025: Ghost Recon -- NFP Straddle Aftermath and Whispers from the Blood Moon
I think I'm really better off being like a sniper, aiming for the best setup in swing trading, instead of being a heavy gunner in scalping. It's not that I'm trigger happy (although I sometimes have that tendency when listening to Eminem lol), I actually have the same profitability in both trading styles, it's just that I keep on mistakenly applying my "sniping technique" in scalping and getting higher amount of losses than gains even if my # of winning trades are greater. I keep on forgetting to double-tap the enemy, just being contented with small gains and not aiming for the kill, because I got used to doing one cool shot at a time in swing trading. I stay and hold on to dear stop loss longer, forgetting that fundamentals don't support scalping, forgetting that camping out isn't a heavy gunner's thing but a sniper's, and losing more than I should.
Anyway, enough of the drama lol. I only have a week of experience doing price action in 1 min chart scalping/intra-day trading compared to a year in swing (slash position) trading. Old habits die hard and I need more practice in price action. I would really love to be able to combine both styles one day.
While practicing how to do price action trading, I've also tried out straddle trading during the NFP news release few hours ago. It's dangerous, they say. It's fun, I say. It's like planting claymores on doors.
Around 30 minutes to an hour before the NFP release, I've setup the following 3 straddles for different kinds of risk in SL (ignore Graduated Straddle above, will do that in the next NFP release on November).
I initially had directional bias on the downward trend, believing that USD would get stronger because like most investors out there (or at least based on market sentiment lol), it's more likely that NFP would be 200k-ish or at least 190k+.
So you can imagine my shock with this report:
And this movement:
Thankfully, no SL's were hit, though I wasn't that contented with my conservative targets either (hence, the graduated straddle next time). Only my buy stops were hit, which gained 21 pips each (ignore the 0.02 lot, it's a different trade):
Overall, I'm happy with the result. I'll continue using H1 chart and trade in EURUSD for some time. I have no strict # of pips in setting the distances between the buy/sell orders, SL's and targets. They're all based on support and resistance levels. (I don't have specific rules but only have guides because I'm more comfortable with the flexible approach, I really wanna learn more about that congressive strategy I've read about in Vantage Point Trading articles written by Cory Mitchell, which he said is mainly being taught in Day Trading Academy. But for those who want rules, I've read some interesting stuff too in some forum originally from a guy named Michael Stewart--and no, they said he's not related to Martha Stewart XD XD XD)
After all the planning and testing I did based on SL's, I've realized that setting stop loss is only secondary. The most important thing in doing straddle trading is knowing where to put that stop order and target profit-- somewhere strategic enough for them not to be hit before banks try to sweep possible stop loss levels. In my straddle experiment, I've set the buy and sell stop orders at the 61.8 and 0 fib levels, and the targets around the same distance to almost double as the SL's distance from the entry price. Not a rule, of course, but they sure were visually good enough whenever I look at the chart above lol.
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Aside from the NFP report and the reality of Fed not pushing with the interest rate hike anymore this year (there's possibility in December this year still though), these topics highly interest me lately:
Even Rob Booker mentioned these things in his latest podcast.
I have no idea if there really is an upcoming gloom and doom (they've been worrying about the dissolution of Euro since few years ago, which never happened, at least not yet). If ever those bubbles burst though between now and 2 years from now, I think it's going to be way worse than the 2007-2008 crisis. But, we can survive, we will, we should, yes?
