ROUND MOUND OF REBOUND

One of my favorite sports nick names that was given to Charles Barkley during his playing days was the Round Mound of Rebound. We had a spectacular rebound in the Bond System yesterday immediately following the first loss we have suffered in 2 months. That gain exceeded the loss so we wound up net ahead between the two trades. This is the reality of trading.

As much as we all try to predict the future it is simply impossible to do. I would be willing to bet some people probably took the loss and passed on the next trade because they were so used to just winning on every trade that they got scared when they finally took a loss. If this is you and you are reading this you have learned a valuable lesson. Trading Futures whether it is Crude Oil, DJIA futures or Gold futures, is all about grinding it out and taking trades. There have been some people thinking the Swing trades are not as good because they have under performed a Bond System that won 13 in a row. Ask yourself what is not under performing my Bond System right now. The answer is everything. Streaks like this do happen but you cannot compare what is the height of peak performance to something else that is just getting started. You cannot draw conclusions in either direction because there is not enough data to fully evaluate both yet.

Further trading a system is completely different from trying to probe to catch larger moves. They are different approaches. We did have what appeared to be a few big trades going in the Swings that wound up reversing and being smaller gains than what we were shooting for. This is fully explained in the web site and it is a characteristic of Swing trading. You have to give the market a little breathing room to try and catch a big win. In so doing you get picked off sometimes. I know of no other way to catch a larger move. Please keep this in mind with the two approaches we are using.

Some questions have come up about placing orders for the Swing trades. It is going to have to fall upon the individual to figure out how to place orders with the platforms that they are using. I am not familiar with all of them so I will not always be able to explain what a symbol is or what orders can or cannot be placed. If you are having trouble with the soft commodities you are going to have to get with your broker to figure it out. I have no problems with the platforms I use placing any of the orders that are in the emails. I am more than willing to help but I just don't have the knowledge of many of the platforms and some of them I have never heard of before. If for some reason you can't figure it out one thing you can do is wait for the time you normally get up and see if the price has already traded through the entry level. If it hasn't just place the order. If it has place a limit order at the entry price and try to get it on a pullback. Often you will be able to get in on pullbacks. The best trades don't look back generally but this is just a possible suggestion. The easy solution is to get it figured out with your broker. If he can't accommodate these basic orders you probably should find another place to have your account.

The next chart is a market that is starting to look interesting, the Dollar.

You can see we have had quite a slide here and have moved into a sideways type of range. During this sideways move we have seen commercial buying become very strong. This typically has been a bullish sign in the past. If we also factor in that we had a break down below a clear trend line under the lows and then quickly reversed, it tells me this could be setting up for a launch upward. What needs to happen to confirm this is for the price to get above the down trend line I have drawn in here. If we just roll back down from here this setup would be nullified. If we break above this down trend we can look to buy the first retracement. A setup is just that a setup it is not a trade. To me this market is set up for a move upward but there is not as of yet a long entry to take.

Capisce?