I have decided I will post more in here again. I haven't traded for a while and when I did I was trading with CFDs, but the goal is futures trading. I haven't traded for a few months now as I have been away on holiday, have broken my wrist(which halted the saving/trading) so it's taken a bit of a back seat, I was also putting some time into learning programming languages(Python, Javascript, C++ etc).
I have decided I am going to try and be as honest as I can with myself and my trading and try and find my way properly, not copy someone else or try to incorporate someone else's system, but do what feels good and right for me.
To me, I have always thought to myself that order flow does indeed make the most sense, I tend to think if I can see every order going through the market, surely there are patterns and games there that I can see if I just spend the time watching to try and pick up on these things. Some other soft spots I have towards what makes sense, I tend to like the idea of deviation trading and mean-reversion style trading.
I once made an indicator on CQG when I was using that platform that would draw lines every X ticks apart above(of the users choosing) at the open that would be the daily standard deviation, hourly deviation, weekly deviation etc.(I would have multiple plots of this indicator) that I would work out in excel, so get the daily data of the instrument, get the daily ranges, avg range, std dev and use that figure as the distance apart to automatically plot the lines. My thinking, probably wrong, is that we know things usually don't(or rare) have days that are outliers, like 3 or 4 standard deviations, so I thought I'd represent this as lines from each day's open and get a feel for how many standard deviations we have/haven't gone today. I have since adapted this to Ninjatrader just to see how it looks and how well the lines do, like so, still very much a work in progress and just seeing how they go, not really making a strategy or method to trade with, just curiosity at this point, this is today's session so far, so these were drawn on the open of each session this week, so 2 days, they're just spanning over into each others session(something I'm working on):
Other than that I've been playing around with watching the sessions back at 8x speed using BookMap and nothing else, just to see what I can see, have tweaked a few settings and put in trailing stops which you can see here which is a 10 tick stop initially then trails it as the trade goes in favour, although the result is good(+2762 eur up the top) it's kind of hard to explain what exactly I was doing, which feels weird to be honest, it feels I should be more systematic in my approach, but here I am just trading by feel and I guess getting in on pullbacks or where liquidity was, but certainly no rules like when this line crosses that line type stuff at all, another thing that bugs me is that doing replay stuff is a bit skewed, as you already know in the back of your head how the day is going to pan out, so its easy to be trading for how the day pans out rather than actually looking for good entries/legit things to get into trades for, which is something I need to work on. But this is what that looks like anyway, little blue marks are entry, pink line is trailing stop automatically moving up for me:
Whether any of this will morph into something worthwhile is yet to be seen, as I mentioned before this is all just my own way of trying to find something that works for me, consistently, and to learn and watch how my market moves.
I also want to learn to be much much better at managing trades, have been trying to find stuff about taking completely random entries and still making it work via risk management. Seems to be that the better you are at managing trades and risk, the higher the chance that you will be a profitable trader, choosing what to focus on(entries vs exits) etc. I need help in this area, all areas of the above actually
but hopefully I can figure some of it out that suits me.
I have also been jotting down things on a notepad that I'm trying, keeping track of at least what I'm trying so I can then focus more on things that show a little bit of promise, rather than swapping and changing between things all the time.
Excuse the enormous post