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Thursday, August 23, 2012

HARSH REALITY




This is going to be a little hard to read, but you can get the gist of it. I have above a summary of just trades by some systems I have this week. I did not do all of these obviously, but you can see that overall most of them are pretty good. However, you can also see that there is a rough stretch the last few days on these. You can see 5 of the last 12 trades have been losses. This is the harsh reality of trading. Even though overall these results are incredible, there is still a bad period where money was lost. I know of no way around this. It really aggravates me when I come across people who advertise things, and how they never lose, they caught this, they caught that etc.. Then you check into it and find out their methods do not work.  I recently checked into one of them, who had a good record. There were 7 strategies that supposedly were available to trade the emini SP 500. They released one of them as a teaser, and when I studied it I found it does not work. I then traded some emails and talked to someone who worked there who admitted that one did not really work. HUH? I think what we probably should do is a trade if the league salary cap rules will allow it.

I think we should swap all the people who are in jail for trading violations, for those who are not but suspected, just switch em all right now. Of course we will let Madoff and Stanford stay there as being grand fathered in to stay there. We also throw the judges in jail that support the theft of Segregated Funds starting with the court of appeals judges in the Sentinel case. The judges are worse than the con men in that they support their crimes.

The moral of the story here is, there are always going to be losses and losing periods. I was talking with the head of a brokerage firm the other day, and he told me of the prop accounts they were currently running, only one guy was ahead. The guys trading these accounts are all good traders, so that tells us how tough it is to be consistent, year in year out. In as much as my Bond System is just absolutely killing it right now, having made over $11,000 a contract just since the April introduction of it here, I know a period like what we see above is coming. I would bet my life on it. I also know that some people will quit once it begins. Most people do not have what it takes to trade through a draw down, and that is why so many people fail. It is not easy.

You always feel like a genius and get so optimistic, when you are having good trading runs, and get too down when you have tough periods. This happens to me also, although I try to stay as even keeled as I can. Now that I have had so much money stolen from me, the wiggle room I always had for draw downs is gone. I have had a couple of lousy trades this week after starting off with one that was great, and it has ticked me off. I am so determined not to let PFG ruin my life, yet my start back up has been slower than I wanted. Nonetheless, I will stay the course all the while moving my money from one firm to the next and back and forth to banks, to try and stay ahead of the next customer theft that we know is coming. I feel like Jason Bourne.

Moral of the story, trading is tough, suck it up or do something else. This is not an easy road to riches in spite of what so many represent. It is like any other business, you have to work hard, and grind through tough times.

Here is a trade I am in today, Natural Gas.




The reasoning behind this trade is as follows. First, we have a rollover in price and a retracement into what is now a short term down trend. We have the momentum indicator at the bottom rolling over confirming the trade. We also have some red arrows on the chart. Those are somewhat complex and will not be revealed in here as to what they are. Essentially they are indicators of buy and sell points. You can certainly see instances here when they are great and others where they are not, so they are not the holy grail. However, when I get a confluence of things like this all at the same time, it is a trade I need to do. I have not established a target yet because it would be too far away to be hit today anyway even if we went way down. Since I do see this as being with the current short term trend, I will try to ride this one for a bit if it goes in my favor. As anyone who trades knows, what we see on the screen could evaporate in an instant nowadays.

Interestingly enough, I do have a few potential short term sells in grains today, that I doubt will trigger. Gold and Silver are absolutely flying, so we can see how significant that support level in Gold was that I talked so much about. I did say if it held we could be off to the races, and we are. The Gold market is very much like the stock market now. It is being artificially supported by governments and their buying. The one difference is that the buying by governments in Gold is more transparent than the stock indexes. The reason is, it is other countries. Isn't that great, once again we have to look outside the US for integrity.

One last note for today. I have decided to re-launch my website on trading, iamafuturestrader.com. There will be a link to it here in a week or two. I have to redo the site, and finding the time is a challenge. What will be convenient about it is that subs to services will be able to access the orders and pay via Pay Pal right there, without having to screw around with sending me checks like the current arrangement. I got a very good deal from my old hoster to help.

The day it is up I will announce it here. It keeps things simple since the name is the same. Since subs are doing so well with the Bond Service I decided it was time to get back into this again. I may do a newsletter also, which will be dirt cheap, and teach more specific techniques for trading. I also plan on expanding beyond Bonds for trading signals for those interested. 

The PFG update is basically just that everyone is getting pissed off at the trustee for dragging his feet on the initial distribution of customer funds. I guess I am too. Just watching accountants and lawyers charge $650 and hour for weeks on end, which it taken out of our money, is beyond frustrating. It is nice to know they all become millionaires, as I was taken of that list of millionaires in the process.

Good Trading to everyone


8 comments:

JM said...

Looking foward to the new site. Loving the bond system. In the world of 'everything is one trade' (more or less), it's also helpful with short term index futures trades. Nice, thanks, Chris.

Vikas said...

Looking forward to the new site Chris, thanks again for the bond trades. Also, looking at the trades you posted above, the P&L still looks OK despite the few losers?

Anonymous said...

Very nice to hear that you're
going to reopen your website.
Would be very nice to have also other trading signals, as you're thinking to do. Looking forward for that

sergio said...

not sure about your short, the price pulled back quite a lot today after the low

Pat B. said...

Thanks Chris. I have been waiting for the PayPal option so that I can join!

Chris Johnston said...

Yes Sergio the nat gas short was a bad trade, and it appears headed for a stop out. I will show the others I made so everyone does not think I am a complete idiot. This is why I post trades when I do them, for credibility and you see I don't just show all the ones that turn out great which gives a false impression.

Yes Vikas, that was the point I was trying to make. You have to accept that some trades just lose, like Nat Gas today. Overall you can see most of my signals from my tools work pretty well.

sergio said...

Maybe it is still good to short but in this case, where did you decide to come out? where do you put the stop loss in this cases?

Chris Johnston said...

had my stop last night above the prior days high so I got stopped out on that trade. I keep the stops tight, my patterns are designed to go right away and the best trades like the two others I made yesterday I will show in today's post are examples of that.