IEM's Trading Blog This trading blog will include setups I see and track how I played them. I am a developing momentum chart swing trader. Draw your lines and take your trades, Cheers!

Needless to say, the market had significant selling all day. There were bear flags breakdowns everywhere and the EUR/JPY chart broke nicely and ran right to support today.



It certainly wasnt fun going into today net long, but I learned a couple lessons today and in the process helped pulled myself back to even. First of all, I stopped out 2/3 of my XTEX at 9.60 (purchased at 9.98) early in the day and my MGA also dropped today (need to hold around here soon or it will trigger my raised stop).

Looking back through my journal and tape, flexibly and early detection of the day's trend was what saved me from having a bad day despite coming in net long as a swing trader. My expectation from last night was a choppy day that might have a slight negative bias and certainly not expecting a 2%+ move in the /ES. Looking at the premarket futures at 6am certainly changed my read and a miss in jobless claims suggested possible further range expansion. The question became how do I want to manage my existing positions and how would I enter bearish positions given a big gap down? Would the day become a trend down day or would the market bottom around 10-10:30 like so many times before?

There are several observations that told me this will be a clean trend down day:
- opening under S2
- opening drive down on high volume with very negative tick reading (-1300)
- strong declining cumulative tick
- strong declining vwap
- almost 8:1 a/d line

This signaled me to focus on the bearish side and knock out a couple of good r/r plays (NUE - bear flag, COH - bear flag and IYR - base and breakdown) to pull me back to even. I closed both NUE and COH today, but held on to IYR short. I also found a great play on VIP off the 18 level, but I took NUE a min before VIP broke down and did not want to overtrade.

Although I did not make any money today, I am quite pleased with the execution on NUE and IYR today. I will continue to keep my positions small and time frame short. Tomorrow is the jobs report and it has a good tendency to fade off the open, be careful out there!

- Chris