What a BORING day! A bit frustrating as well with the Nasdaq pretty much doing nothing. Took 3 trades in the Topstep account and ended up taking another step backwards in my journey to $2000 with a loss of $75 today. Took a small scalp, a break even, and a loss. However, didn’t take any trades in my live account so still at flat for the month with real money so at the end of the day I’m still winning. I can take as long as I want to reach $2000 in the Topstep account before proceeding to the next step in the combine. Hope we see some volatility tomorrow.
International markets seem to not be too worried about tariffs headlines as indices go for a nice bull run in the premarket (European hours) on strong volume, currently above the 71K mark before 08:00 ET. Will be interesting to see how this translates into the open for NQ (Nasdaq Futures) as this is about a 0.35% retracement of yesterday’s close. Technically, very possible for another day of selloff. One candle can change things quickly, as well as a tweet from our favorite Twitter handle.
Nothing significant on the calendar today.
COB Recap
Only two trades for me today getting stopped out twice. With the choppiness I decided to not take any more trades for the day and risk digging myself deeper in the hole. The market will be open tomorrow, so what I’ve learned from the past few months is not to push it when the market is not on my side. Of course, later things calmed down a bit, but it was not a super strong day. Probably could have got back in the green but price action would not have made it easy and there’s a good chance emotions would have found their way into my trading resulting in bad decisions.
I did continue with paper trading, but the result wasn’t much better with the aforementioned price action. Was completely done for the day by 10:30 ET. Another positive is I’m still green (barely) for the month which is an improvement from July and August where I got off to a decent start before giving it tall back by the second week.
Contract month rollover for many futures today. Indices (NQ, ES, YM, etc) as well as currency futures rolling over to Z (December). Not much action in the after hours leading up to the Retail Sales report at 08:30 ET. From my watchlist, NQ and GC got a slight bump in European market hours. Volume is a bit lighter than we’ve seen so far this month, more than likely due to the contract rollovers.
On the calendar today, Double Retail Sales reports at 08:30 ET.
COB Recap
Long story short, had a plan, let fear based off surprising price action get me away from my plan, got off to a bad start and had to climb my way back from not so much of a bad loss in a choppy market. Even with all the chop should have been green but it is what it is. After taking clawing my way back bit-by-bit to under $100 in the whole decided to just throw in the towel and keep myself in the green for the month. There’s still two weeks left in the month. I can make it up next week.
