(I:DJI) Dow Jones Industrial Average

Jayo,

Thanks indeed for your post. I am going to read it again tomorrow so I can give it the consideration it deserves and when, frankly, I am sober.

But first and foremost, you don't 'owe me one' or anything like it, indeed the debt of gratitude is my burden dating from a pie-eyed noob on an Aim O&G bb who found some voices of reason along side the muppet chorus. The only credit I will give myself is that I had the good sense to listen. It is no exageration to say I might not be in this game now if yourself and Tas hadn't the integrity to tell it straight and the charity to share from your experience and knowledge on these boards.

Best Regards

Fox

PC, last man to tell anyone anything, but I know I owe you one, and the urge to try help you here is too much for me. The simplest things can make the most huge difference to an intraday traders performance, with the smallest adjustments.

Today, you had an OK entry, even if the move was getting stretched to the downside. If you keep an eagle eye on your oscillators, the signs of a bounce of some degree were present at the time you were in reasonably good profit. Nothing whatsoever to guarantee the bounce would actually materialise, but the warning sign was there, which needed respecting. It's hard to come to terms with mentally until you get used to it - but bringing a stop to breakeven on an intraday position like that is always the right thing to do, even if stopped out of perfectly good trades as a result. It's an old rule of thumb to never let a profit run to a loss, and for good reason. (swing trading is different, but that is not what you are doing here) The natural inclination is to avoid stopouts, but that needs to be overcome early as possible, before it becomes a bad habit ingrained in your psyche permanently. It's OK to be stopped out BE or small loss, no foul, and only two points spread away from getting back in if it rolls over again. Accept it early on and allow that to rest easy on your shoulders - there is nothing to fear in here. The feckers do everything in their power to force emotional errors by flipping price back and forth to pop stops both sides - but you can learn to let them wreak havoc on the amateurs accounts, while keeping your shape yourself, and using their games to your advantage. The bad news, is that for you to win - you have to find losing traders to trade against. The good news, there is no shortage of them around.

A good excercise is to take a timeout, and flip a coin 100 times at random keeping a record of how many times heads or tails came up. If you don't subconciously set the coin to heads or tails trying to influence the outcome before flipping, and do this excercise genuinely, you will be dumbfounded at how close to 50/50 the result. Trading is identical to the coin game, you can never win, just keep flipping the coin, with random heads and tails coming up over and over. You may have 10 tails in a row, or 10 heads, but over 100 trades, stats will be close enough to 50/50 overall, trust me.

Now enter competent use of TA - and odds shoot to 70/30 or better as quick as that. All you need is the psychology to operate even the most carp of systems once it has positive expectancy, to take the stopouts when they come, but to keep flipping the coin, keeping losses smaller than your gains by use of military discipline with stops. Right up your alley as we know, you were actually trained to trade, only nobody ever told you

I am posting a chart here which shows the MACD and more sensitive Stoch gave you good clues as to where the turning points might occur in a 10 min chart. Look at this evenings trade again, through the eyes of this chart, and see what you think. You can drill down to 5 min and 1 min for sharper entries and exits, but a lot of noise down there, and only experience will allow you to "sense" what to ignore, and what might be of significance.

In 10 min alone, if you sold every time we get mad overbought, and bought every time we get mad oversold, you will make money overall once you run the winners and don't snatch like most are tempted to do. Remember perfection doesn't exist in this arena, and not every signal will work, and you will be stopped out up to half the time, even on perfectly good positions. Trading is all about executing with military discipline, and supressing all the emotions which cause the majority to fail, for giving in to the temptations which pretty much every tick generates in the uninitiated. If you can master yourself then the worst system in creation will probably be a successful for you, while reality is that even the best systems will

Closed 11839.5. Don't know what caused the spike... But I didn't like the pace of it.

I've had a bad week so far, I think it would be wise to give it a rest until next week - too annoyed with myself atm.

Best Regards

Fox