Today is Monday March 16th and I posted another good day on the e-minis.

While Trading the S&P e-minis today, I called out the short term top in the market before it happened. You can hear me make the call before it happens exactly at the the high of the day. Then you can hear me make the call, on how we will be pulling back from that high point down to lower levels. At the close of the day, the S&P pulled back off of my short term target, by 20 points. That is a lot in two hours, with the Dow off 190 points.

This is going to lay the ground work for a continued pull back. I suspect that, at the open, we will get a small reactionary rally, but I would definitely be watching for short trades. We have had some technical damage and the path of least resistance should be to the downside.

With this being said, the market can do anything it wants at any time, there is no guarantees. All I can tell you is that when I see a pattern like the one I am looking at right now, a pull back is what usually follows. I will be watching for short trade setups and will stagger some of my exits. That does not mean all of them. I always watch price action to tell me what to do and that is what I will be doing.

I try to not have a strong bias for direction too far in advance, but it is something I will be looking at. It may be that the big sell off does not come until the afternoon session, or it could come early on. Price action is what will influence my decisions at that time. I only lay this out for you because I am looking at the daily chart, just like I am looking at a 5 minute chart or tick chart for that matter. The price action is the same and currently looks bearish.

The day was really pretty smooth. I had the time to trade, so I just kept at it. I started out with some nice gains and within a few minutes I had my daily goal. I cut my size back but kept on trading and added to earlier gains. I mostly traded small all day, 2’s and 3’s were the most common contract size. If I had some draw downs it was not going to eat into earlier gains with the small size. I did have some good runners today and captured some of them on video below, so be sure to take a look.

There are different ways to approach the trading market based on price action. If we are in a choppy market and you are trying to go for bigger moves, you are going to struggle. One way that I overcome some of that is to first identify what kind of market we are in. If its choppy, don’t even think about going for more than 4-6 ticks. You will have another trade in just a couple of minutes to capture additional profit. If in a trending market, you can set yourself up for a few more ticks, but you have to know how to play it and not get greedy.

Again, in today’s market, I had quit a few of these. If you have the time, take a look. If short on time, you can always come back later. The bottom line is that I try to get myself in a break even situation first, then a small gain, locked in. After that, if the market runs, it’s all gravy.  By only trading small, I was still able to post some nice gains because of the runners.

I closed out a long position that I got stuck with over the week end for a profit of several points. That gain did not count towards today’s numbers below. Today, I took 32 trades, 25 gainers and 7 losers and my total scaled out percentage was 77%. The total equity gain for the day was just a little under $2,500 dollars on mostly small size.

During a couple of the videos I am calling the intermediate term direction and as the next video progresses you can see it come to pass. We hit the short term top in the market today and pulled back 20 points, take a look.

http://www.screencast.com/t/oPiqTiFG6              Today’s equity chart

http://www.screencast.com/t/P9iiuTUPd              Some of  Today’s Live Trades

http://www.screencast.com/t/Bna8H6Oe              Some of  Today’s Live Trades

http://www.screencast.com/t/NAik15UUR           Some of  Today’s Live Trades

http://www.screencast.com/t/y7YeoTIZC            Some of  Today’s Live Trades