Back in Action

I've decided it's time to revive this blog since I need a place to track my trades. Just so everyone knows I will be utilizing a different methodology than what I tracked here before. In case you're curious the old methodology works just fine still, although I've been looking at a more discretionary setup across multiple markets (eminis, Forex etc.) as this seems to be far out performing my more strictly mechanical methodologies. Never fear, however, I haven't take a nose dive completely off into la-la land of astral charting, moon phases and psychic intuition...

Recently I've been inspired by a number of things I've read (in the past of course) such as how Paul Tudor Jones describes his trading in Market Wizards (lots of little stabs at the market looking for the big payoff), Van Tharp (not some of his flaky ideas like entries don't matter but more looking at large R payoffs versus little R risk), and lastly Avery aka the RumpledOne who approaches each trade as a scalp but is willing to ride his scalps if the market is poised to do so.

Of course the big question that every trader eventually asks is "how do we know when we are part of a 'big' move and not just a reaction". That question has been on my mind for quite some time now and the light started to go on for me after reading a thread on Elite Trader (yes Alice there are a couple of real traders at Elite Trader) called Daytrading 2.0

For those of you who want the Reader's Digest version, let me sum it up by saying that you need to have an idea of what the macro (4x-6x larger than your current time frame) trend is and then look for higher highs, higher lows (for bullish conditions) and the opposite for bearish conditions.

The other discretionary setup I've been looking at recently is a divergence setup with a Fibonacci reversal target and a Japanese candlestick confirmation.

In case any of that sounds like Japanese to you, I'll be posting some trades in the next few days with these setups an an explanation of the setup logic.

Lord Tedders