Webinar

On a boring ‘Fed day’ that began and ended with a short-squeeze leap on the opening bar, we spent the entire session searching in vain for juicy odds. The process was illuminating nonetheless, since most of the time, we were looking at charts of one-minute degree or less, where tiny subtleties have the potential to produce big – and relatively riskless – gains. Skip to the last ten minutes if you want to see how the would-be best trade of the day, in BABA, worked out. There is also some material at the beginning of the lesson that shows one way not to use options.

We initiate trades using small patterns, camouflage-style, because the big ones carry more risk. The goal is not to make a pile of money on the small patterns, but to get aboard with relatively little risk or stress. You can see the thought process at work in this recording, since we spent most of the session hunkering down on charts of one-minute degree or less. This is where trades start to work very consistently, mainly because there is relatively little competition. If you’ve been getting stopped out too often shortly after entering a trade, this lesson shows how to avoid it by paying attention to small details that are off nearly everyone else’s radar.

I've been putting increasing emphasis on "counterintuitive" trades during these tutorial sessions, since some of our old tricks have not been working as well. Mainly, it has been a case of gorgeous ABC patterns stopping us out, sometimes more than once. A promising solution is to look for patterns that make us feel a little queasy when initiating a trade. B-C correction legs that retrace almost to the point 'A' low are a good example of this. In this lesson, we consider several such patterns while looking to get long or short well outside of our usual comfort zone.

The Fed rarely has anything new to say, but the markets never fail to go nut-so for a few hours whenever the Open Market Committee puts out yet another hum-drum press release. That was the backdrop for this lesson, which featured not only the usual, technically-driven hunt for timely trading opportunities in some popular vehicles, but also the extra measure of caution required when the stock market is in a state of low-grade fear, uncertainty and hysteria.

The Dow was up around 250 points when this session began, and because the broad averages seemed reluctant to correct, we looked for opportunities to get aboard a presumptive second leg up. Mostly, this entailed hunkering down on the very lesser charts of the E-Mini S&P. After one false start, we found a promising entry point with just a few ticks of initial risk. The rationalizations here are very finely nuanced and required as much psychologizing as paying attention to the mechanical details of tradable patterns.

Skip to the tail end of this lesson for some finely shaded trading decisions that allowed us to get November Crude’s range and rhythm. Oil futures aside, much of this session is focused on the lesser charts. That is not only where the action is for day-traders, but for swing traders looking to establish long or short positions with relatively little risk.

This session is loaded with good stuff – a must-view for anyone interested in the new tactics we’ve been using to identify the best (i.e., least stressful) entry opportunities. Continuing a theme of the last several sessions, we explored purely visual techniques for initiating trades without heed to the old rules concerning ‘legitimate' impulse legs. Toward the end of the session we shorted ESZ in real time. The process of rationalizing the trade is all there, detailed at the level of the 30-second bar chart.

This lesson, although at times a study in tedium, produced paradoxically interesting results. On a relatively quiet day, we focused on two stocks - Google and Priceline – that were moving. There was a lot of psychologizing and second-guessing along the way, but the unexpected result was a quick $800 profit in Priceline. This happened after we’d been stopped out for a $250 loss. The lesson here is that it’s important to get back on the horse if you’ve been thrown. The confident trader should expect losses; they are stepping stones to profits -- and therefore an essential part of a winning game.

Skip to around the middle of this lesson to see how we found a profitable trade in December Crude on a day when the markets had ground to a halt waiting for the usual ‘momentous’ announcement from the Fed.  We used a bearish, big-picture target to inform our bias; then we identified a very subtle, downtrending ABC pattern on the sub one-minute chart to find our entry point. The initial risk was just seven ticks, and we were able to cover three quarters of the position before the session ended.  Potentially ‘easy money’ awaited at the target, since we had a nice profit to cushion a generous stop-loss on any bottom-fishing attempt.