Bears are back, dealing with trend days

Well I had done a nice video for you but for some reason as I was rendering it ready for youtube it crashed, so it’s back to typing!

Mega gap lower today, after yesterday’s relatively undecided action post fed. The YM gap was about -155.

I had two hypothesis as usual going into the open.

1) A push up to fill the range before rolling over
2) A continuation lower to fill the unfilled gap from several days ago (not to be confused with the days gap)

We got the latter and the market pushed lower straight off the open. I missed it completely, I was looking for a deeper pullback that never came and before I knew it we were within a few ticks of my target.

I flipped my sentiment short term and decided to look for a quick long scalp (small size only) I was waiting for the sellers to flush out completely and then take the long closing out as the pop up came.

I switched to the ES and got small long at 1094.75 one tick off the low. The market popped enough for me to scale out and reassess the next trade

After I’d closed my long the market loitered for a good few minutes before trying one more push higher than was immediately met with selling, this was confirmed by the TICKS not being able to break the 0 line and I hit the short. Target new lows, trail it until the panic subsided. We didn’t get it and I was forced to close at the last low at the YM double bottomed.

I’d made a couple of nice trades, but hadn’t got on the end of a runner yet.

Well the runner should have been the double bottom, but of course after thinking we were going to push to new lows and not getting it I decided to ease off a bit, sit on my profits and observe the action for a while.

So I sat out the next few cycles and only started to look again when the second trend wave kicked in. Initially I was looking for a flush at the 5pm time, but as the volume picked up I noticed that 10400 cash was coming into range here.

I went long on the tag of 10400 on the low tick reading in my IG spreadbet account.

I scaled as usual for +15 and waited for a VWAP tag as my final target. Again it fell short and came back to stop me out for just +10……after going 25 ticks my way.

That was the lot for the day apart from a quick scalp in the lunchtime chop which I shouldn’t really have done but got away with an 8 tick profit.

Today was a funny one, look at my PnL and it looks like another solid day, but I didn’t get on the end of anything substantial. That is the danger with counter trend plays; unless you do get hold of a good cycle expect to not hit your final targets.

Some days you look at the figure on the dow or the S&P and see a high number up or down at the end of the day and think to yourself. “I should have absolutely nailed that, why is my PnL not exceptional?”, but sometimes the amount the market is up or down is not representative of daytrader opportunity. There are days when the market has ended where it started and you’ve got every swing high and low going. That’s trading, and as long as you’re focusing on making the next trade your best the profits will take care of themselves.