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Gav's trading blog - Perseverance, Consistency, Confidence

Gav

Postmortem 03-Jan-2007

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Was that because I had not been trading ‘too long’? or because I am not fully committed to my own plan?
I bet 30% of the former and 70% of the later. I have been spending time designing setup, testing, reading charts, and writing the plan, and yet, the first execution was a failure. That’s not so nice huh.

In fact, there was another trading opportunity around lunch time which a new downtrend cycle started. I gave up the idea of following the market, instead, I went to bed early as I found my mind was kinda messy.

Ok , enough. I am going to read my plan again. I will trade tomorrow, the only way to solve this problem is getting myself to trade.

I didn’t expect Tapeworm to remove his blog yesterday. Well, at least, leave it inactive. Market gapped up yesterday, and failed to continue. You know the reason now.

According to the Trend analysis of Google Reader, Taleofthetape is on the top of my reading list.

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The stupid paper trader; Trade that got away 03-Jan-2007

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Yes, the stupid paper trader, that’s me. The difference between real trading and paper trading is I will never fail pulling the trigger when paper trade.

This is the second time of the day. I failed to pull trigger in the morning (Singapore time) when trying to swing trade stock. What on the earth am I doing today?
Today, the first trading day of 2007, and heck, I just can’t pull the trigger!?!. Yes, I am frustrated , and disappointed of myself. This is unacceptable.

I continued following the trade,well, on paper :(? . The trade would close with 3.5-R profit.

5-min chart of NQ. Entry is the first pull back of new trend cycle. And dummy spot, inside bar, was formed. Long position would be established above the high of the 10:05am candle. I trailed my stops and position would close at 1809.75.

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First Kiss of 2007

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My workstation

First of all, Happy New Year!

A great year starts from a plan. Here is my resolution for year 2007, well , a brief one.

I have given some thoughts for my trading in 2007. Now , everything back to zero. I have gained a little bit experience from the past 6 months of day trading. I need to move on with improvements.

I need to draft out a plan before I continue involving in this business for the coming year. I would list out some points here since it is pretty lengthy and personal, I am not so comfortable to dump in all the details on the web.

Futures Trading:

I would continue day trading E-min Futures. At least for the first quarter of 2007, I will only trade E-mini Nasdaq (NQ). Since it offers the lowest dollar risk. I will stop paper trading, instead, I will forward trade my strategy in NQ. I have reviewd my past dummy trades and reading back charts after charts. My current system works much better in NQ than any other index futures. And another key reason is I am comfortable with the risk taken in NQ futures. Yes, the return per tic is small ($5), and the movement is slower. But what’s wrong with that? The objective here is achieve consistency and keep making good trades. I am a table tennis player, so I don’t wanna force myself to play Tennis before I have the strength and technique to swing the tennis racket now.

Second option is to trade YM (mini-sized Dow) futures. The reason I did not trade YM in the later part of 2006 is due to the instability of eCBOT. I am setting up a second trading account to hedge YM by trading ES should eCBOT is down again. Anyway, YM is still my second choice now.

I know I am not comfortable with E-mini Russell (ER2) and E-mini S&P (ES) trading now. As the risk and volatility are still kinda exceed my tolerance. I tend to chicken out or hesitate to enter a position.

Some key points for my futures trading for the first quarter of 2007

  • Master one setup before trying others. Making high accuracy trade. It is definitely OK without making any trade if there is no setup found.
  • Make sure I know the Exit point before entering a trade.
  • Maxium risk per trade (R) is 0.8%
  • Losing days are ok. My target is to be profitable every week.
  • Continue studying ES and backtesting my strategy.
  • Continue studying different futures trading strategies.
  • Continue posting my trades, weekly review, and postmortem on the blog.

Swing Trading:

I have been lagging in swing trading for the past few months. Since I am trading from Asia and having a day job, I can only swing trade stocks in Singapore market, and day trade American market in the evening time. Relatively, swing trading requires lesser maintainance. In addition, trading in Singapore market (SGD based) requires smaller capital due to currency difference and It helps to balance out my overall portforlio with different currency holding.

I have some experience in Metastocks programming. So I will do some scannings and studies every evening.

Some key points for my Swing trading for the year 2007

  • Master one setup before trying another. Making high accuracy trade.
  • Maximum risk of 1.5% of trading capital
  • I will limit myself to maximum 2 swing trades per week.
  • Losing trades are OK. My target is to be profitable every month
  • Continue studying different swing trading strategies.
  • Continue posting my trades, monthly review, and postmortem on the blog.

I believe by integrating Swing trading and Day Trading into my overall business plan will improve my overall performance. Sometimes, opportunity appears in different time frames and styles of trading. In addition, I avoid making day trading as the only source of income, this will help to reduce to pressure of forcing myself to trade everyday.

I am not trading for pastime. My intention is to make it as my full time career at some point of time. With the limited capital of mine, I will start slow and grow it gradually. I am not setting a big profit target for 2007, instead I am looking forward to grow myself as a consistent profitable trader.

Week off

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I am taking a week off from trading and blogging. So, do come back next week, I will share some updates of my work. Meanwhile, check out the blogs in my blogroll.

Happy New year. Here is to an excellent 2007. I am determined to do better, are you? 🙂

By the way, I was having some hard time updating my blog today due to the earth quake near Taiwan. Internet access in most of Asian countries are affected.

So, how about adding Earth Quake into trading plan?

Slowness

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I observed some slowness occurred when loading my blog. There seems to be some problems loading Javascripts. After debugging, I have removed Mybloglog widget. And , ‘Tick!” the problem is solved now.

Well, too bad, I have to let go the cool avatars of my readers. give it another try since Eric and the team from MyBloglog has done some fix.

*if you experienced slowness again, and you are kind enough, please shoot me a comment*
Merry Christmas!