Tutorials

We played cat-and-mouse with the E-Minis and some other joy-riding favorite during this session, but you might want to just skip to the last five minutes for the payoff – a ‘camouflage’ trade in August Gold that shows in detail how one could have made hay using the three-second bar chart to buy ahead of a target culled from a chart of much larger degree.

I tell students to come to these session ready to pull the trigger, since it is only by walking the walk that we truly learn. During this class we went two-for-two, with a short in GDX and a long in the E-Mini S&Ps. Both used ‘mechanical’ entries that were signaled in real time. The latter trade could have been worth as much $300 per contract when the 2120.50 rally target was hit exactly later that morning. It’s all here in this video, down to a bar-by-bar rationalization of the trade. The recording is a must-view for webinar grads, since it contains the most finely nuanced discussion to date of the mechanical trade.

We went into this exercise knowing we’d have to force a trade if we were going to trade at all. That’s because the market was deader than a fly in amber ahead of whatever drivel was coming from the Fed at 2:00. Against the odds, we found something to almost like in June Gold’s sub-minute charts. Did we come up with a winner? Check out the last half of this recording to find out.

Once again, our focus was on the finer points of the ‘mechanical’ trade. In this case, we considered a trade in Comex Gold futures that had been recommended the night before. The entry could hardly have been smoother or simpler, with a set-it-and-forget-it bid at 1195.60 and a stop-loss at 1192.80. The futures went no lower than 1194.20 before embarking on a powerful rally that hit 1218.50. The trade could have been worth as much as $2,290 per contract -- not bad for a day’s work. At the end of this recording, there is also a detailed game plan for legging into a bullish call spread in TLT if it falls to a Hidden Pivot target at 117.75. Check it out!

How do you get short when the Dow is already down 150 points? With a bearish target that implied 100 more points of additional downside potential, that was the problem we faced at the outset of this tutorial session. A risk-averse solution came in the form of a mechanical trade, the logic of which is explored in great detail. Also covered exhaustively is the use of put options to facilitate our strategy, taking into account option “delta” values and implied volatilities. For webinar grads still unclear on how to execute a mechanical trade, this is the most intensive lesson I have recorded to date on the topic.

We continued our exploration of chart minutiae and its myriad opportunities during this session. The bottom line is that whenever there’s a big-picture trade that looks too enticing to pass up, there will be corresponding price action on the very lesser charts that will allow one to take the plunge with relatively little risk. On this day, we used a magnifying class to pore over real-time charts in some popular trading vehicles, including gold, the E-Mini S&Ps, T-Bond futures and crude oil. It was in the last that we found the most appealing prospects.

We dog-tailed May Crude to start the hour, with fruitful results. Crude can usually be counted on to produce swings that occur within 20 cents of Hidden Pivot targets. However, in keeping with our increasing emphasis on trading with the trend, we focused mainly on camouflage setups that pared theoretical entry risk to a practical minimum. We looked at June Gold as well, and even found set-ups in the E-Mini S&P, a vehicle that has grown increasingly ornery because of its strong appeals to the algos.

Using the camouflage entry technique on the one-minute chart, we initiated a long position in the E-Mini S&Ps during this session after stalking it for a few minutes. The trade could have gone either way, long or short, but the first opportunity that met our criteria came off a buy signal. The trade worked beautifully and has been captured here digitally to remind you that even when trading a vehicle as diabolical as the E-Mini S&Ps, making money needn’t be stressful.

We pondered trivia for most of this session, poring over the very lesser charts of gold, the E-Mini S&Ps and some other popular trading vehicles. The payoff was a deeper understanding not only of certain technical-defined opportunities, but of psychological ones as well. The emphasis was second-guessing ourselves, and on initiating trades that were out of our accustomed comfort zone.