Trading, like any profession, is a process of continuous improvement.
Every trade you put on is an opportunity to learn something. Whether by adjusting current strategies or formulating new ones, you discern as best you can what works and what doesn’t. And through trial-and-error, you arrive at something that works.
Even after 30 years, I’m constantly thinking about what I do and how I do it.
As you progress, you keep in mind that no strategy is perfect. Like Teddy Roosevelt once said, “there is no effort without error and shortcoming.” Unless your trading profits come effortlessly, there is always an imperative to perpetually adapt.
You never land on a final, all inclusive, “this is it” strategy. As a trader, you just ride a wave by adjusting.
I’ve adjusted my philosophy on how markets work (they are not rational). I threw away the notion that there is such a thing as “objective price” – there isn’t.
Heck, I’ve tossed away 10 times as many ideas as I’ve kept.
But nothing has had as big an impact on my trading results as giving one of those “tossed away” methods a second look.
Early to Rise My first job in financial markets was as a runner on the Chicago Board of Trade.
I took orders from the bank of phones surrounding the pits and ran them to whichever trader was working the order.
But the pay wasn’t good. I made $7.50 an hour for 30 hours a week. Suffice it to say, there were gaps in my budget.
One way I plugged that gap was by working for a floor trader before the market open to help him craft his daily alert for clients.
I showed up at the desk at 4:30 in the morning and poured through chart after chart of what was then called Steidlmayer charts after its inventor, J. Peter Steidlmayer. They look like this.
Every letter represents a trade at a price during a specific period – say every 30 minutes. Trading at that same price within that 30-minute timeframe doesn’t change the chart. But when a trade happens at the same price during another 30-minute window, that trade stacks up next to the previous one.
Eventually, a distribution of trading emerges that indicates more trading at some prices (usually with the most happening near the middle of the range) and less at others. The core assumption being that, over time, that distribution of trades would look like a bell curve.
Grains, cattle, lumber, bonds, equites – it didn’t matter. We would look at almost any futures contract for opportunities in the shape of bell curves to point out to his clients.
It was a great learning opportunity. However, as I spent more time in the markets, I felt it missed something. Price is only half the information contained in a trade. Equally as important is volume. And Steidlmayer’s method (later renamed Market Profile) missed that vital piece.
But time and technology, as it tends to do, cured that deficiency in a new charting system. The Steidlmayer system I learned nearly three decades ago has had an upgrade. It now maps volume and trade price. So, it reflects all the information contained in a trade.
Plugging the gap between trade price and volume gave me an opportunity to grow and adapt.
And it has allowed me to take even more of what the market gives me than I ever thought possible.
That Last Step Was a Big One A year ago, I started playing with the new method. But it wasn’t until December that I turned it into a full-blown process.
Since then, this approach has helped me generate a 1,400% return across 77 trades with a nearly 60% success ratio. And tomorrow,
I want to share that process with you. Tomorrow, Saturday, June 25th @ 8pm, I’ll be doing a walk through and explaining how I use it to spot trading opportunities.
You’ll get to see first-hand, how — at its core — my process is driven by bell curve distributions.
Click here to reserve your spot and I’ll send you a reminder just before I go live.
Take what the markets give you.
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