Ray's amnesty page

[immy]

just a side note about the 10 pip myth
10 pip a day is a myth IMHO. 10 pip a day is a dangerous thing. It has the ability to seriously put a block/ a ceiling to the upside of your trading totals. once you have this in mind, you'd stop easily when you've made anything above 10 pips but ironically if you're done 5 times more, like 50 pips for the day, you still try to catch some more pips just to break even. the mind is a crazy thing. Don't make 10 or 20 pips your goal in trading. The T20 principle is there to change our paradigm that the goal of our daily trading is to achieve and maintain consistency.

[wiseambitions]

just a side note about the 10 pip myth
10 pip a day is a myth IMHO. 10 pip a day is a dangerous thing. It has the ability to seriously put a block/ a ceiling to the upside of your trading totals. once you have this in mind, you'd stop easily when you've made anything above 10 pips but ironically if you're done 5 times more, like 50 pips for the day, you still try to catch some more pips just to break even. the mind is a crazy thing. Don't make 10 or 20 pips your goal in trading. The T20 principle is there to change our paradigm that the goal of our daily trading is to achieve and maintain consistency.

Hi Immy thanks for your words of wisdom.
The considerations are at one extreme "If we owned a goldmine would we just work in it for a few minutes a day?" or at the other do we think we want to catch every possible move, make bucket loads of pips and stress ourselves out before the week is half over?
I have done my sums on averaging 10 to 20 pips a day. It doesn't mean I stop at that if the day is young, but it remains important that one consistently sticks to what we know works, accept a few losses on the way. Must not let let optical illusions when watching charts or revenge or impulse let us open bad trades, nor hang on in hope for the wrong reasons to a trade which is going wrong.

[wiseambitions]

0954 Friday. I won't have any more chance to trade today I don't think. It has been a good week as there has been plenty volatility on the Dax.
249.9 pips. Shame I didn't just make it 250.0
Anyway 46 trades opened. Average result +5.4 pips, PF 3.8 worst loss 23 (my fault), best win 34 on main account, mainly m1 trading, s1 and some s2, mainly green line or elective exits

The least good trades were generally market orders when I noticed setups I had missed, and the best ones generally came from pending orders which were opened pretty much without slippage.

Measuring things in the context of 20 helps, but also a buddy and I have been undertaking a serious statistical review which has actually overturned some of my prejudices. We just need to trust the system, knowing that in 20 and more transactions it is very capable of adding up to more than zero without requiring too much thought on our part.


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1605. Just had a few more minutes at the charts, and made it up to 277.4 net positive pips this week, which would be about as good as I get, and I am extremely happy about that.

M1 trading can get a bit intensive, I hate the phone ringing, people coming in talking etc and although I propose to stick with it (having once been more a trader of m5) I definitely agree that you can only watch one pair and can only concentrate and be in the right frame of mind for an hour or two maximum per session.

[wiseambitions]

The universe is a friendly place for some folks!
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... n-one.html

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I guess due to Easter I will need to shut down terminals at noon on Thursday, tomorrow.

I don't think I'm the only one who has found this week a bit of a challenge, yet looking back in retrospect it (Dax) would have been easy trading higher timeframes than m1,

Currently up 115 pips from 21 trades in the week, but some have not been correctly executed, eg in human error I put in 110 SL this morning instead of 10, the price went bad by over 20 before returning to profit, so little experiences like that were bad for the nerves even if they did have a satisfactory outcome. Best win 27 worst loss 10, PF = 4.1 in pips terms.

Perhaps Immy is right and some of us are at times "chinamen" traders, I do recall him saying that such persons can still come out on the right side

[wiseambitions]

Friday, Easter Bank Holiday

Looks like the NFP figures came out and added 100 pips to GU and 130 to EU amongst other things

Dax fell out of lower aims levels on fairly high time frames too, and there was also a 50 pip drop on UK FTSE100. But these were all indicative prices off the market, and I guess subject to silly high spreads.

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Thinking back to amendments to my trading system in the last month and more.........

Basically I observed some magic in the old gator, and have decided to reduce the SL tolerance I should give a trade and let myself be knocked out by the green line, rather than letting it go to the opposite aims level. Sure it increases the number of losing trades but it keeps them small. The other trick is trying to optimise the profits. How many of us have ever calculated the % of available pips which we eventually take off the table? The analysis of that is quite revealing, and anyone does quite well to get more than 35% of them, whether by setting a TP, trailing, or using the other aims level incrementally........

This has been a difficult week, I eventually attained 136 net pips but it was a bit choppy at times, and required more than average caffeine intake. Although there were some nice trends they may have proved more suitable to m15 m5 etc than to m1. Generally I do not think conditions this week were typical.

[wiseambitions]

This is the sort of fun that went on when we weren't watching at NFP time on Friday. A Dax price (futures) was only available until another 45 minutes after the news. I guess some people made and some people lost a bit of money with all that going on. Firstly it moved up about 25 pips on the chime of 1330 BST then within seconds everyone decided it was to be sold and it fell through support and went downhill faster than the alligator until closing time. Spread was typically 6 pips. Around 80 pips available from bottom of m1/m5/m15/m30/h1 aims levels.

[wiseambitions]

Just hoping everyone had a happy Easter break away from all this stuff and will be back to trading with renewed enthusiasm and focus.

During the weekend I took chance to catch up on some abstract stuff to do with the basics. Why I believe the reason why this system with Immy and Bill Williams work does work is entirely down to a belief in the structure of the market, this makes the principles timeless, and is why the system will work this year and next year and the 10th year after this.

Amongst material I enjoyed going through was this video which begins with the statement that "the universe consists entirely on waves of motion which start with stillness and return to stillness".
It refers, as we so often hear said, to the golden ratio of 1.61 and wave forms and I think this one also mentions Mandelbrot and fractal geometry. And seeing it mentions waves of the sea adhering to the same fibonacci numbers it should be of no surprise that markets do the same thing. May many successful extensions of 61.8% to everyone's account be with us all Amen.

Fibonacci patterns give great beauty in nature eg the way seeds in a sunflower are packed so here is a pretty picture

[wiseambitions]

I think it should go into the Discipline Score that I was not watching at a time when I could have been trading and missed the chance to make up to 40 pips even if knocked out on first try here...........

Classic S1 short from 1548 BST

Anyway I suppose my excuse would be that I'd left off for the day already, 7 trades, 61.5 pips good, 22 pips bad, net 39.5, PF2.8


PS - sorry I labelled this pm "Monday" it must be how I feel.....

[wiseambitions]

Friday. I have never tried harder to remain focussed than I have in the last 3 weeks. Have been working daily with another trader who is better at EW analysis than myself, a disciple of Bill Williams.

My main message to all of you is that I think Immy's suggestions about measuring performance in 20 trades and giving yourself a discipline score for each foray are amazing.

I now keep a running total of the production of the last 20 trades. It really helps alert me and give me an early warning if my trading quality is slipping. I have had a few days of 3 and more consecutive losses, but I have tried hard just to keep doing what I know has served me well in the past and I have to say IT WORKS. I also started plotting the average result of the previous 50. What it is showing me is that in spite of some days when nothing seems to come right, the result in a running 50 over the last 3 weeks, during which I have taken over 100 trades, is surprisingly constant. I am happy about that, because I am not looking for sudden flight to millionaire status, I am happy brick laying !

Trading is not a competition, I don't see much benefit in comparing financial results with other traders, the main help we give each other is how to choose a good trade entry and how and when to get out. That is why I enjoy looking at how other members interpret the charts and everyone honest enough to put up their campaigns deserves thanks and good success.

Enjoy your weekend chaps!

[wiseambitions]

Looks like Dax has reached new heights today

It was one of those mornings where I traded m1 and kept getting stopped out with small profits as the green line was tending to keep catching up with the price. On m5 the alligator was running up slower than price and I suppose what I am saying is there might have been better gain for being on that time frame. Anyway I was lucky enough to get over 40 this morning and I am more than delighted by that. Which in total gives me 173 pips for the week from 28 tries.

Nothing to do with Aims or Bill Williams, but I have seen people using 80 Linear moving average as an entry and exit indicator, I do admit it does seem to work quite well, the points to notice are not only when price touches, but also when the direction changes