Maintenance Mode

One of the lessons learned about system development over the past decade or so has been that the holy grail, if there is any such thing in the trading racket, is not to be found on the entry but rather on the campaign management side.

Which is a perspective rarely shared among novice system developers who almost instinctively focus on finding exotic alpha factors with the premise of nailing perfect entries.

But in truth even if you do manage to grab an almost prefect entry (i.e. nailing a long term spike low or spike high), the real work has just begun, for you may still be robbed of much ill-gotten gain during an ensuing whipsaw, or perhaps miss out on the meat of an extended run higher by taking profits way too early.

I frankly could go on for hours on this topic drilling into minute details and as a matter of fact I have over the past years. But theory is one thing and the more casual reader as well as I myself usually prefer to see real live examples.

Which I serve up on a daily basis, mind you, via the campaign management techniques employed along the discretionary campaigns posted here.

The reason I bring this up is that over the course of my trading career I increasingly started to differentiate between hibernation, entry, and maintenance periods. One would think that they mostly overlap given the broad selection of markets at our disposal.

But strangely reality seems to be coming into focus across various market verticals at similar moments. And while last week was most definitely the time to strike, this week is now shifting us into more of a maintenance regime.

The E-Mini seems to be ready for a little shake and a retest may bring us back to the ES 2690 or lower. I’ve decided to recede my trail back to < 2680 as I would like to ride this horse all the way, assuming of course there is more bullish tape across the horizon.

Bitcoin is slowly getting out of the gate but we are far from out of the woods here. Keeping my ISL where it’s been – nothing to do here.

Patience is indeed a virtue when it comes to trading. Unless you’re on a margin call 😉

Gold has been rather uncooperative over the past few days and I just got stopped out, fortunately this time at break/even. I may consider a re-entry here if it paints a juicy spike low later today.

Which is why I’m happy I had enough foresight to spread my precious metals exposure across both gold and silver.

The latter has been running like gangbusters and my current trail has been elevated to roughly 2.5R. Perhaps there is more to come, but a shake out now appears to be on the roster.

Similarly copper has been on a tear all week and I was lucky enough to nail what one may consider the perfect entry.

But proper trailing here is now becoming a factor and I decided to err on the conservative side as the daily formation suggests continuation after a shake out.

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