Pollinate Trading

Stop Losses In Trading

Where I place stops

How to size positions based on stops

Dealing with losing trades

End of bar stops vs intra bar stops

Psychology of price action near stops

I cover a couple of trades that I got stopped out on recently

Follow me on Twitter @ChrisDMacro

My swing trading process and how I prepare for the upcoming week

How I prep for day trading

Pre-trading warm ups

My routines

I expand a lot on how I came up with my system

And of course walk through this weeks trades 

Let me know your thoughts on Twitter @ChrisDMacro

Here's the thread on Twitter as I was trading it in almost real time

https://twitter.com/ChrisDMacro/status/1208058684611293184

“This is the longest bull market in history!”

That’s just not the case

Let’s take a walk back in time….

This chart represents Present Day $SPX all the way back to 1872

This only represents about 150 years of US Markets history

From a headline perspective the longest bull market in history sounds tempting to use

There are some agreed upon norms for what we consider a bull market, bear market, recession, depression or crash

They are all fairly arbitrary

For example the 2018 meltdown that dropped 19.9% doesn’t count as a bear market, because it would’ve had to be down 20% for it to be an official bear market

Investopedia has this to say about what a bull market is…

There is no specific and universal metric used to identify a bull market. Nonetheless, perhaps the most common definition of a bull market is a situation in which stock prices rise by 20%, usually after a drop of 20%...

Everyone talks about how hard you need to work at becoming a good trader

It’s true

But doing the right hard work vs just hard work is where most fail

The old saying “practice makes perfect” is usually improved by saying “perfect practice makes perfect”

When you repeat a task over and over you get more efficient and more effective at that task

You could practice throwing a golf ball with the intention to get good at golf

But in the game of golf, throwing the ball is not allowed as a way to advance on the course

I use to think that making a trading plan the night before and sticking with that trading plan the next day was what working hard was all about

Then the market would have its say about my trading plan and I’d get so bothered because I made a plan and it didn’t work out

I’d get frustrated, I’d feel defeated, I’d want to give up trading

Then I’d...

Equities Bullish - hold long

Bonds Bearish - short

Currencies - sideways mean reversion (focus on swing trades)

Metals - short

Energy - sideways mean reversion (focus on swing trades)

USDCAD - sideway mean reversion - compressed vol
USDJPY - sideway mean reversion - compressed vol
USDCHF - sideway mean reversion - compressed vol
USDBRL - attempting vol extension in bull volatile regime
USDMXN - sideway mean reversion - compressed vol
NZDUSD - downward to sideway mean reversion - low vol
AUDUSD - downward trend with expanded vol contracting
EURUSD - downward to sideways trend with expanded vol contracting
GBPUSD - sideways mean reversion - compressed vol
ZB - FVBO (with strong buying pressure) - short target 149'19
ZN - FVBO (with strong buying pressure) - short target 123'225)
ES - VBO long and strong with measured move to 3300-3500 range
YM - VBO long and strong with measured move to 33,000
NQ - VBO long and strong with measured move to 10,700
CL - sideways mean reversion wide range...

There is a big desire to want to be right about “calling” the future outcome of a market 

Would you rather make more money, consistently

Or 

Be right about calling the market top/bottom and not be in the trade?

Trading is a damn hard job

Only about 10% of all traders make money (Student)

Only about 2% make a living as a trader (Pro’s)

Only about 1% make incredible returns (Elite)

To be clear, about 90% of traders LOSE money trading (Gamblers)

I work with every one of these groups from the struggling trader who is looking to start this new trading business/lifestyle

To people who make over a million dollars in a single day

I have identified a number of characteristics of each trader type and I will break each one down

GAMBLERS - 

New traders who are full of confidence that they are able to predict the future and rightly so, they are usually very successful already in another...

Systems trading is by far the most boring way to trade

You know that you are either going to win or lose on the trade

You know how much you are going to earn or how much you are going to lose +/-

You know what time of day to review your setups

You know when you need to update your profit targets

You know when you are going to stop out of positions

You know how much money you will make that month

You know how much money you will make that year

You know when your system is broken and can turn it off

You know exactly how much money you need to use to achieve your financial goals

You know when you don’t have anything to do for the day

You know when you are going to be a bit extra busy (20 minutes instead of 10)

The only time it isn't boring is when you don't follow your systems rules, then there is no predictability and whatever the outcome you have no clue!

When I first met her, she had just blown up her first account

It was the summer of 2000, the Dot Com bubble had just burst and she was one of those buy the dip people who made millions only to give it all back and a lot more

She had no idea what she was doing up until this point, but she was very good at coming up with unique perspectives on things and creating very successful outcomes

She was also an attorney, this is a unique skills that attorneys tend to have

They can see a problem and fuss around with it until they figure out some completely out of no where solution that no one else even considered and run laps around everyone

Back to our story

At this time the trading world wasn't as remote as it is today, there still was a big focus on going to offices. So we would all meet up for breakfast after the opening session and share ideas to get that human interaction

She was very inquisitive on what strategies people were using, asking a lot of questions and doing a lot of research