Video - Tight range breakouts and position sizing

Something a little different tonight:



Alan

Scalping the news - Video

Tonight's video went over the Youtube time limit so I've cut it into 2 pieces...the first focusses on intraday short and long scalping on news plays.



Alan

Scalping the wall break

This was originally part of Friday's video but it was rejected by Youtube for being too long. I was going to abandon it but thought I'd throw it on here anyway:



Alan

My first video blog: The perfect day trade - BTA 16 Sept 2010

I mentioned the BTA dump and bounce today on Twitter. "Gimme" trades like this don't come along every day, so I thought I'd produce a video replaying the trade as it panned out.

I actually had an alert trigger in Web Iress just as I was about to buy, and the few seconds that it took to close this and click back on my buy order was enough for me to miss this trade. There were more than a few choice words heard in the office after that...luckily my son wasn't at home, or the swear jar would have had a nice little bonus!



It's my first video attempt, and the volume is a tad low, but hopefully you'll be able to hear it OK. I'd suggest viewing in "full screen" mode.

I intend to produce more videos in the future. If there is anything in particular you'd like to see let me know, and I'll see what I can do.

Alan

Set Ups: The Swing Low

If you've been following my daily Twitter Feed you will have seen me mention on many occasions, a swing low set up. I thought I'd revisit this set up and shed a little light on what I'm looking for.

This is an old example from a couple of years ago, but the set up is still relevant. The stock was HGR. You'll see it had a huge run, followed by a blow off top, and then started to dip. For 3 days it failed to make higher highs on the daily chart, culminating in the low made at Candle A.



Once HGR broke the high of Candle A, a swing low was in play. Depending on my perceived strength of the set up, I like to enter either on the 1st higher high made (ie the break of the high of Candle A), although I may wait until a break of the next resistance level above if I'm not so confident (in the above case the high of the bar preceeding Candle A).

Volume plays an important part in my decision of if and when to enter. The swing low after Candle A was ideal because:

* the volume on the dip preceeding the swing was reducing every day
* the volume on the swing low day increased compared to the previous 2 days

You'll notice HGR threw a similar set up several days later, but the swing low then couldn't go on with it and eventually failed. Notice how much lower the volume was on the bounce day after Candle B, compared to A.

Conventional technical analysis suggests setting a stop loss just below the previous low before the swing set up, for your exit (ie the low of A and B in each case), but being a short term trader mine would usually be tighter, possibly a trailing stop using support from an intraday time frame.

This swing low set up can be used across all time frames, ie it can be just as effective on a 5 minute chart as a daily. As always though, I can't emphasise enough that you must keep your losses small, and exit the trade as soon as the set up fails.

Happy trading.

Alan