Sunday, August 1, 2010

Sunday, July 18, 2010

Euro Meltup 7-13-10 & 7-15-10


------------------------------7-13-10-----------------------------






------------------------------7-15-10-----------------------------







Friday, July 16, 2010

Euro Meltup 7-16-10


Overnight Review


I will post about my previous HORRIBLE trades this week tomorrow. For now I just want to focus on this very trendy Euro action. 


7-18-10 Update: 







Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Euro 7-7-10

Yesterday's >20K volume spike in 10y treasury bond was the topping signal for ES_F:


Happened today too, so expected topping to happen soon in Euro:







Another day another stop loss gunned down for me... I was so close to nailing this one but not close enough.

Thursday, July 1, 2010

Massive Euro/Gold Liquidations 7-1-10

Haven't touched this market till yesterday since my last post. Got stopped out on a badly executed fill after having price go in the direction I expected prior to this trade, which gave me the confidence to make the trade.

Saw big buying cluster (now green, used to be red), then expected price to stay above VWAP but it didn't, got stopped out with -5 tick damage.

_____________________________________________

Gold vs. Euro correlation: What correlation?!


Gold's long term uptrend hit the breaks on this liquidation day... tanked over 3%



While euro had a no dip Thursday... up over 2.4%
Also notable on the tape today were big orders at capitulative volume spikes (over 90), either long or short

Euro bumped into 50DMA resistance...

...and made its first significant dip of the day before ramping into 1.25s


Also notice the big sell print in spot Euro on the retest of that 50DMA, these kind of prints happened last week too, so far the most consistent swing buy signal in Euro since I started tracking it:


Monday, June 21, 2010

Euro 6-21-10 New Structure

Overnight Review



UPDATE:
Took another loss today. -9 ticks damage. I was expecting some kind of 30-40 tick bounce as it did before this major structural change. Well the bounce was very muted and didn't even reach the morning low, which was my target. I heavily relied on the tape since it was so useful to me in the past quarter. I saw some supposedly capitulative volume on 1min chart, a reversal signal and several retests of low but it kept bumping into the same lower high under morning low and eventually returned back to low so I had to cut my loss. Then it broke to a new low and made another leg down with another muted bounce afterwards.

My rationale for buying was because there were several nice bounces overnight and that the theme is still one of squeezing the shorts, hence all bounces should be shallow. *buzz!* WRONG! mean reversion was muted and Euro kept sliding down.

I was expecting confirming indicator in the tape in the form of gradually increasing sell orders to follow the rise in price. (this has happened last week in a very trendy up move on the way up to upper 1.23s). Didn't happen. After the big clusters of long stops getting hit, instead of typical massive buy orders to gradually work into the tape, there were just less frequent long stops getting hit instead.

Monday, June 14, 2010

Euro Short Squeeze 6-14-10

Overnight Review

ZeroHedge noted this weekend here that long term
shorts *cough SOROS* are not backing off despite this ugly squeeze last night

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Euro Action 6-10-10

Overnight Review


New signals are repeating this week. 

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Euro Action 6-9-10


Overnight Review:

Structure is gradually changing: Noticing new continuation signals, lower overnight volume, volume spikes big relative hourly average in 1 minute chart.


Also note this morning: heavy selling in 10y future.

Afternoon Trade:
Saw pretty heavy orders around 1.1970s-80s so I waited for the shakeout 30-40 ticks under that range then bought after it bottomed:

This is the night before ECB rate decision and after New Zealand central bank raised rate to 2.75% on inflation concerns, which helped rally.
It's pretty hard to trade in afternoon since the volume is so thin. This is also a curve ball since its rollover day into September contract.

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Euro Action 6-8-10

Overnight Review

By the way, nice fireworks in TX from the nat gas explosion, 2nd incident this month already...

Monday, June 7, 2010

Euro Action 6-7-10

Overnight Review
This week's goals:

  1. Only trade on an identified crystal clear intraday theme, add on winning positions, stop when trade does not go as expected up to 1/2 of profit target range.
  2. Study high ATR / low volume signal in Euro
  3. Study Pound's intraday structure as well (today's structure has very interesting high ATR/ low volume reversal signals in 6b_F)
~More as the day progresses...~


Friday, June 4, 2010

Euro Chaos 6-4-10

This is going to be a LOT longer than usual because I want to cover the whole picture of my decision making on this very eventful day. Today's trade halted my 2 week hot streak. I was not in tune enough to changing market conditions and refused to stop myself out when downside for my trades was, in hindsight, about 3 to 1.















































^
Or so I thought... turned out Gold was a much better indicator of further downside/upside risk


























I started out the quarter being cautious and trading only when rigid clear technical themes were repeating. When I wasn't trading I was experimenting; testing out different ways of looking at market with simulated trading. I wasn't trying out new ideas without testing them out first.

I ended the quarter with trading without stops, bad entries with ~3 to 1 downside vs upside and worst of all I added to losing positions when I didn't time it right. I also didn't notice, typically after hot streaks, that I'm not trading any more - I'm gambling to continue my hot streak while ignoring the fact that with appreciating volatility I could of easily erased 4 good profitable trades after adding to a losing position.

I tried to rely on correlations that worked consistently this quarter/month/week but gradually broke down one by one today and when I realized that doesn't work any more I sticked with exclusively watching the tape for signals. The tape is a double edged sword: on "normal" days it is relatively easy to read but on chaotic days like today its almost impossible to keep up with. Flooded with lengthy clusters of big prints, todays tape only made sense in hindsight and even then it was difficult to decipher into concrete signals.

I need to get back to paper trading until I get back on the right track. Even though my account didn't take any hits, the next loss could of been too big.

You can't force a good trade when you're not experienced enough to deal with rapidly morphing intraday structures with unfamiliar themes like in today's chaos.