20191025
Short 1 NQ 7957.0, +10.5
Short 1 RTY 1551.5, -0.0
Short 2 YM 26824, 26822, +30, +7
Short 1 NQ 7971.0, -1.0
Short 1 YM 26828, -6
Short 2 RTY 1556.8, 1557.1, -1.5, -1.5
Short 2 YM 26861, 26861, +7, +18
Short 1 NQ 7996.5, +6.0
Short 1 NQ 7998.0, -2.25
Short 1 NQ 78004.5, -2.25
Short 1 NQ 7807.0, +6.0
Short 1 NQ 7811.0, +5.0
Short 1 RTY 1561.8, -1.4
Short 1 NQ 7829.0, -0.25
Short 1 YM 26962, +22
Short 1 RTY 1564.0, 1564.0, +1.0, +1.0
Total YM +78
Total NQ +21.75
Total RTY -2.5
The most difficult day of all for futures traders is somewhat ironic. After all, it usually doubles ad the most profitable day of all for option swing traders and portfolio buy-and-holders. But futures traders who do not hold positions overnight, and often focus their entire day's worth of trading on a single frame of the day, like the First Frame, as do I, are especially challenged when the market does not make reversals and turns.
Fortunately for us, such impulsive Persistent Trend Days only number about 4 in any given 21-day business month. And with the plethora of days being those that Test-n-Reject short term trend extremes, often in both directions, fading such extremes as the market naturally pulls back into consolidation is only as difficult as identifying which price extremes to fade and those to leave alone. In the early days of stock index futures trading, I would have never even dreamed of trading the 1st Frame volatility... until Serial Sequent Fractal Method was uncovered. It was a real eye-opener, and remains the key to short term profits in the majority of trading days each month.
Still, there are ways to skin the cat of the Persistent Trend Day without the Serial Sequent Fractal Method, if you have mind to what you are looking for.. ..and are willing to sit through most of the trading day, glued attentively to the screen for the typical signals, of which there are about 4.
The first, is the ORB. This one doesn't always show. But when it does, it appears as an ORB Pennant, and often heralds in the Persistent Trend Day with a simple bracket order position. Today, the YM came the closest to this signal. To separate the more likely from the nearly-but-not-quite-good-enough, I require the ORB pennant to have either the basic complexity of one lower high and one higher low before I place the bracketed breakout triggers. The alternative to this is a double inside bar pattern, where the ORB itself telescopes down into a total of at least 3 successively smaller bars, all inside the other. The Russian doll. Today, the YM only showed 2 bars. That's one bar for the ORB, and one smaller inside bar. ....and then price exploded... The ORB, you see, is the Singularity. It precedes the Big Bang of an exploding universe. And in the space of just minutes, the whole mass of price mass has traversed an entire trend. You have to be alert, ready, and weary of any series of days where the market has lulled you to sleep with its choppy, bifurcating consolidation. I missed this one...perhaps my rules are too strict.
The second signal to act on in order to capitalize on some sparse Persistent Trend Day opportunity landscape is called the First Chance Texaco. It says "Gas up", cause the long stretch of nearly abandoned U.S. Route 66 leaves few remaining stations open for biz. It does not show up in all contracts. (That's why the market gods invented 4 otherwise decent ones to choose from...)
It does not pullback far enough to signal a volatility index climax to offset the one it just came from in the true trend extreme. It does not usually meet some convenient and easily acknowledged Support/Resistance level. After all, everyone sees those... But it does often arrive with a Substitute Serial Sequent fractal signal. Today, such a signal came in the YM. I wss short 2 contracts in the YM from the initial stall at the early high as this pullback came to an end. I covered my shorts with a decent profit. But out of respect (actually it was fear) of having achieved a momentum climax at that early high, I did NOT turn-n-rev my shorts to longs, and the Persistent Trend Day took off towards its rendezvous with history.
The third signal is usually associated with the Noon Hour High/Low phenomenon. Why does the trend so often fail when making new extremes at the Noon hour? It's sort of a chicken and egg story. Which comes first...? Lunch....or the anticipation that there won't be enough participating traders to drive prices on beyond it? Or, maybe it's a "why did the chicken cross the road" story... but nobody ever tells the joke like "why DIDN'T the chicken cross the road?" If they did, perhaps the answer would be "because he would have BECOME lunch on the other side, you idiot."
And the fourth and final potential signal for short term futures traders on Persistent Trend Days is the compliment to the First Chance Texaco, but in this case, it's Last Chance Texaco. It turns out that the First Chance Texaco was just an advertising scam. But the Last Chance Texaco is dead real. It's not an easy one to take. Price comes speeding up to it so fast that you hardly dare belief it could ever slam on its brakes hard enough to actually make the turn. But an interesting factoid for the experience observer, if price comes up too slowly to the desired end of this pullback, it usually doesn't turn at all. In fact, the ability for this pullback to hold and propel your fearful in-trend position back towards new market extremes in the Last Hour Frame of the day seems wholly dependent upon making it seem like the market reversal is actually going to stick. One other tell that is of use: this pullback is often associated with the 2:30pm ET Transition Time. ....but nobody knows why. ...and it's even more pointless to speculate as to a valid reason than why a Noon Hour new price extreme is such a poor breakout strategy to get in with in-trend.
OR, you can acquire the Serial Sequent Fractal Methodology, which--because it is Anti-Fragile--is actually exposed more clearly in the wake of volatility than overcome by it, and use that to do some really amazing counter-trend positioning even on explosive Persistent Trend Days...
You can read all about this Persistent Trend model, and the other models too, in the book Pivots, Patterns and Intraday Swing Trades, available at Amazon and other places online. ...and a good weekend to all...
