5 of course this has now told me as price was coming back to get me out of trade that this is now a 123 to go the other way my actions will then look that way

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com...ddeaa2fc16.jpgonly the good stuff

Good discussion. I might be a somewhat oddball, while I thinki be+1 as very good outcome. Maybe it's due to the transformation I am going through. It almost feel like a win, but of course it doesn't pay any bills. I'd think that if trading would be sole form of income my attitude would be different (better?) meaning I would be trying to win much more. Now I am more or less limiting risks.

TD that's what trading is limiting risk. That's why I remove risk when up 6

Ok guys - I will do the 1 - 2pm and will see if I can get through the last hour as well. I am thinking 3-30 till 4.30 ? Can anyone confirm what the LAST hour would be.

Well that's true. Maybe I am at the right track after all! Have been too reckless before in trading.

330 to 430

Hi TC - the NQ is 0.25 increments but I have adjusted for that in my calcs. EG - a 40 point move = 160tks. Cheers .

Nice one!

Yep, Q's = 5k YM = 20k thus it works out the same (4x).

Experimenting again with FDXM (DAX mini futures) for the European morning... I keep hoping it will become the "European NQ", but whilst the volume is slowly growing (it was only introduced 18 months ago), it's still way, way below the NQ (in volume : the range is similar, sometimes less, sometimes more). Nevertheless, for one or two lots., it's just about tradable (€5/tick, but €1k margin, although Eurex commissions are lower than CME).

Anyway, here's what I now call my "Type 2 entry" to get the week started : same entry described by H, although on a 34 vol chart to account for lower vol.
Edit : as for target management, I had set my exit target at 2t above the big round number, but price blew straight through it : the 6 more bars to the low of that swing formed in ONE second !



By the way, did anyone else notice that the tick value on TF, the Russell 2000 emini was reduced to $5 in December ? I also hear it will move back to the CME soon. ER2, as the CME originally symbolled it, used to be my favourite futures contract (huge range in the mid 2000s).

I too have been experimenting with the DAX using FDAX & 75 vol. I've found it not to conform to the NQ style of trading and possibly a waste of time trying to make this system fit here. Maybe you can get one or two good setups but i see more fail than compared to NQ. Different set of traders using different methods maybe. Would be nice to get something to trade this system in the Euro/London open..

Hey jt, i used to trade the tf until about the data feed costs exploded to over 100 usd a Month. Back then it was still usd 10 per tick like Cl. Sometimes It moved like a Machine and due to the tickvalue the commission were lower as the nq which was a good thing. But Cl worked better for me so i dumped it. A strategy like this One here could be Well suitet for the tf