I come once more with another load of guff and rubbish, this one probably a little more guffy and rubbishy than usual.
Wink Waffle Well, gotta say that was a week I am glad to see the back of, Oh My God, was sick as a dog on Wednesday and thursday, due to a bit of a gastritis thingy, and quite possibly due to over turkeying... Y'see, my local supermarket still has all this turkey for sale, left over from christmas, and they keep reducing the price, til finally they took fifteen dollars off Fifteen Dollars Off! So what did wink do, well he basically bought the majority of a turkey.. twas a strange thing, full breast and two legs, don't know how they did it, as no wings bum or backbone But anyway... that's a lot of turkey, and they also had these cheap carrots... don't ask... So for three days... I ummm ate pretty much nothing but turkey and carrots. Can't really explain why... at the same time a nasty gastritis bug went around at my work. And I kinda caught it, and that with the carrot and turkey combo made for a couple of nasty days... To cap it all off, the day job was nutso busy, so I was working from home occassionally pausing to sit on the throne, with a bucket between my knees. I could mention that I happen to have my home rigged for wireless internet, meaning I can work from any room with my laptop, but that would be nasty...ewww.
So yeah, yucky week... and unfortunately I am still weak as a kitten.
HotCopper Waffle
I have none!
I think I made about three posts on hotcopper this week... bizzare!
trading waffle
Bahahahahaha! Bahaha some more... Stupid Wink! You might recall in my last waffle post I mentioned a particular trading technique, highly unrecommended involving fading into price before a turn commences using multiple contracts... heap of warnings and caveats and gosh know what all about why you shouldn't do it...
Well Guess What??? On the night of the major sickness, couldn't sleep, and decided to trade... First dumb idea... don't trade whilst sick.
I was working the DAX... after a nice old rise, I think price was around 3430... I'd sussed the downside target, 3330 odd, and began to short the index. Wel it kept going up.. and I kept shorting it... till finally I Really had gone a bit far...big old four figure negative position... I reassessed the charts and saw that price could still be going a fair bit further to the upside which would see my quite negative position become quite more negative, and I lost my bottle and got all nervous and stuff and questioned my system and whether I knew what I was doing, came to the conclusion that I had no idea, and cut the trade... nice big loss, and took away the previous week's hard-earned profits. Booo Hiss!
Funny thing was, price DID continue up, reached an upside target, and then fell all the way back down to my original downside target over the next two days.
Even funnier, the next day, after the night of the lovely loss, I had freaked myself out so much, and was still a bit weak and poorly, that I almost went long.. in fact I ended up scalping a few points longside, before thankfully backing off and leaving the markets for a bit.
had got completely out of phase with the market, was on the verge of panic, ignoring my system, and desperate for no real good reason.
thanks be to all deities, I was able to observe myself, have a good laugh and chill and watch the markets and see that they were still the same, no big change had occurred, I had just made a bit of a mistake. It happens
But I came extremely close to charging back into the fray, totally unprepared, and heading straight for ruin. As previously stated, Stupid wink.
Lessons learnt? hope so
And what are the lessons?
For me... Don't trade whilst sick. The markets are gonna be the same tomorrow as they were yesterday. If price is in a particular trend, there is no harm in following that trend.
I've since re-entered tha playground, and have traded well, and brought back about half the profits. Primarily just on Friday evening. The US down trend was very handy, as was the bounce after cash close, directly from a downside target based on 5 minute histogram divergence..
Of great note, was that I actually traded a lot better, after the minor squicking from the dax...
Why? A lot more conscious of the greater trend, and able to take more advantage of it, running a couple of contracts pretty well down to the bottom, then closing and going upside and capturing the bounce.
Targets and cycles and scalping WITH the trend
Targets The target thing is still working well, and works well on the short term and long term. The interesting challenge for me at the moment is trying to be confident on which way price is going between targets
That is I can quite often calculate an upside target and a downside target that bracket current price... But... I have found it a bit difficult to figure out which target price will hit first, particularly when I am trading on the one and five minute charts.
This I beleive is primarily because I tend to forget about anything that happened the day before... which is a bit of a shame really, cos the bigger picture has all sorts of signs and clues to help me on the smaller picture.
Observations on the XJO
I've only attached one chart, this is the 5 minute IGMarkets representation of the XJO...
Current calculated targets based on divergence via the histogram are marked in.
The black horixontal line on the macd shows divergence through the rise,
The red horizontal line on the macd shows divergence during the fall, though tis not so divergent as of Friday night's actions.
The usual methoda of calculating.
All targets ar numbered on the right hand side... red for up, black for down. Hope I got the colours right for colourblindness. I beleive the 3535 target upside may already have been satisfied.
Note the two vertical thick lines on Price... the first one is the length of the first drop, the second is a copy of the first.
This suggests to me that we need to get down at least to the 3430 target or below.. base of rightmost vertical line is 3424 and couples well with previous historical resistance/support.
Interesting if the current down side is forming a three wave corrective structure as per the blue lines, then this could suggest some quite strong upside soon.
Looking at the daily though, I have my doubts for the short term, coupled with our reporting season kicking in.
Meh time will tell.. a lot of people expecting downside on HC at the mo, so it may be time for a surprise rally...
Guys, I'd like to impart more, but I am sorry, I just don't have it in me, I need some more sleep and have to close for the night. Hopefully I'll have some more good stuff next weekend.
Trade well, respect to the mods, And Big Love to all
(20min delay)