5 min YM.

It never rains in Southern California... except when it does, as it is doing now and has been doing for the past 3-4 days. Last night totally sucked. It was the hardest rain yet, and we have this balcony railing outside the bedroom that gets hit by the gutter falloff. We had that ring ding cling clanging going on all night. The smoke alarm outside the kitchen started humming, too. I woke up a couple times to figure out what that was about. Somehow a little water was leaking into it from the ceiling (how? I'm afraid to find out) and shorting it out, so I uninstalled it. Finally, our power went out and reset the alarm clock, so I woke up late. Only saving grace was that the baby slept soundly through it all for an amazing 13 straight hours.

Anyway, the YM had a very tradable range again today. The follow-through was not as good as yesterday. Again, there were too many times my quick scalp target of +4 was hit, my stoploss was auto-moved to b/e +1, then that was taken out a second later. I'll have to work on a new revision of my trading plan by the weekend. The all-in, all-out strategy seems to be better if the market is tight and I'm going to scalps. Going for a tiny scalp and hoping for a successful runner are opposing strategies that are tough to combine. The other point is if the market continues its recent volatility and good moves (let's hope so), the scalp strategy isn't necessary and I needn't have a preset target at all. Just let CCI take me out on an exit signal. I have to be nimble enough to adapt to and adopt the proper strategy for each day, and not just approach each morning with the same cookie cutter mindset.

Again, I watched the 2 and 5 min YM mostly, paying no attention to the 8 and 13 min charts. The 5 min has given a good number of setups the past couple days, so I've looked to that first, then to the 2 min for a corresponding signal and more defined entry. With the 2 min, it's fast enough to just take the signal regardless of where you are in the bar. No muss or fuss wondering if I should wait for the bar to close, or wait for 20 seconds are left or whatever. I stayed on the 5 min for monitoring. Exiting with proper CCI exits on the 5 min is the goal for now. That didn't happen too much today as my runners were stopped out prematurely. Fix that and I'm golden and happy.

Woodie will be releasing his "sidewinder" indicator soon which he touts as an effective range indicator. It'll just be a number (-75 to +75 indicates a flat market so sit on your hands, > +75 means safe to take long signals, < -75 means safe to take short signals). There's a West Palm Beach trade-a-long next week. Guess it'll debut there, and then the rest of us get it. So there's something new to add to the pot. I've been trying out the Herrick Payoff Index on the bottom of my charts with zero impact on my decision making.