You can watch the first video in the Hurst Method training series by clicking on the link or the image of the chart. (Will open in new window)

The Hurst Method shines brightly in volatile markets, especially in the intraday time frames because the trend within that time frame is so clearly defined by the Method itself. The narrator (me) is a stiff but the video has some interesting and useful information. When we say that our Hurst Method is like ethical cheating – we’re serious. You can buy it here.

I’ve done my best to convince you that when you are emini day trading, your exit strategy, on both good trades and losers, is more important than your entry strategy. If I haven’t convinced you of this one point, please go back and re-read everything on this web site a second or third time. Your success as a day trader absolutely depends on getting this concept and using it.

I’ve emphasized the fact that you’re going to need the best day trading advisor you can possibly find who has years of trading experience and also trades for a living.

Invest in some emini day trading courses. You will spend at least this much money and probably more fighting your own untrained human instincts, as well as fighting the professionals who (1) understand trader’s natural weaknesses, (2) know most of the public’s “retail” setups and hard stop placements, and (3) have deep enough pockets to ride out most of the intraday market moves.
If you’re thinking that the cost for a trading course is high, it may be that emini day trading is not for you, because financial markets are risky, and investing is risky. If you’re not willing to pay for the chance to decrease that risk, you may be training for the wrong profession.

Now here’s some general emini day trading guidelines.

1. Several of the RBI trading entries involve stepping in front of a quick, strong-looking move at just the right moment of emotional exhaustion to catch a small gain or a trend reversal. In order to avoid getting run over on these, you need to develop a sense of when the trend is so strong it’s unwise to fight it. In these situations, switch entries and use a pullback to RBI dynamic support or resistance to enter with the trend. This is one more area where experience and “Real-Time” training are valuable.

2. If you have 2 or 3 losing trades in a row, take a break from emini day trading. Get away from your computer screen and get your emotions under control. Then after 15 minutes or so when you go back to trading, remember that your former losses must have zero affect on the rest of your trading. The tendency will be to increase your risk in some way to compensate for the losses. This is a rookie mistake. A consistent approach (where you forget about hitting home runs to make up for any losses) will work in the long run. Anything that takes you away from your defensive posture (every trade starts out as a scalp until proven otherwise) will kill your success in the long run. Focus on the long run.

3. When emini day trading, keep a trading diary… at least until you’re making a profit for six consecutive months. But keep the log easily doable. A good way to do it is to mark your entries and exits on the chart you use, then copy and paste it into your journal at the end of the day with minimal comments.

4. Study your trading diary every weekend. Take notes of what works and what doesn’t. Write these notes in red on the charts so you can review them quickly at the end of each month. (Don’t make this a burden or you won’t do it.)

5. When you find an emini day trading method that works for you (mine or anyone else’s) don’t share it with anybody. A trading edge is like a magic trick in a way. If a professional magician tells the public his secrets, he’ll soon be out of work. I’ve recently taught my emini day trading method to some select traders, I’ve never done this before in 20+ years of successful trading. If my students keep this method private, it will continue to make a good living for those of us who have the discipline and the fortitude to trade it.

Support and resistance will never disappear from liquid markets, any particular way of trading a market edge can lose its effectiveness if it becomes popular. This is common sense among professional traders. Don’t give away the family farm. I’m not. My classes are small and infrequent, I won’t be teaching my RBI strategy long enough overexpose it, and the trader’s who take my classes sign a non-disclosure promising not to sell or share my trading strategy.

6. When emini day trading, write out a detailed trading plan that includes your exit strategy, all your entry setups, all your rules about maintaining discipline, and exactly what you’ll do if your discipline falters, regardless of the trade’s outcome. Do your best to rank your entry setups in order of highest probability to lowest. Gradually develop enough confidence in your best ones to increase your trading size when they show up, always keeping your risk per trade down to a tiny fraction of your overall trading account size. Whenever you make money by entering or exiting a trade outside the parameters of your trading plan, stop trading and remind yourself, “success” outside of your trading plan is poison. Failure is much better when your discipline slips! To make consistent profits emini day trading, you have to “program” your mind to work within your own strict parameters until your strategy become a natural reflex.

7. If for some reason you are under serious emotional stress, like a divorce or a death in the family, don’t trade real money when emini day trading. You’ll make your situation worse, I guarantee it. It would be like stepping into the ring with a broken arm to face a heavyweight. Wait until you are at least 80% back to normal. In the mean time, simulation trade with strict discipline… or just watch the market passively to improve your rhythm.

8. Be patient, optimistic, well-informed, and above all, persistent. Success in any business takes years… but when you arrive, you are the boss. If emini day trading is your successful business, you can move anywhere in the world (with an internet connection). You can take vacations any time. You don’t have to please customers or employees. There’s no inventory headache, no sales team to motivate and no advertising costs. And you’ll be doing work that’s often very exciting and always interesting. You’ll look forward to Monday mornings for the rest of your career. Actually, that may be the best thing about professional emini day trading.

Expect to spend 3 to 5 years before turning a consistent profit emini day trading. You can greatly shorten your learning curve by following my RBI Trader’s Updates. They give you my daily trading plan which is based on the most accurate support and resistance levels you’ll find anywhere. I’ve been publishing them to all levels of traders since 1996.

For more intense and in depth training, my week long “RBI Trading Camp” will help take your emini day trading to a new level. Click here to request more details. I’ll teach my strategy for a limited time, to a limited number of traders (for the reasons I mentioned above).

“http://www.TradeStalker.com”

By Vadim Pokhlebkin
Elliott Wave International

You don’t have to squint to see them. Watch currency market charts long enough and you’ll see them everywhere: those moments on a chart when the market first swings wide up and down, then less so, then the swings narrow even more… Then for a while it seems the market is stuck, going only sideways, until – boom! – it launches into a wild spike that takes it far, far, and away.

Triangles. That’s what Elliotticians call those contracting swings in the charts. In fact, one of the triangle patterns in Elliott wave analysis is called just that: a “contracting triangle.” It’s usually a sideways move comprised of 5 waves, A-B-C-D-E. They most commonly form in 4th waves. And when one ends, the resolution is usually sharp and swift. “Triangles appear to reflect a balance of forces,” says Prechter and Frost’s Elliott Wave Principle – Key to Market Behavior. “When a triangle occurs in the fourth wave position, wave five is sometimes swift and travels approximately the distance of the widest part of the triangle.” Here is an idealized diagram:

Read the rest of the article…

Get immediate access to all EWI’s trading articles by joining ClubEWI. There is no cost or obligation.

The majority of traders are looking for entries with a very high probability of success. Web sites and book stores are loaded with day trading advice to fill this “need.” Some of it’s pretty good entry advice. A lot of it is average, which is actually not a good thing. But good or average, if they are leading you to believe that “If you can find better entries, you’d be making money.” Than this is poor day trading advice, it’s a lie and they are taking your money and they are taking you for a ride.

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Trading Rules that Work introduces you to twenty-eight essential rules that can be shaped to fit any trading approach—whether you’re dealing in stocks, commodities, or currencies. Engaging and informative, Trading Rules that Work outlines the deeper psychology behind each of these accepted trading rules and provides you with a better understanding of how to make those rules work for you.

About 80 to 90% of price action is simply the losers liquidating their losing trades. When you begin each day, and before you place a trade, ask yourself this question: “Where is the loser?” pg 7

Well, it’s time to stop believing the lie. Stop paying for “sure thing” entry methods.

I write a market newsletter each day, giving my “game plan” for the next trading day. I’m as specific as possible including Support and Resistance levels that I will be buying and selling against, which provides you with great trade set ups nearly everyday.

I’ve been day trading futures for more than 20 years and I’ve developed a strategy that makes money consistently. I don’t promise overnight success, anyone who is really serious about wanting to learn day trading, realizes that it’s not a get rich quick profession. Yes, my method does include great entries, but most losing traders have decent entry strategies. My experienced day trading advice doesn’t focus as much on entries as it does on exits…

Offense doesn’t win this ballgame, defense does!

If you’re going to make it day trading the stock market, and actually be successful at it, you must understand why this is, and then you’ll program your reflexes to follow your knowledge.

Think of it this way…large corporations spend millions of dollars inventing boatloads of products that are worthless. But in the early stages of research and development, the company can’t tell which products will make money. If they take all their new products to market, and only a few sell, the few won’t offset the losers, and the company will go under.

Most new companies (about 95% by some estimates) fail. The same is true of traders, they want to be successful, but just don’t know how to go about it, which day trading advice should they believe, and who’s just trying to take their money .

But there is an upside to all of this, successful companies know a secret. They find a way to identify their losers in the early stages… and close the projects down quickly before losing a lot of money in the marketing process.

As James Surowiecki puts it in his book, “The Wisdom of Crowds”

“…companies place huge bets on losers all the time. What makes a system successful is its ability to recognize losers and kill them quickly.”

The same is true of stock trading strategies. Experienced professional traders place bets on losers all the time, but they know how to identify losers and kill them quickly before much (if any) money is lost.

I close bad trades well before my hard stops are hit, but anyone can do that. But, you also have to recognize your losers early. Otherwise you’ll be killing your good trades along with the bad ones.

Every successful trader I’ve met has a way of getting out early on bad trades. If you are day trading support and resistance, I can teach you how I do it. You may be able to find a way to do it on your own, but it will probably take years. I’ve been trading for more than 20 years, and publishing my day trading advice on the internet since 1996.

No matter which route you take, identifying and exiting losers is the key to trading.

I can give you day trading advice and specific trading tips to improve your entries. My strategies are time tested and I have been successful with my methods of trading for over two decades. What’s even better, I can show you intra-bar timing of your entries. And it’s true that the timing of entries affects your ability to recognize the losers before they hurt you. But it’s your ability to kill those losers quickly that really counts.

For the past 10 years Mike Reed has been writing a market newsletter each day, “The RBI Trader’s Updates“, giving his “game plan” for the next trading day.

Every professional trader I’ve seen [tag]day trading the stock market for a living[/tag] watches the SP futures charts and/or the Nasdaq futures. They do it for one specific reason and that is that Stocks lag behind the futures markets.

Stocks that track with the market indices make their moves a little bit after the futures markets move. It may be a few seconds, or only a fraction of a second, but it’s an exploitable edge that experienced traders use in their stock trading strategies.

That’s primarily why traders who are day trading the stock market subscribe to TradeStalker’s RBI Trader’s Updates. They want to know where the turns and stalls are most likely to happen on the Futures charts, so they can time their entries and exits on the stocks they’re trading.

For example, if a guy day trading the stock market holds a long position in a good tracking stock and it’s going up nicely, but he sees the SP futures jump up to a resistance zone and stall, he’s going to exit that long position, or at least part of it, before the market turns around and clips his gains.

And a break-out stock trader is going to watch the futures market, looking for a futures break out that leads the stock he’s trading.

Of course, stock traders have the disadvantage of the up-tick rule when they want to short. That’s one reason many of us prefer day trading futures rather than stocks.

But take a look at these charts below and you’ll see why [tag]day trading[/tag] the stock market with the RBI support and resistance levels on the SP futures really makes sense…

The chart on top shows the SP eminis from Friday, 8/12/05 with an RBI support / resistance level at 1236.00 (blue line) that I calculated and published to my subscribers the night before.

The bottom chart shows IBM’s one-minute chart, bar for bar, straight below it.

First take a look at the top (the big circle) on the top chart where the ES futures poke through the RBI s/r level at 1236.00 and get quickly rejected. This is a sign of weakness in the overall market. You would be hoping for another push to that same s/r level so you could short the eminis.

Now look at the second bar after the top (in the big circle) on the ES chart.

Compare that to the same candle on the IBM chart (in the big circle).

If you were trying to day trade IBM without the ES futures (and my RBI s/r levels), it looks like the pullback at that second bar is weak…

Say you’re holding IBM long. It looks like it will go higher. You would probably stick with the trade and get clobbered in the next down bar, but if you watch the futures with my support and resistance levels, you know the next bar is going to be a long fast down move. So you get out to protect your gains. Or if you’re flat , you might try to short IBM on that second bar in the big circle.

And look at that nice pullback right up to RBI resistance and the quick rejection. That gives you a high probability that the market trend is going down. So when IBM makes those two quick moves back up to the right side of the circle, one look at that area on the futures chart lets you know what’s going to happen. The futures are going to lead IBM down. Time to hold short, or get out of a long position.

Are you day trading the stock market? Without a doubt, the stock trading strategies that the experienced traders use are based on the stock index futures.

Learn day trading from Mike Reed , a 24 year experienced trader. These are the most effective futures support and resistance zones available, and you’ll get them in your email box every evening so that you can plan your trading strategy for the next trading day.

A lot of trading strategies are based on oscillators, especially [tag]stock trading strategies[/tag], but I don’t have oscillators on my charts. I prefer [tag]support and resistance trading[/tag] because it gives me:

* High probability knowledge of what will happen in the future.
* Trading setups that hold their edge in all liquid markets decade after decade.
* Logical places to exit and enter trades.
* Natural protection for hard stops.
* A sense of confidence you’ll never get from oscillators.

The problem with oscillators is they tell you what happened in the past, and they’re derived from price, so they lag the market whereas Support and Resistance Trading starts with price, and project directly into the future.

Oscillators don’t tell you very much about the future. The way most traders use them, they’re not much better than flipping a coin. For instance, in trending markets, oscillators hit the extremes and snake back and forth across the trigger lines for a long time, giving false entry signals that can drain your account if you don’t ignore them. Problem is you don’t know when to ignore them because it’s not a trending market until after the trend begins, and by then you’re in and the market’s stopping you out.

In choppy markets, oscillator entries are better, but they still get you into a trade very late in the price move, after the best part is gone. This causes “whip-saw” action that’s costly. Now, on the other hand, support and resistance trading that’s timed with the NYSE TICK gets you into trades much earlier than oscillators.

Whether you’re day trading the stock market, the eminis, stock options, stock index options, Forex, bonds, or mutual funds, support and resistance levels are always there on the charts, ready to be exploited by anyone who knows how.

I write a market newsletter each day, giving my “game plan” for the next trading day. I’m as specific as possible including Support and Resistance levels that I will be buying and selling against, which provides *you* with great trade set ups nearly everyday.

There are basically two broad categories of support and resistance:

#1. The Fixed Areas- I calculate and publish these for the SP and Nasdaq Futures every trading night using many tools such as Pivot numbers, Fibonacci numbers, previous highs and lows, areas of congestion, certain moving averages, trading channels, price symmetry and trend lines. I use multiple time frames and always look for places on the chart where different tools give me the same numbers. I call these “clusters.” I publish my fixed support and resistance areas in my TradeStalker’s RBI Trader’s Updates, along with my daily trading plan and analysis. My support and resistance numbers are probably the most accurate and effective numbers available anywhere. I’ve been trading for more than 20 years, and experience is priceless when it comes to trading.

If Support and Resistance Trading is what you’re looking for, you can check out my percentage of accuracy for FREE in the delayed RBI Updates for as long as you wish, no strings attached. Or if you’d like to receive your updates the night before in order to put my support and resistance levels to work for you, then Click Here Now to subscribe to them in “Real-Time”.

#2. Dynamic Support and Resistance.

These levels come into play during the day and give outstanding entry opportunities if you know how to trade them. Some are based on key moving averages during trending markets, others are based on chart formations, and still others are calculated with the same tools I use after market hours.

I’ll teach you how to find these dynamic areas in my trading course along with everything else I’ve been doing for the last 20+ years to make a living day trading support and resistance.

If you are looking for a day trading advisor, put my experience to work for you. For about the price of a daily Vinte Expresso, you can start your day with a precise trading plan that is straightforward and easy to put to use, receive my daily support and resistance zones for great trade locations, learn how to take advantage of the emotional swings of the market, reduce your risk, and finally day trade stock index futures (and their proxies), options, and stocks with confidence.

Mike Reed is author of TradeStalker’s RBI Trader’s Updates. He has been trading the Market for 23 years. His support and resistance numbers have been published on the internet since 1996. Mike’s nightly support and resistance zones are specific and incredibly accurate. He offers an unlimited free trial of his nightly TradeStalker RBI Trader’s Updates. “http://www.TradeStalker.com”

When [tag]day trading futures[/tag], you enter and exit all positions in the same day – never carrying a position overnight. Since the overnight moves of the market are difficult to predict, many traders avoid risk by day trading. Ironically, the public believes that [tag]day trading[/tag] is the riskiest way to trade.

THIS IS A MYTH !

Some traders day trading futures, make 1 to 3 trades per day, trying to catch the major intraday moves. Others trade in-and-out very frequently, trying to “scalp” a small profit on each trade. (My style uses a unique blend of these two strategies.)

For those day trading futures, the Emini Stock Index Futures have become the most popular day trading vehicle because of their liquidity, leverage, and the ease of trading them online. You can go short or long with equal ease – unlike stocks where it’s easier to go long than short due to the “up tick” rule.

The time relationship of the eminis (and the “big contracts”) to the cash indices is important to understand. Let’s start from square one.

The S&P 500 stock index (the cash index, symbol SPX) is central to day trading futures. It has an Exchange Traded Fund (the “Spyders,” symbol SPY) that trades like a stock, but without the “up tick” rule. The price of the S&P 500 cash index moves up and down with the 500 stocks that make up the index. The SPYders follow the S&P 500 cash index very closely. You can trade Exchange Traded Funds such as the SPY (and QQQQ for the Nasdaq 100) online from home. But for day traders, they are not as favorable as day trading futures.

The concept of “futures” is a little confusing, but it boils down to this: the financial industry has turned the S&P 500 cash index into a “contract” that trades like a stock. The contract (or futures contract) has a price that goes up and down from one moment to the next. It has a chart that looks just like stock chart, and you can make money with it by buying low and selling high, or vice versa. That’s a complicated as it needs to be for now.

The “big contracts” or SP Maxis were invented first and they’re still around. With the big contracts, a lot of money changes hands. When the price of the SP Maxis moves one point, $250 per contract moves with it. The SP Maxi contracts trade in a literal “pit” where the traders, called “locals,” shout at each other, buying and selling for everyone who wants a piece of the action.

The locals are not public servants, of course, they make money for their own accounts. They have the advantage of being able to read each other’s body language and the tone of the other trader’s voices. They see what the strongest traders in the pit are doing. They have several other advantages too, their costs per trade are tiny compared to the public’s commissions.

The “locals” aren’t born as professional traders though, they learn to trade like everyone else, except they have a huge advantage in learning as well because they learn to scalp first! Their instant access and low commissions make this possible compared to others, but those day trading futures online can take advantage of scalping trades as well.

Scalping is basically limiting your losses to only one or two ticks while taking any profit you get as you get it. It’s easier than going for several points per trade, I’ve been using this strategy day trading futures with much success.

Locals also use the spread (the difference between the bid and ask price), to grab quick profits from orders that come in on either side of the market. This makes scalping easier for them.

In the past, all these advantages made it impossible for a “retail” day trader to be a successful scalper. It was insane to try. And to this day many traders have the idea that scalping is too difficult for the public because you have to compete against traders with an unfair advantage.

But all that has changed now. If you follow some simple, yet important guidelines then you too can be successful scalping and day trading futures online.

They took the concept of the Maxi futures contracts and came up with smaller contracts (the eminis) that move $50.00 per SP point instead of $250.00. This allows all traders, big and small, to trade the stock index futures.

But even more radically, they set it up so that the smaller contracts (the eminis) are traded only through computers. This was revolutionary, they bypassed the pit, taking away the advantage of the “locals,” and leveling the playing field in a way that has never been done before. And to level the field even more, retail commission costs fell like a rock. Today, any trader day trading futures with a small account can pay $4.80 per round turn (entering and exiting a trade).

This means that scalping is open to the day trading public for the first time in history. But most people who are day trading futures don’t even realize where the new advantage really is.

Scalping is one of the keys to making a living day trading futures as I do, because I follow a simple rule: “Every trade starts out as a scalp until proven otherwise” .

The SP emini futures became more and more popular and more liquid, breaking a lot of records along the way.

The SP Maxis futures and the SP emini futures are both derived from the S&P 500 index (symbol SPX), which, as I said, has an ETF that trades like a stock (symbol SPY).

So the question is – which of these is the leader and which are followers?

Today the emini futures track the Maxi contracts almost tick for tick, with the emini’s beginning to lead the Maxi’s at times, and also “overshooting” the Maxis at emotional extremes, such as the at the top of an intraday rally.

Both the SP eminis and the SP Maxis (the futures) lead the S&P 500 cash index by a variable amount of time, often in the range of a fraction of a second. Some people call this “the tail wagging the dog,” because the futures are derivatives of the stock indices, but call it what you want, the futures are leading the way.

The fact that the futures lead the markets makes their chart patterns more “pure” and reliable for support and resistance trading. This makes a huge difference to me.

I use the stock index futures (the eminis and Maxis) for calculating daily support and resistance areas, which are the basis of my own trading style – a style of trading tat has paid my bills and built my financial security for about 20 years now.

Mike Reed is author of TradeStalker’s RBI Trader’s Updates. He has been trading the Market for 23 years. His support and resistance numbers have been published on the internet since 1996. Mike’s nightly support and resistance zones are specific and incredibly accurate. He offers an unlimited free trial of his nightly TradeStalker RBI Trader’s Updates. “http://www.TradeStalker.com”