Wednesday Notes - Productive Morning

4:11pm There's no doubt I'm a morning trader. For that's when I'm at my sharpest and the pattern follow-through from the prior day is most in play. Such was the case today as yet another textbook "morning after trend" setup handed us some early gift long biases with the attached 5-min chart as our guide.

The market was actually kind today, as it gave those of us looking for a more conservative entry (vs. a blind 9:30am entry which I hate) a solid entry opportunity on the first pullback -- with a 1-min continuation trigger to boot. It doesn't get much better than that. And once the high-probability trade played out (approaching Tuesday's closing high), it was simply back to wait mode to let the market tip its hand -- which it did with a nicely paced 5-min downtrend into the noon hour.

At this end, I matched the market pretty much step by step throughout the morning session, and was able to grow the chip stack +$24K by lunch (on a highly efficient 650 x 2 trading, and I can't remember a stop), with much of the meat coming from shorting late morning pullbacks toward the 5-min trend line ... and with some conviction.

From there, the afternoon was pretty much a scratch for me as ES did its best to frustrate traders trying to (1) short the 820 breakdown, and (2) play for an afternoon short squeeze which only ended up being a cruel fake. I nibbled on both at times with very small size, but wasn't too interested as I felt both were too obvious and would likely chop heavily as is often the case when the whole world is looking for the same thing.

So I essentially kept the morning gains in tact ending the day as I did the morning ... just under +$24K on 753 x 2 trading (for newbies, that's 753 total contracts x 2 for a buy & sell).

I guess you could call today "going with your strengths" as I traded primarily when both the market and my pace were solid and in lock step, and sat out or traded lightly during the rest of the time.

It certainly wasn't a home run day, but I'll take the solid base hits and walks, and come back to the plate again in the morning.