Neutral Fuel

Both the Nasdaq and the S&P were in neutral territory this afternoon.  The trade on a neutral print is to find a price to lean on and fade the second range extension back to the mean.  This trade was not an easy one to stomach today, and quite frankly the buyers defended the pants off of their progress.

We saw a slight risk aversion divergence when /ES made a new high without the /NQ and at that point I was looking for short entries despite the poor high printed at HOD.  Net I had a decent day, loaded with machine gun error strikes after my best trades.  This is a bi-product of trading a 1 lot.  I know that my trades might yield more than my first scale point.  Thus, I become overzealous in reentering.  I need to frame my mind as if I am still in the original trade and how I would manage my position if that was the case.  This will eliminate these errors.  I am thinking like a 1 lot chump.  One might presume I could simply bump up to a two lot and this error would magically vanish.  I won’t lie, I considered it.  However, the more disciplined approach to this issue is to avoid taking a poor reentry.  This will pay off big when I do start increasing size, because I will be more familiar and comfortable with proper re-entry/re-sizing tactics.  See below:

I left my book alone today.  If anything, I would have increased my long exposure because something about today’s neutral print smacked me in the face as BOOLISH.  But I didn’t—I rode my cycle instead. I will be poking around the sacred halls of iBankCoin for another long idea this evening.