Christopher

First, so for me I classify a 5 min orb as taking a short / long anytime during the 2nd 5 min candle. So you get a first 5 minute candle close, then during the second 5 minute candle you're digging through the 1 min chart looking for an entry, but you could argue this was an ABCD or Bear Flag or support & resistance too, it was somewhat all of them. Everyday is good bro!!! 10R or max loss, your job as a trader is to just learn everyday, if you're doing that then you should always feel good. I like your setup! If you right-click the border of the top of each chart, there is an option to omit the title bar which will give you more real estate for your chart! - >

@tntp45 Hey man, I took a 5 min ORB today that worked out, thought you might dig it.

@tntp45 np man! happy to do it so first, and I think most people would agree, that if you're entering a trade you want a minimum 2:1, If you have a really large account and great intuition for price action, I think you could get away with taking high probability 1R-2R moves and partialling quickly, but for us, I think 2R minimum is a good general rule. My setup has the 1 min / 2 min / 5 min / 15 min / and the daily / + $SPY 2 min (so valuable imo) but ya, the daily is to get a sense of the ATR of the stock, the 15 min is to see what it did premarket, or if a 15 min ORB is setting up, the 2 min I use a lot for parabolic reversals and I'll take ABCD's based off the 2 min as well. The $SPY 2 min is just to have a general intuition for market sentiment, I mean would you really want to take a 2 min ORB to the upside on $AMD when $SPY just broke a support and is tanking? Lastly, reversals are tough man, I think you gotta be really good at reading volume + price data ( commonly referred to as VPA = Volume Price Analysis) But, I think if you sense a stock is very much so over sold, and is struggling around a significant level, maybe $SPY is bouncing, and the level 2 is giving you some good indication, I think it's a reasonable trade! Try some! -Chris

What's up man! Looking good, the first thing that I want to say is when I first started trading I traded almost exclusively off vwap. The logic was something like "Large institutions are the catalyst for the bulk of price movement, vwap is the most important indicator for these institutions, ergo if I think a stock is strong enough to stay above vwap i'll go long, if I think it's too weak, I'll go short." I ended up hanging around break even for a lot of weeks trading like this and it felt very limiting. Now I only use vwap as a profit target and very rarely take a position based off vwap and I do a lot better. This video recap by Aiman put the start of trends / importance of moving averages / stop placement in to perspective for me. A few more things ... 1. All of your winners are sub 2R, I challenge you to make a plan before you enter for a fixed R profit. Something like enter long at $10 with a stop loss of $9.90, and a profit target of $10.30, i'll partial 20% at $10.20 and get all out at $10.30 for a ~2.7R gain. It doesn't have to be that strict but the main take away is when you enter a trade you should always know where you want to get to, and roughly how large of a move that is. If you're consistently getting sub 2R winners then your hit rates needs to be really high. Where for example, if you only take 2R trades and your hit rate is 50%, you take 10 trades, 5 winners, 5 losers, that's 10R - 5R = 5R = $500 (for you) 2. Are you using kyles hotkeys? If not, I HIGHLY recommended that you do ... 3. So your entry on $PLAY for the 5 min ORBD was actually not that great check it out .. Remember, when you take a 5 min ORB you want to have some type of confirmation on the 1 min chart, most often an ABCD setup. You can see that it was respecting previous day close for a while, and tested and rejected it, a much better entry would have been around 16.53 with a tight stop above vwap / previous day close / moving averages. It wouldn't have worked but this entry makes a lot more sense, the risk / reward is now there, the odds that PLAY just smashes through $16 is very unlikely, but it makes a great profit target. I'm not sure if I would have taken this, if I remember $PLAY gapped up heavily Friday, I'd be looking more for a fallen angel play rather than a ORB to the downside, also $SPY was strong, and the candles are very wide on the 1 min, definitely wouldn't be a terrible trade though, maybe a B- (IMO :P) Hope this helps, gl! v/r -Chris

@alexander shanks Whats up!!!!!!!!!! Welcome back to trading!! I'm still in sim as well, but I think finding some time in the day where you can VERY consistently trade is going to be the best strategy. Notice that the open and close of the market have by far the most volume, so if you can catch the market open some days, but the close everyday, I think you could find some strats that will work well for you! I should also add that I have zero experience trading the close, this opinion is from the first principle that volume moves price action, the more volume, the more moves! good luck!

Lookin good dude! Make no mistake, learning how to trade is not easy. It's a skill, and like any other skill it takes time. Managing emotion / expectations is not easy, some days you'll feel you got it figured out, and others you'll be lost, but keep good documentation and stay positive! Good luck! -Chris *ALSO* I think it's much better to think in terms of "R's" rather than dollar amounts, especially in the beginning. Just imo, i'm sure a lot of other people here would suggest the same thing.

Good question @Clay Davis! Lets think about it.. First, the following is my opinion... There are a ton of different ways that this could play out, but in this scenario since there were SO MANY orders sitting at $20, the price is highly likely to bounce off of $20 a few times, and we will almost always get something that represents an ascending triangle. Now, by first principles we know that there is no such thing as a fixed price per share, price is dynamic, so long as there is volatility. So, by "wedging" price in to a fixed point, we're trending towards a contradiction. The market is saying, "THE SHARE PRICE IS WORTH EXACTLY $20" but we know from first principles that this can't be true! I like to think of it as momentum, the tighter the wedge, the more momentum accumulated, and ultimately, the more volatile the inevitable breakout. So, we know 2 things, price is going to breakout to the upside or to the downside, it has to. scenario 1 (upside breakout) 1. Break with a continued buying effort 2. Break with a retest of $20 3. Break with a retest and fail of $20 scenario 2 (downside breakout) 1. Break with a continued selling effort 2. Break with a retest of $20 3. Break with a retest and fail of $20 So, the main take away is that price cannot converge, there is no such thing as a "true value" of a share price, only a "perceived vale" and when we wedge we create a contradiction = > increased momentum = > breakout, In my video, price had no support beneath it, and so it's no surprised that it got hard denied, in the situation where price does have a lot of buying support, and we're approaching a strong level, we are trending towards a contradiction and ultimately, a breakout.

Have fun man, love to see your consistency here, keep it up!

@Justin thanks! I was thinking about hijacking a thread and doing a video a day on one of my trades, it helps me, and I think there might be a couple people out there that would enjoy it, would that be alright?

I think having goals is good, but this mindset could be counterproductive. I wouldn't take the forums advice on whether or not you can make 2% a day, as I'm sure there are plenty of people here that can / do. Prove it to yourself! Trade in Sim as if it were live for a few months and compile the data. One week at 3.3% a day is beyond great! But, it's not nearly enough confirmation to see where your at. You're gonna have great weeks, decent weeks, and not so great weeks, and all of the data from those weeks are equally important. Don't go live thinking you can make 1%-2% a day, go live KNOWING you can. Good luck! -Chris

@Justin Nice!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm rly good at copying people.

@Brendon I think a lot of people don't realize but Kyle's hotkeys has a default stop buffer of 1 cent. So if you load up 10.00 in to your level 2 and send in a buy order, it'll place the stop order at 9.99. That plus this bug could very consistently put your stop 2 cents away from your intended spot. If you take tight stop morning plays off of premarket levels or parabolic reversals you're just asking for either an early stop out or a significant reduction in return. -Chris

Thanks for the reply Justin! Hope all is well -Chris

When I double click the price on a chart the price that loads in to my level 2 will often be off by 1 cent. It's a big deal when taking 3-5 cent stops. Any solution to this? v/r -Chris

Yeah, that's what I've been doing so far. There have just been a couple setups that knowing I could have given it just a little more space for the 4R move would made the trade in to a winner. I've only taken maybe 20 of these so far, so I'm sure my lack of experience with the setup plays a role haha. Still though, knowing that distance could only be a benefit. I appreciate your activity in the forums! Hope all is well.

I've been having fun getting proficient at Aiman's Parabolic reversal strategy. However, It would be very convenient to have the distance the current price is from the 9ema on the 5 minute chart to be able to quickly calculate my stop loss. Timing is everything in that entry and those extra few seconds spent looking at the 5 min then back to the 2 min then doing the calculation feel like a lifetime. Any ideas on how to pull this off?

It looks like that option got added in the 5.4.7.0 version Do you know if there is an updated SIM version on the BBT site? I can't find anything. edit: The download you posted works in this version Thanks! -Chris

What up bbt! I'm trying to scale the marked part of the chart down and zoom in to the candles only Right now when I zoom in I just get this I want the candles much larger on my screen with a reduced y-axis price to something like .. Edit: Running version 5.4.6.0 (sim) Any help greatly appreciated! -Chris

Well that sounds way less fun!! albeit, probably smarter hahaha.

Dude! I just wrote a similar program in C++ and came here to post it and saw this lol. I think it's a really rare occurrence that'd you'd want to buy as many shares as your account will allow. I remember seeing a hotkey where you buy a % of your accounts value. Like you buy as many shares as possible with %25 of your account size. I can see those hotkeys being useful. For my program you input the max you're willing to lose on the trade, and then it tells you how many shares you can buy based off of your stop loss (which also goes in .05 increments) Here's mine

Hey everyone! I’m a new trader ( 4th week in sim ). I’ve been thinking a lot about risk/share size and I thought of a really straightforward program that calculates share size based on your max loss per trade dollar amount and I wanted to share it. Take for example $CAG today. Say you wanted to take an ORB at $31.55, setting your stop loss at $31.30 below VWAP. So, we are risking .25 cents per share The program has one input. "Enter Max Loss" So, say that the maximum amount for any one trade you're willing to lose is $100 then ... we input 100 and ... The output tells us that for a .25 cent stop loss, we can take 400 shares. So if we bought 400 shares at 31.55 and stopped out right at 31.30, we'd lose ~$100. or... say your $ANDREW and you're down to risk $400 a trade, then... we input $400 and ... The output tells us for a .25 cent stop loss we can buy 1600 shares! So, if we bought 1600 shares at 31.55 and we stop out right at 31.30, we'd lose $400. Since I'm new I just decided on a $50 daily goal, a daily max loss of $30 and a max loss per trade of $10, so here's my output ... I could only take 40 shares! The program has slight rounding, and of course you're not going to always take stops in 5 cent increments, but it definitely helped put things in perspective for me.

Thank you!