March 4th

Here is the Global Gold Index chart for the morning trading. This time, as I mentioned, I did some trading and got caught in the morning churn. The overall up day that I was anticipating did not happen as of yet, but that is of little concern as I follow what the averages, pivot points and price movement are doing, so even a bias is not that big a deal.

I should have stopped trading sooner than I did once I realized what was going on...or more appropriately, what was not going on. The spreads were unusually wide, as much as five cents at a time which is unusual and probably is a good sign that the market is undecided...now this is only in the ETFs HGU and HGD. So there were no defined moves.

It should be noted that these quotes do not drive the market as they are reflecting the sentiment of ETF traders. Seeing as they were unsure I should have just stayed out. A good chunk of the actual loss of each trade was due to the spread as I entered three or so cents farther away than I needed in a lot of cases. I saw a number of even 100 lot quotes on both sides and about as far away from the inside bids, they did some dancing about as well. I suspect that these were the market makers doing their job of providing the necessary liquidity as they showed up when the quotes were very thin for quite some ways away from the inside. I definitely stayed away then as the spreads were larger and the price was flitting about.

I happened to try to trade off of the averages a bit. I should know better than to do that when they are so close to one side of a pivot zone. Although my rules were fine for yesterday and Monday I think that I will change my entry criteria a bit for tomorrow. Use the averages ONLY to determine if a trade has too narrow a target, the good ol' squeeze play. Confluences must be more confluent.

So, taking my plan back to some bare bones entry criteria now to eliminate the questionable trades and only sticking to those that are more defined. I think this will give me fewer trades as I use patience to wait for the setups, perhaps I will employ some limit orders again as they slow me down a bit. I never had enough of a move today to use them but I was going to use some manually trailing stops had I got on the right side of a decent moving trade.

Overall another learning day.

Jeff.