The market opened with two sideways bars on bar 1 and 2. After that, we got a nice bull follow-through bar, so I took the bull breakout. The trade struggled to go higher pretty quickly, and with the PMI news coming up, I was already a bit uneasy about how this would play out.

Price then pulled back, and I eventually took the trade off for -15 pts. The market took me out by about 1.25 pts, and then of course it immediately started to reverse back up. Sometimes it really feels like the market knows exactly where my stop is 🙂

When price pushed back into the middle of the range, there was a lot of volatility, most likely due to news. After that burst of volatility, the market turned back up, ran to the high of day, and eventually broke out of the range.

It did form a BOPB during that move, but I wasn’t ready to trust the bulls again yet.

The bulls then made two measured legs up and even overshot the second leg a bit. After that, price formed a LH double top. We then got what looked like a LH MTR after a possible failed breakout by the bulls. In real time, that setup was very hard to trust. In hindsight, it would have worked nicely, and price did drop back down into the range.

That move stalled around the middle of the range and then reversed back up toward the range high again. This made it difficult for me to get involved on the long side, since there was still a good chance we could get another measured leg down toward the bottom of the range.

After stalling again at the EMA and the top of the range, price finally dropped down and started moving toward the measured move of the bear leg. It did in fact hit the measured move, and also reached the Globex low and the bottom of the range. So the read was good — I just didn’t fully trust it in real time. I clearly gave the bulls too much respect for being strong in what was really a trading range environment.

Overall, a very difficult day. Even though in hindsight this was a very textbook trading range — two legs up, a failed breakout, and two legs down to the bottom of the range — it was not easy at all to trust and execute in real time.