20200316
Short 1 ES 2457.0, +19.75
Total ES +19.75
There's an odd psychological profile exhibited by traders who naturally suffer from the antipathy of stop-outs. Sometimes this is revealed in the dangerous habit of pulling stops as the market approaches so as to avoid the pain.... no matter how great the sea of red that stacks up from doing so. Sometimes, especially in those who are well schooled in just what this sea of red is doing to their account, unattended, as it were, by a protective stop, move the stops up impossibly close. This pain, they figure, is more akin to ripping off a small band-aid than having your gall-bladder removed. Just so. But sometimes, and this is the odd part, this anxiety over being stopped out takes its action in moving THE TARGETS too close, instead of the stop. That's right. So afraid of missing out on the pure luck of finally having a successful entry, they dump their trade before it even has a chance to develop, less it does what their losing streak has been so consistently depicting, a poor entry model. And nowhere does this tendency show up more than in the extremely volatile markets. These traders see the market like a game of 'hot potato', with the object of getting it out of one's hands as fast as practicable. ....and nowhere is this a bigger waste of opportunity than precisely the place most likely to induce it, the high volatility markets.
Raise your targets on your ATM strategies. Then, raise them again. Then, raise them yet again.. And even that will probably fail to deliver what these incredible excursions are offering these days. I should know. For even with my targets substantially raised, I usually fail to capture even half what the average swing turn has to offer in the First Frame of trading each day in the stock index futures.
