Almost any way you look at it, today was by far my best scalping day ever. With my trades scoring 16-4-6 (Good-Bad-OK) today & a Batting Average of 74%.

My errors were down on all fronts today as I felt as if I really had a firm grip on my impulses which cost me dearly yesterday. The few impatient plays I did make today cost me 4-ticks each on average but I can’t complain too much given the vast improvement. For the first time ever, my average Good Trade made more money than my average Bad Trade lost. This too can only be seen as positive.

The one troubling fact today is that 19 of my 26 trades were on the short side of the market today despite it being a decisively up-day. In fact, my 7 Long trades today netted me $0 while it was the 19 short trades that netted me $820 net.

I’ll continue to really focus on watching and controlling my impulsiveness tomorrow as well as making sure that I don’t enter prematurely withou adequate confirmation.

One other piece of info that I learned today was to really pay attention and know what times the economic #s are coming out as there were 3 really good volatility cycles initiated today by the PMI, Oil Inventories, & Fed Minutes….Hard to take advantage of on a Trend-basis, but perfect for scoring some quick 2-tick scalps!

As always, the full version of my ScalpRate.xls spreadsheet can be downloaded here for those of you who wish to see my exact trades, entry times, criteria, & annotations.

Go on vacation for a couple of days and see what happens, all of your errors come flooding back! With an average # of errors per trade over double what it was the last day I traded, today was a decisive step in the wrong direction. Here’s my synopsis of what I need to focus on for tomorrow:

The market tanked all day today pausing only to chop around, yet despite the apparent downward trend, I actually had more long plays that shorts. This can be a huge mistake if not unchecked.

For the first time since starting this log, I also attempted more Trend plays than scalps. Combine this error with the previous one & you can see how I was not only going the wrong direction but striving for a higher target as well, a sure fire way to lose!

My biggest mistakes today were

A.) being impatient and jumping at more signals than were warranted.
B.) Jumping in a trade prematurely without adequate confirmation of a reversal or range breakout.

In short, today I acted impatientely, saw what I wanted to see, not what was there, & subsequently faked in and out of plays that I normally wouldn’t take.

I’ll take this info to heart tomorrow & see if I can’t turn these things around.

I made some more significant progress today meeting my goal of [# Good Trade = Bad + OK ] for the first time. But the mistakes I made were costly and I did not end the day profitable overall. I added another metric on the spreadsheet that I will be tracking. It is Erros per Trade (EpT). It is merely the total # of trades that I made that day divided by the sum of all the “Y”s in the orange columns.

The good news is that it is has been getting smaller. Being 1.34 the first day, .92 on Tuesday & .75 today. Despite the PnL results for today, if I can keep the error reduction trend and the % Good Trades trend continuing in their present direction, then I may just about be on the doorstep to Scalping Consistency.

Here is the Full Spreadsheet Download for those of you who are interested

Well today was one of my best days in scalping ever. I really think that this method of trade-analysis is starting to pay off already. My win rate was at 70% for the first time on a closing-day basis. It had been hovering around 60% until now.

I didn’t quite reach my goal of having more winning trades than BAD+OK trades combined but I still fared very well, especially in the areas I wanted to focus on today. With a little extra concentration, I was able to seriously reduce the frequency & potency of TRIX OB/OS, & Counter-trend errors. I still made a few, but no where near as many as I did yesterday and I was able to recognize them early enough and minimize their damage. Pre-conceived notion errors still cost me quite a bit on average & I will need to continue to be persistent in keeping my mind fluid, open, and non-attached to market direction.

I will not be trading tomorrow, but when I come back on Thursday, I will again have the goal of having more Good than BAD+OK and will continue to focus on watching that I don’t have any Preconceived Notions, that I almost exclusively take with-trend plays, & that I am very careful about plays when the TRIX is OB/OS.

But my primary focus will be on trying to be more vigilant in recognizing when ranges are forming on the 55 & 610-tick charts and making sure that I don’t get suckered into entering on breakouts.

If I can eliminate these 4 errors alone, it seems as if I’ll be able to turn this scalping around.

Here is a link to the Full ScalpRate.xls Download.