My Morning, Step by Step

I started my day looking at the MP. ES was rallying and got to 1348.00, above yesterday's VA, and in the single selling tail. Asian stock markets were weakish overnight. I know it's a zipper but not in the normal sense and at this time of day (7am London). I saw the previous day's VAL at 1350.25. I decided to start selling with a view to scaling into a position. My first scale in was 1348.00 and I had scale outs all the way down to yesterday's close of 1343.00. My plan is (and I'm writing this after my first sell) to add to shorts on a rally up to 1350.25 and to stop myself out if price is accepted within the value area above that price. I'm trading other markets and may comment on those too.


I scaled out 2/3rds down to 1345.00 at the 33EMA. I then saw a picture to go long, so closed the balance but did not go long, rather looking to re-short at a higher price.

Well, it didn't happen. I had the right idea but did not maximise the opportunity. But then there was the DAX.

You can see from the attached pic that I tripled the 45CCI setting and cut the normal DAX range bar setting to 6 ticks. The result was pretty good, although there were a couple of scratches before the big payoff at just after 10.30am London time. For me it's important to keep the discipline of getting TP complying trades on. I may to and fro and scratch but I MUST get the trades on. Imagine having traded the earlier morning and getting frustrated with myself as I wasn't getting the follow through and then missing the trade. Using Flo helps a lot. The sequence below had fixed targets of Euro150/contract. The DAX is relatively thin so trade size is also small. Nonetheless, the sequence shows a profit of nearly Euro1,000/contract.


The message I am trying to send is that the methodology is always the same: trade the pullbacks in the trend. How I can best see those pullbacks depends on context and volatility. That's why its called discretionary trading.