Live Trading System Results on March 15, 2024

The market continued with its high frequency bucket shop trading style today in the stock indexes. The 250K Portfolio was down -2.30%. We are down -4.65% on the month and are pausing for the quarter. So far, trading this year has been really tough and down almost -15%. March looked like it would resume with more trends after a favorable start. We have been focused on the markets that have been the most profitable for us the last few years. There are easier and better markets to trade and focus on right now.

There are some positive setups to work with in our strategies and in other markets. I am pausing live trading to find the best setups for us to trade in Q2 and to re-group. The metals are still at the top of our list as Silver was a highlight today and this week. Crude Oil looks like it could become the next hot market as it continues to move higher in a more stealth pattern and may breakout of this range soon. Our day trade strategies such as the SR CounterTrends did well today. Crude Swing has also been on a roll buying the dips.

Copper could start to breakout. If AI is in charge, maybe the trends are alphabetical and we are on the "C's" now. Cocoa has had a massive runup and outperformed NVDA on pure trend and was up almost 10% today, more than doubling on the year.

Copper and Crude Oil could be next. Inflation could re-emerge with recent economic data and commodity prices creeping higher.

We were up on the month as of Monday but we have endured four days in a row with the type of trading that we saw in February that made for a challenging and exhausting week. Many hours of research from 10 tick charts, 15 second charts, Renko charts, daily charts, etc. on the Nasdaq futures for the current market but finding very few patterns that are tradeable. Some of the patterns that do work well the last 3 - 24 months are based on VWAP, and do not work prior to 2022, while the longer-term patterns we have seen work for many years have struggled the last couple of months.

We have been in bigger drawdowns before but the stock indexes are trading differently now. The market internals are not correlated with the E-mini S&P and E-mini Nasdaq and there are many factors I believe that have distorted prices. The VIX remains unusually low with ranges similar to 2017. The VIX was down on the week.

Let's wait for a pullback in the stock indexes to wash out some of this liquidity and bring back some tone to this market as well as correlated market internals before we trade multiple stock index strategies. It would be great to see the dip buyers get deleveraged and more of a two-sided market.

30 minutes before the day session started the Nasdaq started a 200+ point sell off that last about an hour and extend into the day session. After 10:07 am, the market traded in an increasingly narrower range. We did not get a Friday resolution trend into the weekend after a choppy week. The entire net selling was done about 17 minutes into the open as the close of the day was at the same level as 17 minutes into the open of the session.

The Nasdaq strategies were stopped out on longs and shorts today as all 3 V-Reversals were stopped out. Viper did not trade. Gap Continuation took a short and was stopped out. Some of our best long-term strategies are struggling in this unusual day trade environment.

For Q2, I anticipate we will have 1-2 E-mini S&P strategies and 1-2 Nasdaq strategies at most while expanding to other markets slowly while we wait for the stock indexes to become easier to trade intra-day.