Today all my trades were on the NASDAQ index. My first trade was a short trade that I classify as a continuation trade. On the daily chart there has been a break of market structure and therefore I was looking for a possible short. I took this trade on the 2 minute chart below. See the trade set up along with detailed explanation as to why I took this trade.
You can see that price action was in a clear downtrend. I shorted after the close of the large red candle beside the marked 'entry' and I placed my stop loss above the candle.
I took this trade because the candle in question had wiped out all the price action of the last 8 or so candles and also, the price was being rejected at the 20 period moving average.
As you can see eventually the price action formed a W pattern and I was stopped out of my trade.
Was I disappointed? No, I wasn't because I had followed my rules and I simply accepted that it didn't work out. Could I have done better? Yes I think I could have. There had already been a decent move to the downside and therefore without any sizeable pullback the probability of this trade wasn't high.
My second losing trade was another short trade. As we could see from above the price action, after reversing to the upside hit resistance at around 17560 and started declining. See the chart below for a visualisation.
As you see the price started declining and then attempted to break the 20 period moving average again but was rejected and came down to create a pivot point. However, when I seen this pivot being broken I went short again on the basis that the price action appeared to suggest that this was a pullback of the larger move down.
You can see that price then continued down and when a couple of pivots of lower highs and lower lows were made I moved my stop loss down to a point close to break even. Unfortunately I was stopped out again but because I had moved my stop loss close to break even I had a very marginal loss. Again, comfortable that I had entered a relatively decent probability set up.
My next losing trade was actually a long position. Let us take a look at the set up.
As you can see the price action had moved up to break a previous pivot high. The general trand currently is down on the daily but this looked like a good set up for a scalp long. After moving up breaking the previous pivot high tot he left the price strated consolidating. When the price broke I entered the trade.
You see at the hammer candle far to the right of the entry point I actually moved my stop loss to break even as the price action was starting to look weak. However, as you can see, not long after there was a huge galagtic bear candle which stopped me out but because of slippage I actual was exited with a loss due to slippage. What I did wrong here was not exit immediately after that hammer candle which would have been for a small profit.
Full transparency with my trades are included in my trading history screenshot below.
Today I actually had 4 trades of which 3 were losers so only a 25% win rate. However, because of tight risk management I actually finished the day in profit. I preserved my capital to trade again for another day!
Clear trading!
Comments