April 16th, crossroads

I always try to write some sort of market impression in my journal before the market opens. I think that I should pay more attention to these small musings.

Today's very first entry:

$290 TTGD seems to be a resistance level right now.

OK, that sounds pretty basic. I actually thought about entering a position in HGD and just holding it through the day...too bad.

Here are the charts that say it all:

S&P TSX Global Gold Index, daily six month chart.

Support and resistance does not get much more defined than that.

Same chart, 5 minute period, 10 days:

Amazing 200sma support squeeze...almost too good to be true. I mentioned using 5 minute charts in my medium term trading blog as they allow longer term views of shorter term trades and the 200sma still applies as if it were a 1 minute timeframe...actually the 200 applies across most timeframes, I just have not found it speaks to me in the 30 minute or 60 minute periods. This is the kind of setup that makes me want to give up the 1 minute charting and just place a trade in the morning and let it ride it out...if the stop loss orders were available I probably would have done so this week. This does not always go this way, if I were trying to trade multi day this kind of move would sort of suck as I waited for the price to move.

On to the minute chart:

Back to my journal entry. $290 was definitely resistance, I missed the very first ideal trade, that one would have been a keeper using the 50 for stops then moving to the various pivot points once I was way in the money...maybe even entering another couple of lots around 1145h as the S3 was broken and using the 200 sma as the stop due tot he very horizontal price movement.

I am going to go hunting for the NYSE and AMEX equivalents in gold as gold I know now. I added these two exchanges to my Esignals account today, tomorrow I may add the market depth for them as well but I get that through my broker, so maybe I don't need to spend the money on those until next month.

I only started playing again with stops last week and found how they were not working, so up until that point stops had no bearing on my trades.

Now I realize that I just need to be able to leave a trade run on it's own often, if that had been available this week I would bet that my trading would have taken a slightly different angle and I would have entered a lot of those times when I knew I was not going to be able to babysit the charts. Of course that doesn't necessarily mean that I would have made tons of money... although I think I would have done well enough. Today, as a prime example, that initial trade at the early peak I saw and did not take as I knew that I could not place a secure stop so I hesitated and chalked it up to misjudging peak. True enough.

Stop loss protection here I come.

Jeff.