October 22 Overlay, Trades, and Commentary

I had a good read on the complex open this morning.

I took a breakout short at the support zone this morning. This is not often part of my plan.

There trade needed to be taken because there was good structure to the down side and good risk/reward. Also, an excellent pattern entry for a support zone break.

I cut the trade with a 2 point loss and reversed long because I had a classic long setup after the washout.

I exited both long trades early. This was my plan today. I had an expectation of a test of at least 1082.00 and likely beyond but was in a different mode today.

Working On Being More Of A Hybrid Trader:

I am doing well catching the big moves 1 or 2 times a week but having obvious difficulty holding equity highs in between big trades.

There is something to be said for putting points on the board every day and there are definitely not premium setups every day.

I need to start addressing this because the past couple weeks have demonstrated that I can grind even worth near perfect reads on what I expect the market to do.

This is because there is a lot of noise when price travels from point A to point B and introducing risk management stops of 2-4 points makes it impossible to catch these moves the way I want to catch them.

It is causing my to "pick and choose" my trades too frequently. I want to be mostly discretionary but have had too much randomness in the past 2 week.

I need to work on my skill of generating smaller profits in between premium trades. I believe that this is now the most pressing issue in between me and accomplishing my goals.

My Struggle:

The main struggle for me right now is that I am generally clear on what the price action is doing and thus often holding positions when I know they will pull back and move against my open equity.

So I am often forcing myself to remain in positions that I know are going to correct.

This is OK but it spills over into my executions and I have found myself forcing entries lately.

I am always debating on whether to just lay down my bet on an area and ride it out or to take more of a sequencing approach, getting in and out of a move as it unfolds.

I can go on forever about this issue so will leave it at that for now.

I have to acknowledge that doing what I am doing now is leaving money on the table and will just get better with time.

Plan:

In attempt to increase my proficiency and willingness to consistently enter trades, I am actually going to start cutting most trades earlier that what I would like and forcing a re-entry.

I think this is the only way to get better at sequencing.

I will also be reducing size on most trades but give my self the option to trade larger size than I am now with ad-ins to sequences.

This is not going to be a dramatic overhaul. I do not think my method or ability is lacking here. The approach needs some tuning.

I need to be more agile. It was costly today because I got out of my long with a scalp and did not re-enter.

I am going to force more sequencing under the premise that I will adapt quickly.

This will naturally hurt my ratios and is contrary to much of what I believe about the "optimal" way for a trader to execute.

It is very possible that conventional wisdom as well as my personal beliefs about how trading should be tackled does not suite my trading personality as well as it could.

It the only way for me to explain the divergence between my analysis and execution.

This is my hypothesis and we are going to test it.