I hit my Net Daily Goal today in 12 minutes after the open going 3/3. This morning’s breakdown was beautiful & textbook. I only took enough of it to get me to my goal but it was easily worth 3 ER2 points and as much as 6 if you stayed in until the 610-tick (or 5-minute) trendline break around 1:00pm.

Today was the best I’ve traded in weeks honestly. After I hit my goal I continued to trade using the Ninja Trader Simulator as I need all the practice I can get with these new changes I’ve been making. Today the first fruit was born, but I have high expectations for the future as well. The first 9 trades I made today were profitable, in fact, I left a good amount of profit on the table by only taking 2-ticks in many cases. Later on this afternoon I made a couple questionable trades, but didn’t let them get out of hand, and after making mistakes, that’s all we can ever really do.

Setups like this only come along but so often on the higher timeframe charts so it’s good to take maximum advantage of them when you can. Trendline Break plays don’t come any more clear cut than this. The 610-tick bar closed right on the trendline; all you needed to do was go short on a breakdown below that bar and enjoy the ride.

The break coincided with a TRIX Hook-, which added credibility to the move. And boy did it drop quick too, 4 points in less than 10 minutes is pretty nice. It was nice to have a quick 3 & out for a change. Past couple of days I’d get close to my Net Daily Goal and then slowly backslide downwards to the point where I’d be struggle the rest of the day to keep my head above water.

While not always the most fun initially, change is inevitable, and if controlled can bring forth great progress…
 
 

 
 
After reviewing my trades today, I felt very pleased with the trades that I made today overall. I didn’t get the PnL that I was going for, but I feel like I made much better decisions today than the past couple.

I’ve been working with ViperSpeedTrader and he’s been helping me work on utilizing trendlines in a better manner than I have been. Its taking some time to get used to the changes. Sometimes it is hard for me to add things to my trading repetoir and integrating the new with the old. I find myself focusing one one avenue or the other and make mistakes switching between the 2 instead of looking at the whole picture together. The past couple of days I have found myself focusing too much of my attention on the new Trendline techniques and less on practically all the other signals that I work with.

Today however, I feel as if the integration is finally starting to happen and it is freeing up much more of my attention span. I only made a couple Bad trades today but they were costly. The mistakes I did find myself making are easily correctable and are discussed below in today’s Review of the Day.

This trade highlights a mistak I found myself making a number of times today, (But unfortunately I only realized it at the end of the day during my nightly trade analysis). The problem I’m making is entering what would be a perfectly legitimate trade without considering the contrary evidence.

As discussed above, this may be due to a lack of extra attention as I integrate what Bill is teaching me. A few times today I entered trades such as these that had valid reasons for entry but were simply too close to another trendline that I either just failed to notice or ignored for some reason. The other mistake I made was entering trades based on the smaller timeframes while the larger ones had some pretty strong reversal cues going on Namely: TRIX reversals, & Large Volume…which are easy to be overlooked when I am myopic in following the 55-tick chart.

I think these are very correctable problems and maybe, just like Tiger Woods, you need to take a couple steps backwards when making adopting a new swing so that you will ultimately be able to perform even better…although I hardly claim to be anywhere close to his ability in trading…
 
 

 
 
Not much better results to report today than yesterday unfortunately. While I didn’t have any -3 R-Unit trades, I did have enough full stops to negate the many solid trades I had. I’ve been tweaking my style a little bit today and trying something a little different and I found myself making the same kind of mistake over and over…almost always leading to a full stop. It revolved around taking CT trades back into the prevailing trendline instead of waiting for a trendline break. Thus I put too much emphasis on the TRIX reading and not enough on the rest of the signals.

It should be an easy problem to fix tomorrow now that I know its there. Below is just one of the several instances of similar mistakes that I made today.

In this trade I actually had a lot of little stuff going my way. But the mistakes I did make ended up being very costly turning what could have been a solid profitable potential trade into a full stop.

The first big mistake I made was to ignore the significance of this powerful up-move. It all happened very quickly and there was a surge in the 5-minute volume. This should have been the red flag that warned me to slow down and curb my short-side expectations significantly unless I got a powerful signal to the contrary. So I went for too much, mistake # 1.

Mistake #2 though was the killer. The reversal point labeled as ‘A’ was way too powerful of a move to be ignored. But ignore it I did. Not only did I ignore it and stay in the trade. But I left my stop at 735.90, or 4 ticks above the high!!! This really is unforgivable and I don’t know why I failed to exit the trade:
A.) For a 2-tick profit
B .) At Break-Even when the reversal signal came or
C.) On a breakout to a new high (not 4 ticks above it!)

Just goes to show you how easily it is to slip into a state of mindlessness and give back all that you’ve worked so hard for if you’re not careful .