Daily Score: -.333

Batting Average: 55.56%
Full Stop %: 33.33%
EpT: .89
 
 
Today offered some very nice opportunities to make some solid day trading profits. Unfortunately, I made a number of errors early on in the day and hit my daily stop loss before many of them appeared.

I found myself pushing for scalps when I didn’t have to. I fell out of the “patiently waiting for my 3-4 high % plays” mentality and failed to wait for bars to close on my entry setups causing me to enter on a number of pre-mature entries and bad setups.

Tough day to be out of commission given this afternoon’s action, but that’s what I get for violating my rules.

Lots of people focus on what they do wrong and trying to minimize their mistakes; And while this is an excellent and necessary practice, I find it most beneficial to also take just as much, if not more, time to go over those plays that consistently ARE profitable as to further reinforce them in your minds eye.

I’ve gone over my mistakes today, I know what they are, and I will try to minimize them in the future. But here is the one play that I would take 100% of the time and I want to highlight it because its great for both scalpers and trend traders.

Around 10:07, you see a TRIX Divergence- form on the 55t chart. While this is almost always a good place to attempt a scalp, I will often stand asside if price is heading into a supply area, which in this case would be the rising trendline, since there can be some pretty violent spikes out of that area.

But in this case, there are mitigating factors to the rising trendline that are screaming for attention. It just so happens that the TRIX is rolling over simultaneously on the 610-tick, 2-minute, & 5-minute charts…this rarely happens and provides a great deal of evidence for an imminent move to the downside.

Depending on how aggressive you wish to be, you could have waited for a close & violation of the low of either the 610t, 2m, or 5m chart for entry with a stop not too far away above the prior swing high. Then depending on your exit criteria it would have been good for anywhere from 2-4 points on the ER2…not a bad score given the time it took to follow through.

These kinds of plays where the indicators on all the timeframes in addition to the market internals (The $TICK was also hooking down and made a new low) are converging are like gifts from above….be ready to take advantage of them.

Unfortunately, on this play I was only able to get a quick scalp in. I entered as a scalp and was unable to create a new target in time before my position was closed, so I missed the greater trend move.