CRUDE MELT DOWN

See I told you see....... In all seriousness I have been talking about Crude as being setup for a decline but I have been early so definitely not spot on with this call. This market has had commercial selling into what I consider resistance areas, hence I thought it was a sell. However, that does not mean run out and short the market. Translating weekly setups into daily trades is a tricky little endeavor. It is mostly what I try to do in the Swing Service and it is not easy. 

There are a couple of ways you can look at this Crude setup right here. First, it has clearly broken down on a very short term basis. Second, it is right into what could be a support area. Which is correct? The answer is the always crowd pleasing, "it depends."

If you are a very aggressive trader and try to front run what could be a big move and are willing to get stopped out a lot trying to catch a big one, you should be short right now. If you are someone who wants a confirmed trend break and then pullback, nothing has happened yet. In the latter camp sometimes you don't get the pull back and the market waterfalls in these instances. If you are in the former camp, you get a lot of stops and starts and have to be willing to keep swinging until you catch the one that really moves.

There is no magic answer to which way an individual should approach this, it depends on your personality. Personally, I tend to get fatigued having to trade a setup time and time again, getting stopped out a lot trying to catch the big one, so I tend to wait for the break and retrace. I miss moves sometimes doing this. At other times I have setups that have an edge and I wade in with trades like this early. I do think in summary the ideal  situation for this would be to wait for the price to break below the current level and bounce. I have no idea if that will happen or not.

I have a few explanations to make. First, the Silver trade we did, why it was exited where it was instead of being held because it has fallen off a cliff and we missed a gigantic move. Second, what is going on with the Bond service with the Robbins auto trade program.

The Silver trade was exited because the entry pattern has a rule that it is exited after two days if profitable and the market does not close at or near the lows on the second day. In that case the market closed up with a reversal bar the second day so we exited. It is unfortunate but rules are rules and they do not always catch everything perfectly. I put those trades in there the way I make them so when we miss something like this I miss it too. I wish it were different. We did still make money so it was not a total disaster.

The fiasco with the Bond trades at Robbins was a combination of a fault on my part and one on their side of the equation. We had a recent trade in Bonds that wound up making a small profit after it went against us quite a bit initially. While the trade was upside down I was told by a tech guy at Robbins that I might have a period of time where I could not access my account due to the back office software add they had to make in order to set up the auto trade program. Since this could have happened at any time, and Murphy's law would surely have had it happen over night leaving me no way of exiting the trade, I exited the trade at the market with the intention of not making any more trades in that account until the software program was implemented. The problem with that is that we are tracking the trades in real time to build a record in their system and this totally messed that up. I was between a rock and a hard place on this. I had a trade that no matter what I did was likely to show a result that was different than what the system rules indicated. Further, I stood to have the problem further exacerbated by potentially missing an additional trade as we worked to get this done.

The solution is we are starting from scratch now. I am waiting for the back office software to be installed and working on my computer, then we will move forward with all the live trades and the following of the system by those who want to do it through Robbins Trading. This is mostly my fault, but anyone who has ever been caught in a trade, like we all were with PFG when it went down, and could not get out for days and watched money just vaporize, would likely have done the same thing. There is nothing to worry about with their system working, it works fine. What happened here is that Vision dragged their feet responding to the tech guy from Robbins Trading, and I while this was happening not knowing when a potential non access period could happen, just exited the trade fearing the worst. There is blame to go around.

There are a few of you waiting on this so I wanted to make sure everyone fully understood what happened, When I enter a trade through Trade Navigator there has to be a back office program that works to automatically do that same trade in the follower accounts. That is the piece of software that is not installed yet. Since Vision has many options for placing trades, there are also a few options for the back office software interface. The delay has involved selecting the right one, getting Vision to set it up on their end, then get it to me. During the installation of it once this was all resolved, there was potential for a brief period for me not to be able to place an order. I should have done all this first but I simply was not aware of all the back office things that had to be set up for this to work. It will work seamlessly once it is installed but it may be another week before it gets done.

My apologies for this, it is mostly my fault, I got kind of jacked up with these guys and in the midst of all of that I exited a trade that wound up making a profit at a loss, so the track record is all messed up. When we combine that with missing the first two trades of the year which were big wins, the record was so far from what the real trades were, it is just better to start all over again in the correct fashion. It there are any questions please email me.

Good Trading