All
I just got the following message on email and I thought I'd reply to it here
I learn mostly by doing. I tought buyers will defend the 1835.00 level, as we had 21k trades there. i took the long, but soon got into hot water and suffered a loss. What did go wrong? I watch your 1 trading without charts videos twice and admit its a bit too fast. fill me in. my time is CET. Thanx for your help. the first chart is called es-start, the middle shows action a few minutes and the last one is after the horrible loss.
Here is the trade... (click to enlarge)
Well - good that you learn by doing. Don't consider every losing trade as "doing something wrong". Trades do go wrong. They go wrong even when you do nothing wrong.
In this case, you are effectively betting on this being a range extension. You remember in the webinar, we said the market will breakout, put in high volume at a price or 2 prices after the breakout and so might be a "head fake trap" aka false breakout. If it's a false breakout to the downside, you look for price to move to the opposite end of the trading range.
Remember what we said about the POC? The area with the highest volume? In this case, the area with the highest volume is 37.50. The market moved your way to 36.50 but you didn't get a fill there. At that point, when price came back down, you should have been thinking about closing the trade because if a range trade fails to get through the POC, then you have to consider that the range may be failing...
Also - if you look above what we have is a much more significant step above us at 36.75. The market moved up and traded 1 tick below that step but couldn't trade another contract at 36.75. At that point, this tells you that the step there is significant. Again, this should tell you that it's not going any higher.
I'd also say that whilst 21k and 16k below it is a step in the profile, it's not huge, so you that should make you just a bit more cautious when it came back.
One of the hardest things to do in trading is to cut trades when they aren't working out. I think you just need to improve in that respect because it's not a terrible entry. I'd consider tightening the stops once the trade moves your way but also to cut trades when evidence mounts that it's not going to go any further your way.
Still, pretty good for your first day with Jigsaw and considering our day trading without charts webinar was only on Wendesday! Don't beat yourself up about it!