Entry bar in Daily posts

Hi everyone,

Thanks for sharing your struggles, it makes me feel like I'm not alone. 😉

I've been trading full time for 1 year (17 January) and I had my 1st month positive, this January.

I bought the course about 45 days ago and it has helped me so much already.  I use to overtrade, now I take 2-5 trades a day, max.

I really enjoyed reading the following in this thread:

At the same time, I often get frustrated when I exit a trade too soon out of disappointment, only to see the price move strongly in my favor right after.

That's my biggest problem right now.  Fear gets in the way and get out too early of my positions! 

If I had NOT moved my stop loss too early in January, I would have made A LOT MORE MONEY than what I've made.  Fear gets in the way as soon as I see 2 trend bars going against my position.  I often get out because I'm scared and then, the price turns around and goes the way I thought it would go  🙁

For example, in January, I took 18 trades and 9 of them I got out early with Break Even or so.  50% of my trades 🙁   I checked all of those trades and about 75% of them were winners if I hadn't touched them.

I have to deal with my fear and be OK with losing.  When I look at my results, I had 4 wins, 5 losses and 9 break even trades in January.  I made a very small profit, but I get really annoyed with myself because the 9 break even trades would have made THE difference in my P&L if I hadn't touched them. 

But sometimes, I get out and it was the right thing to do.  Like today before the big break out to the downside. It's hard to know what to do 🙁

Anyway, all I wanted to say in this very long post is that I really enjoy reading people like me, trying their best at making a living of trading!  Thanks for reading me!

Hey Patrick, 

About the daily setups, I highly suggest you watch the video on Brad's Channel " How to read Al brooks end of day chart setups"', if you haven't already. 

He clarifies things about these setups that look like bad trade trades after the facts.

For instance for the buy above 48, what I think Brad would say is that it is buying a Breakout, so buying momentum, but its all also near the high of a Broad bear channel so not great context and also a 2nd leg up since 44, so if we don't see immediate follow through, traders will be quick to exit and that increases the chances of a bear reversal which the context favors. So i think if we buy above 48, we have to exit below 49 for small loss or exit at BE on 50 if possible. But initially, buying above 48 had a positive trader's equation making it a valid buy at that point, even if it was bad context, but as soon as we see bad follow through, the trade no longer has good enough probablity so we should exit quickly.

I could definitely be wrong though but thought i'd share my thought on it.

About seeking a reward which twice the risk, I get what you're saying, it also confused me. Especially when I hear Al brooks saying that where we exit has nothing to do with where we got in the trade.

So personally, when it comes to trade management I just do what Al says in the video 52A, Exit if reasonable opposite signal (which in the case above is sell below bar 49) or opposite BO. I don't focus on trying to get 2R on the trade.

As a beginner, I can't answer most of your questions; in fact, I'm interested in the answers myself. But for the particular question

Posted by: Patrick

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But how could these even be profitable trades?

I can try to offer my point of view. The arrows are supposed to be good entries for trades, but not every single one of them will be profitable trades. To illustrate, I took yesterday's chart and tracked Brad's entries from the perspective of someone who wants to be always in the market. I will assume we enter long above B6 with a stop order and remain long doing nothing else until there's a short entry, at which point we will revert to short with a stop order below the appropriate bar, thus simultaneously ending the first trade and entering the second, so on and so forth, until the close. If we do this, we get:

1st trade: buy B6@ 6085.25, sell B37@ 6080. Result: lost 5.25 points.
2nd trade: sell B37@ 6080, buy B45@ 6067.50. Result: won 12.5 points.
3rd trade: buy B45@ 6067.50, sell B50@ 6070.25. Result: won 2.75 points.
4th trade: sell B50@ 6070.25, buy B62@ 6063. Result: won 7.25 points.
5th trade: buy B62@ 6063, sell B74@ 6080.25. Result: won 10 points.
6th trade: sell B74@ 6080.25, buy at the end of the day @ 6065. Result: won 15.25 points.

All in all, even though the first trade was a loss, we ended the day positive with 42.5 points.

As a beginner, I can't tell you why the particular entries shown were good trades, that will have to wait for more experienced people to answer.

Cheers,

Alexandre

Thank you, Fabian and Alexandre, for sharing your views—very interesting.

Fabian, I hadn’t seen Brad’s video, but I just watched it. Well… okay. I wouldn’t say I’m even more confused, but he’s only talking about micro scalps. He keeps saying things like, “As soon as disappointed, one trader would exit here,” after just a few ticks. This seems completely contradictory to Al’s teaching, which is to “seek swing trades with at least twice the risk.” From what I’ve learned, we should generally rely on our stops, hold even through pullbacks, and only exit later if we see a potential countertrend developing. But maybe I’m oversimplifying things here.

If I buy at the top of a strong bull trend bar closing on its high, but then see a small bear trend bar right after, I might feel disappointed. But if I exit immediately, I’ve just managed the trade like a scalp—while my original intention was to go for a swing. At the same time, I often get frustrated when I exit a trade too soon out of disappointment, only to see the price move strongly in my favor right after.

This kind of quick decision-making based on immediate disappointment—Al never really mentions it, or maybe I missed it?

I know, I know—it’s all a grey area, and good context analysis is probably what I’m lacking most of the time.

Now that I think about it, there was a time when I had pretty good results by being very cautious. As soon as I felt disappointed, I would exit—with either a small loss or a small win. But if the price continued to break further in my direction, I would hold, analyzing bar by bar until the first sign of disappointment or a strong trend bar in the opposite direction.

I feel like my ability to find good entry points is okay, but my trade management is bad and needs serious improvement. That’s where most of my mistakes happen.

Alexandre, thanks for the exercise of counting how many points one would have earned by following that strategy. I had always wondered about it but never actually took the time to check. Have you done this over several days? Is it consistently positive by the end of the day?

Hi Fabian,

After watching Brad's videos, reflecting on everything, and doing my homework for yesterday's session, as Al encourages us to do, I had a real aha moment—realizing so many things.

Today, I traded the DAX (I live in Europe), and that aha moment continued. It felt like everything was finally coming together. I ended the day very positive (with more money in my account), only very littles losses, so with minimal stress. Many small trades balanced out, and two big winners, taking profit when i saw indeed some possible signal the other direction. After the fact, some trades were just perfect... this is really satisfying !

There are still areas where I feel uncertain, and I may not have made the best decisions all the time. But without a doubt, this was a major improvement in just one day. In four years of trading, I’ve had moments where I thought I had figured it out—but this time feels completely different.

While trading today, I marked up my chart live, just like Brad does in his end-of-day reviews (though I prefer using squares). This helped me tremendously.

I still need to improve—sometimes I exit too early, sometimes too late. But I see progress. I am always in the good direction when there is a big movement.

My next step is to purchase the encyclopedia and study the many daily setups carefully.

There’s still so much to learn, but I finally feel like I see the full picture and the trading style I need to adopt.

Thank you again! Brad’s video was truly a game-changer for me!

Patrick

Hello Patrick,

You have no idea how much your post resonate with me, I am learning BPA too, I watched the course several times, took notes, watch more BPA on youtube and other BPA traders, I also tried to do LMT orders, STP orders, Swing and Scalps, everything.

I am now a BE to profitable trader because I think I am good taking entries but awfull managing trades and even worse at accept lossers and being wrong ( this is the reason why I usually win but when I lose I lose more than expected so go back to BE or small profit )

The point that I want to make is that I understand what are you going through because I am on the same boat, I also tried to follow the Daily Slides with entries but I dont like them very much because theres a lot of trades that I dont think are good because of context with yesterday / GXH / GHL or because I think the traders equation is bad ( from my point of view ). But I also tried to do the Always In based on taking a good entry and hold it until reason to reverse and I must tell you that this is not a good estrategy for every day, let me explain...

There is a lot of days where Always In strategy works perfect, but as you know most of days in ES are TRD and that makes Always In reverse strategy a complete mess, in TRD the best thing to do is first of all probably take LMT trades instead of STP order trades but even it there are STP order trades you must know that you are probably Buying somewhat high in the TR or Selling somewhat Low because the SB can be big and you are taking the trade with a STP order.

I am going to post a slide with a TRD ( and notice that I am talking about TRD where you can buy and sell on STP order because there is also TTR days when you can do nothing but loss everything if you use STP orders )

Watching the image, imagine that you take the first trade and you reverse everytime you have a setup / SB against you to reverse, the SL will be placed always at the top/low of the last leg.

When I said B1 Buy I mean the STP order triggered at the top of that B1.
Also I am not going to say the ammount of points because is a lot more work, what I am trying to do is show you that Always In dosnt work for every scenario, and it is good to spot when you are in a TRD or Trend day and manage your spectations based on that so you can go and said, today I am going to take scalps instead of swings until something happen for example

B1 Buy or B4 Buy if you dont want to take the 1st Bar --> loss

B7 Sell --> loss

B11 Buy --> Small profit, almost BE

B17 Buy --> loss

B18 Buy --> profit

B27 Buy --> BE

B34 Sell --> SL

B37 Buy --> loss

B40 Sell --> loss

B49 Buy --> loss

B52 Sell --> loss, almost full SL

B57 Buy --> profit

B61 Sell --> profit

B65 Buy --> small profit

B72 Sell --> loss almost full SL

B74 Buy --> profit but final hours of trading so be carefull here

Also you must be aware of comissions.

As you see, if you try to hold your trades and be always in the market, it is really hard to make money even if there is good trend days when you win a lot.

I think that the best thing to do is notice what kind of market are we going to have today, dont be too eager to take trades on the first minuts of the Open in order to see what kind of day are we going to have, and when you have your answer start trading based on that.

Big TRD --> you can LMT or STP order and scalp or hold a little bit more if big range

Small TRD --> better LMT orders and Scale in + scalps, no swing allowed until something happen to change the Small TRD

Trend --> STP orders or LMT PB and hold

All those things...be aware of market cycle, magnets, etc. I think there is no easy answer to how we should trade, and I am sure that it is impossible to find a trading style that works on every scenario, it is more like there must be a trading plan for any of those scenarios but not one plan that covers every scenario ( I hope this makes sense, my english is not as good as I want )

To close this long answer ( sorry for that ) I also want to say that if you see this trading day "Image" and you trade it like a TRD and take scalps instead of holding, you could have done money, but if you trade it with LMT orders and scaling in, you would have done even better, I am not saying that you or anyone should trade with LMT on TRD days because we all know the risk of doing that if you dont know how to read the PA properly, but I think that you understand my point.

Have a nice weekend and keep working!

Hi Alejandro,

So I’m not the only one who feels this way! Thanks for sharing that—it’s good to know we’re all on similar paths in our trading journey.

You also have no idea how much this resonates with me:

QUOTE
"I am now a BE to profitable trader because I think I am good at taking entries but awful at managing trades and even worse at accepting losses and being wrong (this is the reason why I usually win, but when I lose, I lose more than expected, so I go back to BE or small profit)."
UNQUOTE

I’m at the same stage. I’m also close to being breakeven long-term. Some days are great, others are terrible—big ups, big downs, big confusion! Haha. These days, I really imporved my trade management. I don’t know why, but I feel very hopeful right now. Only time will tell if I’m right to be.

The trading day you shared is really interesting, and I have a few thoughts on what you said:

1. With such a systematic Always-In approach, strictly following those entry bars, it’s indeed hard to believe we could be consistently profitable on a day like that—or long term.
2. No trader wins every day, right? I think money management plays a huge role here. A daily max loss can protect us when the market conditions don’t suit us. After several losses, we have to admit that it’s just not our day. Tomorrow will be better. Or, on tough days, we need to be much more selective.
3. Over time, I really hope I can also manage TR days and profit with limit orders. We shouldn’t put limits on ourselves—we have to believe that, with enough experience, we’ll get good enough to trade them like pros. I started to simulate trading with Ninjatrader, it was a big step. Trading with limit orders sometimes, during simulation, will be a start.
4. It’s useful to analyze Always-In results based on Brad’s entry bars, but in reality… many of them don’t seem great to me either. That’s why every trader is different right ? 🙂
   • For example, a sell entry on Bar 8? That’s at the bottom of the trading range, with a 50% pullback still acceptable, and we’re still expecting a second leg. If I had entered on Bar 2, I don’t think I would have sold at Bar 8.
   • So I agree—some of those entry bars seem questionable. A discussion with Brad about this would be really interesting!
5. Always-In is a great starting point to understand the logic, but I think we need to refine it over time, incorporating our own intuition as we gain experience.

Thanks again for sharing your thoughts! Reading and discussing all this with you guys is an important part of the journey—it helps a lot.

Patrick

Always In is really good in order to know who have the upper hand and take trades on that direction, but that dosnt mean that you have to hold them until AIL swaps to AIS.

As I said I think that the best thing to do is notice, by PA and not our believes or BIAS, what kind of day are we going to have and if it is a day that let you hold a swing go for it, but if it is a day with lots of tails, fades and bad FT it is better to take quick scalps.

It is not such a thing like Always In is bad, or Swing trade in ES is bad, or scalp, etc. Every single thing have their context to shine and notice that is the important point.

If you need to drive a nail, you do not use a wrench. I see the market the same way, you need to use the right tool for the task right in front of you, and that tool can be a swing, a scalp, a STP order, LMT order, wide stop or not, scale in...BPA has a whole arsenal in that regard and it is really difficult to use everything consistently well

I made a mistake, I took 18 trades this week, not for the month of January.

Jean, one thing that might help in the situation you describe is to exit half of your position when the trade moves in your favor the same amount as your initial stop. Then even if the remaining half hits your stop, it’s a break even trade. This can make it easier to let the trade run without moving the stop out of fear. 

Hi Jean,

I am not saying that it is better to take partial profits at 1IR, I dont know, you need to do backtest and have some data in order to see the results and also if you trade better or not by doing that because this strategy resonates more with you etc.

But this quote:

Posted by: Jean

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For example, if I risk $100 on a trade with 40% winners: 

4 winners x $150 = $600 ($50 at 1x and $100 at 2x)

6 losses x $100 = $600

The result is BREAK EVEN 🙁

It is not exactly right, as you said all your winners are going to be 150$ win, but not all your losers are going to be 100$. Imagine you take a trade where the price moves up to 1:1 or a little more but does not reach the TP 1:2 and reverse, on that trade even if the market reach your SL you already took 50% profits at 1:1 so you won 50$ with 1 contract and lossed 50$ in the other one, so your PnL is 0 not -100.

If the price does not reach the 1:1 and it is a straight loss, then you loss 100$, but this is not going to be always the case.

I hope this helps !

Like Alejandro said, not all trades that hit the stop will be losers, some will be breakeven, so the trader's equation is strictly positive. 

Al also says that you could just place your stop and go take a walk after you enter the trade, if it's what it takes for you not to get anxious to micromanage.