Looking for a nice trending day.

I have now reigned myself in so that I trade according to my plans, the trouble is that my plans favour a trending day better then a range or mixed day as I tend to try to leave the price room to go when I should be exiting on momentum. I need to work on recognizing when the trend shifts so I can better use momentum targets and wider stops when appropriate.

As a result I had a mixed day today. I expected the downmove in the SPX off the start but didn't get my order in for SDS quick enough at my price to catch the move...next move I tightened up too soon expecting a similar quick rally. The day kind of went like that. Seeing as I was using the 200sma to use as my trade launching and there were three solid crosses and as many periods when it was being tested I had lots of opportunity to try some trading... just not a lot of large quick moves from it.

This is a day when it would be better to fade the moves toward this line, but where to select the entry... I think that these would be less likely to be good clean entries than what I am playing with now so I will continue this method.

I am getting to recognize the TICK divergences on the fly, good day to watch those setup with the price moving about as it did. Something about a three wave pattern seems to be normal for a ranging or mixed day...might even be able to time trades off of the extreme TICK moves...sort of like a reversion to the mean but not specifically with the price action. More on that another time as I think it warrants some investigation along the lines of trading the reversion to the 200 or maybe the pivot point.

Here is the 5 minute period chart for SPY today, note the nice smooth wavey 200sma green line. I recalculated the SMAs to be valid as if this were a minute chart...so the 200 on the 5 minute bar chart is still a 200 minute moving average. I don't have the patience to trade five minute bars but they are nice for quick reference.

I had eight trades and none of them were great gainers or losers, suffice it to say I got a little chopped up even though I had good entries. Some stops were too tight and I didn't feel comfortable getting back, a couple of trades were just wrong, the idea was sound, I misjudged the strength of the market at the time...or perhaps the weakness.

I have not done the overall profit loss for the week but I know I am down, just not how much. Regardless, I am really enjoying the revelations that I am having and am looking forward to the time when I can trade and be confident of a good day regardless of the market activity.

BTW, I am heartened by some of the timelines for active traders to start being good as heard from professional traders when they are referring to their new traders in there firms. Seeing as I have had zero formal education about trading and markets I can consider myself doing as well as can be expected...actually better as most have lost it by now, apparently.

Jeff.