Friday Notes - Thin Market

3:36pm Well, that's a wrap at this end on a Friday the ES market depth was pretty thin for much of the day. Apparently, yesterday's shenanigans kept many on the sidelines today (those who weren't washed out anyway), and as a result I kept sizes and holding times extremely tight throughout the session by playing liquidity-provider more than speculator ... i.e. taking orders vs. making orders. In fact, I don't think I bought the ask or sold the bid all day as it didn't take much to get wholesale fills from retail buyers & sellers.

Today was actually another mini morning-after-trend day give the extent of yesterday's late day run, although I didn't take the normal early pullback entry as ES pretty much shot up right from the open and I played it cautious early by looking for a slightly deeper post-open retracement which didn't occur.

Still, the day amounted to a very surprising +$13K on the day and I'm going out on my equity highs for the day & week simply by having traded 5-30 lots for 3-6 ticks much of the day on 962 x 2 trading. (For those new to the blog, that's 962 contracts traded with a buy and sell for each one ... and please don't try to do the math and calculate per-trade stats. As I've said before, doing so would be completely irrelevant and meaningless given a high frequency trading style where scratches, immediate reentries, and scaling in and out is the name of the game, along with low CME member transaction costs.)

I'm actually somewhat surprised at the strong pace and volatility we've had at times in this mid-November, and I seem to have retained some momentum myself from the record October. I'll of course take it along with a weekly chip count that fell just short of six figures.

The ticker to the left shows 47 days to go. But I'm not "clock-watching" or looking at the stats ... there will be time for that on December 31 when I touch the wall. Until then, it's stroke by stroke, trade by trade.

As has been said, it's the journey that's important ... not the destination. And this 2008 journey continues to open doors and windows I never imagined existed. What started out as a rather gimicky "let's buckle down for 366 days and go for the million" goal in part by making major thought process shifts in January continues to snowball into something more than I ever imagined would be possible.

Perhaps it's best that we never know our true potential ... it would ruin the surprises.

I'd just better find some things I didn't like about this week to keep it going.

That shouldn't be hard.

Look for a video and Weekend Trader updates over the weekend.