How Sweet It Is!

My thoughts are often on the fun things I've experienced in the past. One of them was watching The Great One, Jackie Gleeson, with my Dad. I've posted about Jackie often in the past. "How Sweet It Is" was one of his sayings. When I'm disciplined in my trading which seems to be more often as I get older, how sweet it is.

Order flow in context. That's all there is to it. Today's first 75 minutes or so as a 1 lot trader. This could be any market: DAX, ES, CL, GC, 6E, ZB to name a few.

This 75 minutes in the DAX brought $600 plus on a 1 lot with no losers.

The Power of Context Order Flow Trading

Today's charts and trades show the first 90 minutes or so of the DAX using Context-Trader and its buttons.

The DAX started the day with a gap up and a sell off. It then found support at below the VAL but within the overlapping Profile's buying tail.

The 90 minutes ended with over $1,000 profit on a 1 lot initial entry using my DoubleDown trade management rules.

Order flow was very clear although some of the level 1 resistance points did not hold. This brought in the DoubleDown rules and resulted in no losing sequences again today so far. This is day 4 for me without a losing sequence.

I'm trying to show that you don't have to trade large size to make reasonable money once you have a good trading plan. Starting with a 1 lot size with DoublingDown is the way to start. Once you are CP on the minimum size, scaling SLOWLY up becomes a lot easier. The trap to avoid is to increase either too quickly or to a size where the outcome of any one trade matters.

Order Flow Misunderstood + Consistency

Going through the websites of trading software vendors and trading education, I see that the words "order flow" have become a buzz word to sell. Sadly, most of what I've seen has little to do with what order flow really is.

Maybe I am being charitable, but perhaps the reason for this misinformation is that very few of these vendors or so called educators have actually traded order flow. The purest form of order flow was the live face to face trading that took place in the pits. In the pits, we were the market and what we did was the order flow.

Now, with electronic markets, traders are one step removed from order flow. We are all pushing orders into a bucket where they are electronically matched. Without that pit experience, this new type of order flow is much more difficult to understand. Looking at just what is traded on the bid and what is traded on the ask is not the answer as it misses the basis of what needs to be seen: the flow.

Markets continue in a specific direction until they don't. This up and down flow takes place on every time frame. A successful trader picks one of these time frames and trades the ebb and flow of the orders. That's how we make money consistently. Understanding how this ebb and flow happens and being able to see and track it is fundamental to being CP. There are three trade locations that are important to understand and to watch the flow move between them:

• Over bought
• Over sold
• Mean

That's what we traded on the floor and that's what I trade today. Context-Trader and it's buttons allow me to be as quick and disciplined as I was on the floor. A trader needs to use every edge available to compete and the competition with the algos and HFTs is getting stronger.

I'm posting this morning's DAX trade on a 1 lot basis as I was doing a training session and wanted to demonstrate the consistency between today and the previous P&L post, both in money and in win rate and other stats. The credit goes to the methodology and the software tools I'm using. I'm posting not out of boastfulness but to encourage everyone to trade the real order flow not some mythical invention of people who have never traded it.