Trading Journal

I have hit upon a nice comfortable method and setup to do my trade journalling on paper now. As much as I like having the nice charts I don't think that they are going to be as much of a reference as I thought they might. I see that Esignal has expanded the historical archive of intraday data, or are in process, so I can always refer back to any trade based on my journal entry. I may print the odd one or still notate them and log them here as well if I think they will be important reference.

This feels like a transition for me as I start to really see the nuances and interaction of the markets. Touching on the topic of too much information, I now find that blog posts are mostly confirmations of things that I am already doing or am trying to do in my trading. I am still struggling witht he execution of the trades, getting in just right and setting stops according to where they really should be. It's getting there.

Today's trading was disappointing only in that I was unable to capture the moves that I wanted to catch and saw setting up. I missed one to hesitation, one to interruption, one to away at lunch and one to lack of confidence in my trade idea at the time. All learning points though.

Having said that, saying my trading was disappointing is a little misleading in that I only had one losing trade of the four that I placed. The disappointment was not being there on the longer rides. One trade in particular I moved my stop intentionally to capture the momentum move that had just occurred from my entry BUT had I left my stop just 5 cents lower I would have doubled my profits... no big deal as the plan was the plan.

All in all I think I did well enough to consider it a successful day and it could easily have been profitable given more action on my part.

Here is a decent trade for today that I could have rode farther but still came out ahead on. The stops I need to work on but if I chose to just exit at better than break even I would be doing better. I just would rather work on slightly longer term trades than the short, almost scalping style of trades. There is, ultimately more money in holding for the moves.

TICK chart:

Chart for SPY for the same period:

This was a typical PP200 trade with a TICK timed entry. The only thing better would have been a launch off of the black previous day high at the same time. As it was all of the moving averages were converging and lending seeming support to the price activity. The volume picked up after I was out as the price crossed the high line. I didn't get back to actively watching the chart until after the nice climb to the top started enough that I was price chasing and would need to large a stop to feel comfortable.

Jeff.