HMB

You too?

stop hit. and of course I had raised the bet before several times.... realized loss 440 today. 60 left for the week...

...sadly this looks a bit like Thursday/Friday...

still not! unbelievable..

...but now...😉😎

yea, I was wrong..

I'm likely of course wrong, but looks to me like the stop hunting on the downside stopped..

...Wall Street first narrowing the range, and then hitting all the fresh stops after on both sides...

...this looks very much like stop hunting to me..

will try a bit more scalping for now I guess (will skip the real-time updates - apologies for these..)

closed the two new longs. (net profit 6 GBP or so - should get me a few fresh face masks...)

(..but I'm ready to close the two new NDX longs any second if it turns abruptly lower, just almost did after engulfing red 1min candle..)

..raising the stop of the 2nd long - and the risk of getting stop hunted.. - opening another NDX long with min. size (0.5 GBP/point), same stop (11211) - like the six green 1 min candles in a row...

the first long NDX (opened Friday) is deep in the red. price oscillating around the entry of my 2nd long NDX the last hour. Tesla is messing it up... GM partnering with NIkola - Nikola up 48%, Tesla down 17% today last time I checked... I agree with you (again), doesn't look like March to me either. Although I could well imagine an NDX selloff from a higher level later today, or over the coming days, to extend the correction a bit. I also see a significant probability of a downtrend for a while. guess we will get a better idea today - was it really mainly Softbank closing long calls, and what will they do now...?

finally, through pretty stubborn resistance at around 11260...

(looking at price action the last 30 minutes, and considering the drawdown before, I'm willing to make a small bet that there might be a bit of a rebound - over the next 30 minutes or so)

opened an additional NDX long (DFB) at 11238, minimum size (0.5), stop 11181 (guaranteed).

Kudos to who waited for a retest of the Friday intraday low

Very clear explanation! Thank you very much, indeed

Many thanks for your detailed response! I must admit I'm surprised by the excerpt quoted above - for me "technical" was everything that analyses prices and volume only (including all indicators based on prices and volumes). Maybe that's too broad - are you in a position to give an example what a typical algo actually looks at? I always thought it's only technical (except those guys with the fake orders to test market depth..). Or is it like order book/price ladder mostly? (feel free to replace "not an expert" above with "completely ignorant layman"... ) No problem if you don't want to reveal any more, of course.

Dammit - impulsively I clicked on the link without thinking (like if it was a ticket...) - hope this honorable gentleman won't now also persist on my youtube...

As I'm not an expert in algos, I'd be most interested in how you think they will influence markets. My impression is that technical analysis has become (even) more reliable recent years - because more and more algos are trading accordingly, strengthening the self-fulfillment of the "prophecies". however at some point I would expect declining profitability, e.g. scalping ranges will become tighter and tighter. (How) would you counter that? am I missing it (again) completely..?

No, I got that, I think - useful clarification, though, thanks. My problem would be first to be able to formulate my strategies. In other words, I think it is literally true that I didn't know what I was doing (even at the start, i.e. even before the vicious cycle, as described well by Sunny Days, set in and I was completely in a fantasy world until the brutal awakening). I believe the initial problem was the lack of the ability to narrow the focus and simplify. Whenever I tried working on a strategy, I quickly realized that it will become too complex. I didn't want to ignore anything - valuations, macroeconomic conditions, mega trends, concepts like Soros's reflexivity theory, Malkiel's critique of both technical and fundamental analysis, behavioral finance, capital market theory with its focus on information efficiency, market micro structure, or more recently the idea of "flash mobs" (from, Sears' The Indomitable Investor) etc. (I tried it with back-testing from time to time over the years, but never found anything really useful. Closest I came was selling options based on rate-of-change mean reversion, which would if the right history and parameters were chosen create an alpha of 0.4% or so in the backtest....) But I am starting to work towards some kind of "system" again - after all the valuable insights gained in this forum: I think I continue using charts to identify pullbacks and rebounds - but use also all of the other stuff mentioned above to identify if the trend is up or down, or if the market is oscillating, or if there is maybe a shorter term trend only currently dominating a longer term trend. Once that is clarified, the trading rules can be simple - as you said in another post, e.g. buy on pullbacks when the trend is up. This combined approach seems to me to solve some of the paradoxa I'm struggling with. It still doesn't look easy to me to formulate this in a way that it could be automated and back-tested, though. Wise would maybe be to run a simple benchmark strategy in parallel, e.g. as long as there's no death cross, the trend is up, etc... (and again, disciplined risk management is prerequisite, for which in my case strategies to be able to handle emotions are crucial) But in the past, unable to bring order into the chaos... I went for trust in intuition, likely also motivated by humanistic idealism... (still don't think the robots will take over). Obviously I was totally naive and unable to learn. Guess this is rather unique in its stubbornness... which likely persists to some extent, given I still do believe my initial intuition was probably right more often than not - but at least I'm by now finally convinced that my execution (or better: loss of control) was disgracefully underwhelming... sorry I think was digressing a bit - however as I'm on it already... we never visited a trading floor in school, but one of my first (more virtual) "encounters" with markets sounded like this..., with all the algo dominance nowadays maybe refreshing to read some late 19th century stuff...: ‘Mr. Hall Pycroft, I believe?’” said he. “‘Yes, sir,’ I answered, pushing a chair towards him. “‘Lately engaged at Coxon & Woodhouse’s?’ “‘Yes, sir.’ “‘And now on the staff of Mawson’s.’ “‘Quite so.’ “‘Well,’ said he, ‘the fact is that I have heard some really extraordinary stories about your financial ability. You remember Parker, who used to be Coxon’s manager? He can never say enough about it.’ “Of course I was pleased to hear this. I had always been pretty sharp in the office, but I had never dreamed that I was talked about in the City in this fashion. “‘You have a good memory?’ said he. “‘Pretty fair,’ I answered, modestly. “‘Have you kept in touch with the market while you have been out of work?’ he asked. “‘Yes. I read the stock exchange list every morning.’ “‘Now that shows real application!’ he cried. ‘That is the way to prosper! You won’t mind my testing you, will you? Let me see. How are Ayrshires?’ “‘A hundred and six and a quarter to a hundred and five and seven-eighths.’ “‘And New Zealand consolidated?’ “‘A hundred and four. “‘And British Broken Hills?’ “‘Seven to seven-and-six.’ “‘Wonderful!’ he cried, with his hands up. ‘This quite fits in with all that I had heard. My boy, my boy, you are very much too good to be a clerk at Mawson’s!’ (from "The Adventure of the Stockbroker's Clerk", a Sherlock Holmes story by Arthur Conan Doyle)

yes, I think that's right. it's necessary but not sufficient.

Exactly what I think I should be focusing on - at least at the current stage of my "development".