My best and biggest trade to date. By far the biggest trade on my own, the last largest trade being a swing trade on SHOP that Daddy in Dragon’s chat had called out.
I, out of frustration with my performance yesterday, followed my rules that I outlined yesterday. I saw what looked like a clear enough pattern, I was a bit late to the entry, but got in and held with a wider stop, 3 points initially, but I always kept this stop between 3-5 points, realizing that /ES moves largely in $5 intervals, realizing that I need to have some tolerance for pain, & I might as well have the tolerance because lack of it leads to me losing more than I might lose if I’d just had initial tolerance.
I milked this move for the section between my charted levels. While this was relatively straightforward & easy to hold in price action, I still maintained the gumption & wide enough stops to hold through according to my levels. Granted, the more & more in profit I became, the easier this was, but still, I did so. I leveraged my own frustration to a positive end, and I traded according to my levels.
I was also able to, with a stake in the out come, watch intently level 2 & time & sales. I’m under the (potentially erroneous) impression that the price action is much more straight forward on these futures charts because a significant swath of the retail market is not participating. I’m telling myself the story that because it’s largely larger players engaging in this market, the price action is less likely to reflect hedge fund fuckery & liquification of weak retail hands. I could be mistaken.
I had a thesis on this trade, I saw a reasonable enough pattern, I saw continued support of my bullish thesis: A bullish flag pattern, price breaking above a key level & holding, price continuing upwards bouncing off EMAs, rejections occurring at expected levels, but demand always returning & actualizing a slow grind upwards. I had a thesis & I acted on it and held through it.
A mistake that could be said that I made was that I got greedy. There was a treacherous area where yesterday’s price action touched, then rejected sharply off of. I was anticipating this well enough and decided that I would adhere to my levels, rationalizing that whatever supply that was waiting there had been partially washed out, and the strength of the trend had a decent chance of pushing through this to at least my first level. I was able to have this conviction because I was in profit.
Now watching the price continue to surge upwards I realize my new mistake, selling without a reason. I’ve missed out on another 5 points so far. This is obviously far and away more preferable than taking a loss, but the strength of the trend was apparent, I was in the trade, and it would not have taken much to stay in, I could have even maintained tight stops, $2, & not been stopped out. This is the new work I must take on, of knowing how to properly exit a trade, knowing how and why to stay in, and having the composure to do so, even when the profit I’m in is appealing. The quality of this mistake is higher than many I’ve made in the past, which is hopefully a testament to my improvement, but it’s still one that I must address if I want to achieve lasting success in this field.
Greed can be good if managed well. I got out of the trade because I ‘didn’t want to be greedy’. This is not necessarily the proper perspective to have on this, as evidenced by my now missing out on what would have been very easy, pain free profits. Need to move my stops up, not necessarily have profit targets. Have profit targets initially, with wide stops to hold through pain, but once those targets are reached, then trail with tight stops. You should not ever be capturing 100% of a move, because the inclination to try to do so will lead you to getting out early on moves that might rocket considerably past your initial targets.
Ending the day happy, but now angry that I didn’t capitalize on the now 10 more points of easy upside I could have captured lmao. Still, walking into the weekend green for the day, the week, and again for the month, and nearly halfway to my goal for the month.