May 5th, non-profit goal

Not much to say about the intraday market activity in the S&P 500 today, bears and bulls were uncommitted which makes for a range day. So, in the spirit of the day I took on more trades than I normally do, 10 altogether. I would consider that over trading as some of the entries may not have been justified or properly thought out.

Having said that I was working on a novel approach to the start of the day by setting out a goal, a non-monetary one by asking the question, "What do I want to work on today?", Inspired by Brett Steenbarger's post earlier today.

I decided to work on waiting for my target zone entry and getting my limit orders placed more timely.

Notice there was no hint of "making more money", "catching bigger moves" etc. I figure that if I can get into trades at better timelines then I can use tighter stop loss orders, have lower entry prices and be there when the moves do move. That will, eventually, turn into profits.

Here is the day chart for SSO, the Proshares leveraged ETF which exhibits the same rough pattern as the SPX, S&P 500 index. This is, more or less, SPY on steroids. The pivot point (blue line) and the yesterday's high (black line) are close tot he same area though.

From my pre-market journal entry:

"SSO to bump the 200sma then DT - at least range to the Pivot Point."

Well, it bumped and passed the 200, but I had a plan initially and it was close. So I am satisfied with that much to start.

Here are the trades in SSO, I should have followed my instincts and not placed any SSO orders so early, but the 200 crossings looked OK to test out my entries, they were tight, again, satisfied, just not the best ideas.

The TICK, as charted below for the same timeperiod as SSO above, has no real defined move past the + /- 800 (green and red). The trend, which is pretty obvious but I stuck the black line to represent the rough median, shows the inclination of the market to hover around neutral with a bit of a downward bias.

Here is the chart for SDS, Proshares leveraged bear ETF, for the morning showing my trades. This shows that my plan did, in fact, produce the results that I was looking for with my opening goal of what I wanted to work on today. Had I followed my original idea of only trading the downmoves toward the pivot (in SSO) which are the upmoves in SDS toward it's inverse pivot, then I would have made out better as I would have seen a 36 cps return instead of the piddly 13 cps that I did see.

In addition to having my entries down tighter and timelier I need to work on either following my pre-market instinct or at least recognizing the general trend as it develops better...or, more appropriately, not try so hard for the counter trend moves. I did like that little momentum move at the end of my SSO trading though. Once I realized that I could fade SSO off of the pivot back to the 200sma using the TICK as an entry trigger...that could have been made use of earlier in the day to my advantage...one thing at a time though.

BTW, I am glad that I did not try to trade into the afternoon as it was choppier than the morning and I might have gotten discouraged by the whipsaws. Looking solely at teh chart, without the TICK and anything else, I would have a hard time placing hindsight orders...although that muliple test of the pivot near the end looks like it needs some further investigation for possible setups in future...

Jeff.