20140624
Short 1 NQ 3806.5, -1.5
Short 2 YM 16845, 16845, +7, +14
Long 2 TF 1176.9, 1176,8, -0.6, -0.5
Long 1 TF 1176.8, +3.0
Short 2 TF 1183.6, 1183.6, +0.5, +1.0
Short 1 NQ 3819.25, -1.5
Short 1 TF 1187.0, -0.5
Short 1 TF 1188.3, -0.3
Short 3 TF 1188.3, 1188.3, 1188.3, +0.6, +0.5, +1.0
Short 1 YM 16880, +5
Total NQ -3.0
Total YM +26
Total TF +4.7
A number of low volatility days to deal with lately, followed today by an early vertical climb with scant and shallow pullbacks. Today, sticking to the Trade Plan with pre-10am News management rules bumped me out of longs just before the news explosion, but a nice pullback to the tick lap at least got me back in 1/2 position. Better management would have captured far more of that excursion, but I succumbed to taking the nice sounding round number of +3 for a profit, when the whole 2nd TF trend was waiting to be ridden all the up.
We too often have a tendency to want to be sure of making up for our most recent stp-outs when landing in a position worth far more than the mere recapture of those losses. There are just too many cross currents of emotions at such points to reduce the better outcome to a simple set of rules: getting stp'd out of 2 contracts, I tend to go back only in 1. Landing in the budding reversal with 1 means there is no real management strategy to take partial profits. Trailing a stp on a 1-lot position means staying back far enough to risk recovery from losses while giving the new position enough space to breathe, etc., etc. One is reminded of one of Andy Warhol's many famous quotes in such circumstances, "I want to be a machine," and just so the Trader needs often to be more purely mechanical, and leave the creativity to the planning and insight periods when the markets are closed for business and the trade platforms are safely unloaded from our screens.
