October 30th

I took just a few minutes in between day-job duties to scalp $80 papertrade bucks out of SKF, going long because of the 11:00 doji. I'm shutting down the trading now to focus on other things but a little practice every day in the market helps to keep me sharp and tuned in to my ultimate goal.

I do hope you all had a good trading day; monetary gain or knowledge (or both).

I saw this, liked it, & reprinted it here...

As I surf the financial/trading blogs which interest me, I occasionally read something which catches my interest enough that I want to reproduce it here. Often, it is something which I have adopted and found helpful, or applies to an area of my personal deficiency with regard to trading.
I found this at onlythemomo.blogspot.com , MarketMonkey's Tuesday, October 20th blog post. These are two quotes from Dr. Alexander Elder.

"Do you have a statistically proven edge? If so, why would you get angry/upset about any influence luck has had on any series of trades?"

and,

"Fear of pulling the trigger is warranted when you don't have an edge...fear of NOT pulling the trigger is necessary when you have one"


These caught my eye because I recognize that I have no statistcally proven edge. No edge: In my opinion, that is the reason why I cannot advance to the next step. I take a trade and I have no calculated idea of what will happen. I haven't documented/ formulated the probabilities of success of my ideas about trading entries and exits. It is true that one does not have to quantify an idea for it to work. But, it seems that in my case where I don't have the time to "hang-out" and get the "feel" for trading that it would make sense to measure the odds of success. Over the next few months, I intend to keep track of some things and see how they prove out.

October 28th

While putting together a big bid for a customer, I had time to watch the market for part of the day. I liked SKF so I stuck with it. Paper traded/Scalped $250 out of it for the day.

The yellow lines indicate some of the What's Familiar ideas I've outlined before; reversals based on candles that end at the high or low extreme, dojis, and near-dojis. Also volume spikes and their corresponding candle price reversals (see white lines from the volume chart up to the candle).