A choppy week in the markets

For the week I'm down $150 day trading, down $100 or so in the futures, and down a little on forex.

For the month of November I'm down $400, or 1.6%. Still paying tuition, but its starting to feel tighter, and I am making good decisions. I think the turning point will happen soon. My sins are getting spooked out and occasionally fighting the trend.

The swing account is down as well, the markets are trying to figure out what the next move is and I got into some commodity trades too soon -- a peak and burst in the markets that I did successfully avoid but then got in too soon afterwords.

In terms of day trading I'm really focusing on good execution and I'm pretty much only trading the SPY using 10 minute/2 minute setup. This setup provides good opportunities and forces me to be disciplined about not getting in if the setup isn't right. When I ignore it bad things happen. When I follow it I sometimes get spooked out but am rarely ever just plain wrong. Its about discipline, more discipline, and not experimenting. Its getting better.

Forex is a tough place to trade, there really needs to be a 20 pip move before I can profit because of the way that the bid/offer moves, or doesn't move. The platform adjusts it every few seconds but is slow to do that and doesn't offer me trading opportunities that appear to happen on the charts.

I've noticed that the USD/AUS (Australian dollar) is quite active in the evenings when the Euro slows down, which is consistent with it being morning in Australia. I got chopped up some on a few trades the other day, they were briefly profitable but I was fighting the trend. The thing about forex is that it can move a long way before it corrects, so seeing something that looks like an attractive 'reversion to the mean' type setup can trip you up.

The mystery part of trading is that I don't know what opportunities I'll have, or whether I'll have many. What I have to hold close is the discipline and willingness to sit it out if its not right as well as a trading plan that will let me ride the winners. On Friday I had more winning trades than losing trades but the losers cost more.

I'm starting to trade 200 share blocks of the SPY, and my trading plan must include selling a partial as soon as I get a nickel or so. At that point I can feel safe that I can't lose money on the trade because I can set a stop behind the purchase price and feel better about letting it ride. And ride it must, I can't take a nickel profit on these trades and be happy because the losers all cost more than that. I have to be in a position to have something on the trade at the time that there is movement.

I had a very sloppy day with futures the other day, I was getting in too late or at the end of a move. It was very sloppy.

I'm also paying more attention to the first few bars of a trade. Winners tend to win fairly quickly, and especially in the case of the 10 minute bars if it doesn't start to move the chances are good that its not going to, and I need to get out. I did get out in time on my final trade of the day shortly before there was a 5 point plunge in the futures. I managed to get 2 points of that plunge so that the day overall was a break-even.