Tutorials

We found no timely trading opportunities during this session, but as usual, the effort spent was rewarded with yet more trading insights. Pay particular attention to the segment involving AMZN, since the stock presents formidable hurdles for anyone who would attempt to day-trade it with entry risk under tight control. Buy- or sell-stop entries are not usually available to us because the stock jumps around too much to allow them to work efficiently. Even so, there’s a workaround here that will be of interest to those of you who want to bag your daily dollar quota quickly and with just one trade.

We spent the hour scrounging for crumbs as the broad averages, driven by short-covering, reversed off menacing overnight lows. Even so, there were useful things to plot and observe, including a few 'mechanical' set-ups in some popular trading vehicles including TSLA, AMZN and MSFT.

/vimeo.com">Vimeo. Once again, we stalked AMZN to prove that it’s possible to get comfortable scalp-trading a thousand-dollar stock. This will necessarily entail using ‘mechanical’ bids on the very lesser charts, but this should present no particular problems for anyone who has attempted longer-term trades using the same tactic.

This session is a must-view for Pivoteers who want to be on the cutting edge of ‘mechanical’ trading. We stalked Amazon, a stock that demands mechanical entries because it is too squirrelly for buy- or sell-stop orders. Our goal was to zoom down to a time frame that would allow a mechanical set-up. Follow the process step-by-step in this recording and you’ll have a technique that will work for you whenever you are trading.

This session was the equivalent of a tapas menu, with some small but appetizing selections that were better savored than consumed. We found nothing to trade in real time, but there were a few potential opportunities for later. As always, pondering trade setups we’d never seen before was a useful feature of the lesson.

Although we found no real-time trading opportunities during this session, there were some promising set-ups in a few high-fliers, including NFLX and AMZN. The best of the lot was in VXX, where a very gnarly ABC pattern looked likely to provide the sort of leveraged play we look for in this vehicle. I subsequently posted it to The Scoreboard and the trade was still pending at the end of Wednesday’s session. Check it out if you’re keen on doing the trade, or even if you just want to see what a good set-up requiring a little patience looks like.

Another dull day had us looking harder than ever for good trading opportunities. What we found may have been unrewarding from that standpoint. However, the session was interesting nonetheless for the insights it gave us into the subtle ways we can use Hidden Pivots to understand and exploit price action even when it is at its most difficult. There are a few classroom gems here. See if you don't agree.

Earlier in the day, an obviously frustrated chat-roomer had pronounced the E-Mini S&Ps 'impossible' to trade. To be sure, they are often trendless and always diabolical, but that hardly makes them untradable -- especially when it's possible to discern what our competitors are thinking. If you doubt this can be done, and relatively easily, check out the well-reasoned, manifestly successful 'counterintuitive' trade here which was initiated amidst a quite boring day on Wall Street.

We looked at several trade set-ups that failed to trigger during our hour together, but the process of identifying these opportunities made the time well spent. Specifically, we considered some subtle mechanical set-ups, and we even bent the rules to give us a trigger for a ‘counterintuitive’ entry where the point ‘C’ low of a rally was below ‘A’.