Breakout Fakeout

I am a day late with this update.  It is a Saturday afternoon in Manchester and as usual, it is cloudy and rain is expected soon.  There is a reason it is known as the 'Rainy City'.

I tried something yesterday that I dont like doing, that is trading breakouts, rather than the retrace back to the breakout area.  I tried it twice, and twice it was horrible.  I am never going to do that again. If I am going to trade breakouts then I am not going to join in the momentum breakout, but to do what I always do and that is to look for a good move away and then a retrace to the breakout area.

My other entries were also not as good as they have been recently either.  However, as I am very adept at playing out of bunkers, I still made a good profit on my Sim account after suffering large drawdowns.  Good thing Gold was not in a runaway trend and was rather choppy.  Although the range of each swing was around $10.

On a better note I took a counter trend trade on my live account for 10 ticks.  This was my first live trade this week.  I never once went into deficit on this one.  I should have held it to the nearest supply zone for 40 ticks, but I am still too nervous when in a trade.  What I need, is to have one good trade to give me confidence to hold on to these trades longer.

I am still finding good supply and demand zones, both near term and longer term, so I will look to try and trade from these area rather than go for the silly counter trend trades that I always seem to take.  The only CT trades will be based on the longer term demand and supply zones.

I have also been using a new indicator found at BMT, to identify exhaustion in the momentum. I requested some improvements to it, someone at BMT (Silvester) has kindly made the changes to it and I can now visualise these exhaustion bars much better.  The way I am going to use it is to see exhaustion in the retrace to get back into the trend trade, rather than getting in a CT trade at exhaustion of the trend.

It is also very good at showing exhaustion at the Supply and Demand zones so, hopefully, my performance will improve next week when I take those trades.  With the addition of a sound alert, I am hoping I can trade both CL and GC at the same time, as I have found it impossible to focus on more than one instrument.

All, I need to do now, is to accept my losses so I do not hang on to a losing trade too long thus enabling me to get in on the better trades.

Monthly performance

I got up late again today, extremely late - 15:30 GMT due to being unable to sleep.  I think I am stressing too much and this is causing my sleeping problems.

Anyway, I traded gold mostly and the majority of my entries were pretty good.  The first trade I took a short scalp of 12 ticks, but price fell another 60 ticks right into a demand zone.  I took a long at the zone and held for 15 ticks and it zoomed another 80 ticks.  In between I scalped both trend and counter trend.  I really need to stop counter trending scalp as they are too stressful.

After gold slowed down I wandered into the Oil charts and took a counter trend trade, but this was at a minor supply zone.  However, price broke through the zone and I was quickly in a hole.  However, I am becoming good at spotting short term momentum exhaustion and was able to average down and made a little profit out of it.

I feel like a golfer who has problems with his driving and continually getting into bunkers.  But because he has had a lot of experience in the bunkers, he is able to recover on most occasions.  However, I don't want to keep visiting the bunkers as I know that one of them will be my downfall eventually.  So until, I can learn to accept losses, I am still unwilling to commit my live account to the dangers of day trading.

If I had been looking on my 15 min chart, I would not have taken the CT trade as there was a better supply level above and that is where I should have taken it.

While trading gold, I missed a very good long entry on Oil.  It was at an extremely good level formed this morning where we had a lot of HVC bars basing and then had an impulsive move out, so when price returned later in the afternoon it went into the zone on a climactic volume bar and bounce out up to the supply zone I referred to earlier.  This bounce was about 160 ticks.

So I really need to get up earlier and identify potential supply and demand zones and have alerts for when price is at those levels.

I looked at my monthly Sim summary and although I made a large profit the MAE and max drawdon were too large.  On the positive side, my win to loss ratio was around 70%.

I started this sim account at the beginning of August 2011 with $100K and was surprised that it had grown to $689K and my win to loss ratio was 74%.  The MAE was not too bad, but the max drawdown was horrible.

I am going to reset my Sim account to $25K and see how I trade this month.  But as I am still averaging down, I am not going to trade live until I can cut out the bad behaviour.

I have attached the 15 min CL chart to show the good demand level from this morning and the summaries and equity curve graphs for February and since August.