Wednesday Notes - Keep the Feet Moving

For those who have asked, I'm here ... and trading.

It's just that I'm struggling a bit with what to talk about these days.

I also just got up from my post-MATD late afternoon/early evening nap.

Oh, we could talk about today's monster MATD ... which I chose to get up at 3am to trade both the Europe and early U.S. sessions.

Or we could talk about the need to always be flexible and alert ... as was the case when the Spain news broke just before noon.

But I settled on sharing one particular bugaboo I have from time to time in my trading, which is the tendency to get a bit sloppy and out of rhythm whenever interrupted and needing to leave my trading station, resulting in my needing to scramble a bit at times to find it again.

And today's time-based P&L (below ... click to enlarge) says it all as my trading -- and rhythm -- were both interrupted by a 7am ET chiropractor appointment, after which time I found myself on the retail (a.k.a. "stupid" or "losing") side of a few sequences ... which is clearly reflected in the extremely unusual 3 consecutive bars of losing 30 minute intervals.

As I mentioned recently, the bars reflect profit or loss incurred during each 30 minute interval that begins with the time noted in the chart.

In today's case, I went to bed early last night as I felt the Europe session would provide some of the better oscillation reads & opportunities (trading both the DAX and Globex ES), and planned on pretty much being done by noon -- in part because the afternoon of MATDs are often coin flips, and in part because of the FOMC trade wild card.

It's funny ... the sequence actually started with my being on the right side of the bull move that began just before 7am ET, which I entered via my remote Vaio and inappropriately scratched (error #1) before then settling down at my trading station and being far too early on a couple of short sequences (error #2).

Yet as always, trading isn't about one trade, trade sequence, day, hour, or 30-minute interval.  Rather, it's about the entire collection of work over one's lifetime.  To put the latter in perspective, there are approximately 6,500 30-minute intervals in a year, assuming 13 tradable hours between Europe's open and the U.S. close & 250 trading days a year, so each interval is 0.015% of the year. 

Or said another way, trading -- like life -- is about simply keeping the feet moving.

So as you can tell, I'm having some fun using the automatically generated time-based P&L to analyze the day.

As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.

And today, it likely tells the story better than I can.