First trade of the year - Day Trading: Jan 1, 2016 Intraday

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My year starts with a whimper. I decided to go slow this month... the thing to focus on is to reduce the number of intraday trades (especially the losing ones ☺). I decided to do discretionary trades today, because with mechanical trading systems, the number of trades often goes out of control... I usually don't put rules around the maximum number of trades per day.

For today's discretionary trading, I considered 2 systems. One was the range compression system, that I traded in November. The version of the range compression trading system that I traded in November was mechanical, and resulted in large number of trades on some days. If I had used it to trade today, I would have used discretion to limit the number of trades. Those possible trades are marked on the candlestick chart below.

The other trading system - the one traded today - is totally visual for entries, and based on Decision Point Trading. I decided to be very slow about the entries today, and consider only the Breakout Failures and Breakout Pullbacks of Round Numbers. The only entry that I got with it today, resulted in a loss of 6 points. For trailing Stop Loss, I had decided to be mechanical, and move my SL only if I could lock in at least 20 points. Else, I could easily have tightened the Stop even in this trade.

Appreciate if you could comment about the trading today.

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20151207 - Too many hasty entries today

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Today was going well with decent wins in the first half, but turned a disaster with a string of losses in the second half. At the end of the day, I got nothing.

Many of the entries were hasty, I guess, though I am not sure. To a large extent, I tried to base my entries on the Decision Point Trading method that is explained on the Nifty Nirvana blog (link to download the free e-book on that site), but I am not doing it right.... The author does not take as many entries as I do.

Other than the entries, the rest of my trading today was mechanical trailing. One of my issues with discretionary trading is that I never know whether I did it right or wrong, which is almost what these methods are, by definition.

Again, I did not trail SL early, because that was my mechanical rule for the day. If I had trailed early, I would have lost less in the losing trades, but then Trade 2 would also have been a loss....

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