trader_dante
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Best Thread Potential setups
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trader_dante
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trader_dante
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trader_dante
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trader_dante
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And there you have it...
Now all you have to do is HOLD.
Now all you have to do is HOLD.
trader_dante
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Pin bars should appear at swing highs. This appeared in a sideways market. These seem to me to work about 50% of the time. Not enough of an edge for me.
OK, thanks for the reply TD. I'm about 3/4ths done with your thread. I guess I better finish it all before trading more!
Great call on cable.
grimweasel
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TD
I'm having trouble holding onto gains at the moment. My account seems to fluctuate in the same area all the time, sometimes £400 up over a few days then £400 down. I have managed to stem the losses, my account balance has been the same for 3 months now; It's just I can't seem to move it from stable to profit.
The E/Yen trade was a classic example. I took the pin off the high on the 4hr chart at 169.80 area; the market was heading down and I made quite a few pips. I let it run but then stopped it out where I thought a reversal was taking place. This was not to be so I did this a few more times and ended up the day with a loss out of a good profit. I know you said to let the winners run, I just seem to get twitchy with the profits and cut it too early. I did the same on Gbp/Yen long earlier in the week. Good pin bar, should have been quite a few pips in profit but still came out of it more or less even?
I know the criteria for stops, it's just I can't seem to make this part of the system work? I know it's through trying to 2nd guess the market. When my balance gets low again I always seem to make the money back, but then when it gets high it just peters away again??
Good Trading
Grim
I'm having trouble holding onto gains at the moment. My account seems to fluctuate in the same area all the time, sometimes £400 up over a few days then £400 down. I have managed to stem the losses, my account balance has been the same for 3 months now; It's just I can't seem to move it from stable to profit.
The E/Yen trade was a classic example. I took the pin off the high on the 4hr chart at 169.80 area; the market was heading down and I made quite a few pips. I let it run but then stopped it out where I thought a reversal was taking place. This was not to be so I did this a few more times and ended up the day with a loss out of a good profit. I know you said to let the winners run, I just seem to get twitchy with the profits and cut it too early. I did the same on Gbp/Yen long earlier in the week. Good pin bar, should have been quite a few pips in profit but still came out of it more or less even?
I know the criteria for stops, it's just I can't seem to make this part of the system work? I know it's through trying to 2nd guess the market. When my balance gets low again I always seem to make the money back, but then when it gets high it just peters away again??
Good Trading
Grim
trader_dante
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Grim, I see this problem in so many traders and I have suffered it myself, infact still do so, quite often.
There is one cure.
Take the position, put your stop in and WALK AWAY.
If you are in off the hourly TF, come back once every hour and readjust your stop. If you are in off the daily TF, check at the end of each day.
This takes enormous amount of discipline but it is vital.
Every trade I have made that has been a massive winner was due to the fact that I wasn't there to screw it up.
If you are not comfortable giving back too much profit, then take 1/2 off at 1:1 RR or the first major level (whichever comes first) and let the rest run with your ORIGINAL STOP so that you have a free trade. I put original stop in caps because its very important to this strategy that you don't move to breakeven when you are in profit. These pins and inside bars are often retested by the "retracement bus". Infact this retracement bus has recently taken me out of trades that would have made me a fortune. So beware of them and don't fall for the comfort of a breakeven stop.
I like to trail my stops above/below the low of the candle that breaks each significant "problem area". That way you always have a wall between you and the price.
as TD said in his reply to other posted charts, the pin doesnt "hang" in space, it juts back into the price action, as TD has outlined above, this makes it a less then perfect setup. also, TDs advice is to start on the higher timeframes and eventually work your way down when you're consistently profitable, this does not mean these setups work less often, but, our combined experience on this and TDs other thread would tend to tell us that the higher the timeframe, the more likely it is to produce good setups. one trader you will see on here trades WEEKLY pins quite succesfully. it means you're easier on yourself anyway with the daily and weekly timeframes, means you could either spend less time per day or spend the same time and scan more instruments.
just my US$0.02
rags2riches
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For me this is the hardest part of trading to master. Tampering with a trade is probably because:
1. I have been conditioned to think more work = more reward
2. I fear the uncertain outcome and want the certainty of small profits NOW rather than hanging on during the retracement.
trader_dante
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I mean this with the sincerest respect rags2riches but honest to God, 1 and 2 are almost certain to kill you in the end.
rags2riches
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Indeed. These are biases that I am overcoming but it takes time and practice.
trader_dante
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You are not on your own. I am working on them myself and always trying to improve the way I do things.
There are three stages to making a whole lot of money with this strategy (and indeed any other tradable edge):
1. Identify the high probability turning points and understand what the price action is telling you at them in order to know where is the best place to take a position where your risk reward is excellent. This is actually one of the easiest steps to master but people put a lot of emphasis on it going from one strategy to another. Just learn how to define the areas and keep watching the market, noting down what you see and seeing what happened after. RECOGNISE. REMEMBER and you will be able to make very good calls.
2. The next step is pulling the trigger. You have to have conviction in what you see in order not to hesitate or second guess yourself. This takes some "guts" and is harder. The only way to cure it is keep getting involved.
3. Third and final step is the hardest. This is where you have to grow some balls. Sorry for the crude expression but I find its pretty apt. Regardless of how you trade whether you are swing/position trading like me or trading off the 1m TF you need to be able to stick with a trade when it goes your way. Often you need to be prepared to see a profit come back to your entry or even a loss before the real move gets underway. Start having targets - I call them problem areas - and adopting a STOP or TARGET trading strategy. You are stopped out or your target is hit. WALK AWAY. If you can't do this then the going is going to be very tough. I tell you this from my own experience.
superspurs
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back now td, thx for that explanation,i didn,t doubt you had your reasons,good work fella and an inside bar to boot.
timsk
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Yo t_d,
The only drawback with this approach is that all your losing trades are stopped out for the maximum loss. This then adds pressure to. . .
A) ensure that your targets are hit and, where possible, exceeded - on all winning trades.
B) ensure that the ratio of profitable trades to losing trades is maintained.
If you're mainly a mechanical trader with little or no discretionary input, then this won't be a problem. But for discretionary traders it's much harder. And there are good reasons IMO for not adhering to this policy which will help to minimise the burden on A and B, above. Imagine you trade two or three strategies which you deploy according to the prevailing market conditions. For the sake of argument, let's say that one of your set ups is triggered and you enter a long position, placing a stop loss order 50 pips below your entry. Suppose price goes 25 pips against you and triggers a potential short trade from one of your three strategies. Under these circumstances, there's little point in hanging on to the original trade and waiting for it to be stopped out for the full 50 pips. It makes sense, surely, to close the trade (or even stop and reverse) and 'save' the extra 25 pips? I've lost count of the number of times I've let the trade stop itself out even though every fibre in my body says it's not working and if I wasn't already in it I wouldn't want to be in it.
I'm not saying your approach is wrong, but I would disagree strongly with your assertion that it's imperative to let stops be hit - or not - in the way you describe.
Tim.
trader_dante
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Hey Tim,
Actually I agree with you. There are times when you KNOW its going wrong before you are stopped out. However, for the less experienced traders, the problem with this is EMOTIONS.
If you are not in control of your emotions, then FEAR begins to creep into every fibre of your being when you go offside and you start giving yourself reasons why the trade won't work before it's had a chance.
I see this is in many traders - even the "professionals", who for example, buy a breakout, see it go onside, then they scratch it when it comes back for the retest because they fear it might be a fakeout.
Then of course it takes off. They kick themselves. But next time the cycle repeats. And on and on.
I've found (and I am sure I am not the only one) that if you take a setup with a stop at a day extreme (a.k.a a pin bar) and it goes immediately offside that you start thinking, this isn't going to work. But you see, when you sell based on a price extreme you are not really wrong until the extreme has been broken.
Now of course there is much more to it than that but I am making a generalisation.
I find for me that STOP or TARGET (and then trail the rest) is much more profitable than ENTER and then sit watching the price and second guessing myself on every uptick/downtick.
barjon
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I think I'm with you on this one, TD, which is why I'm an eod merchant and only play with daytrading. My best two days this week (in my daytrading "play" account) were when I was out playing golf to come home to a pleasant surprise and with intermediate price action that would have undoubtedly had me running for the hills had I been watching.
good trading
jon
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