Trading System Signals on 01/05/2024

The 250K Portfolio live trading results were -$4,100. Natural Gas long on SR CountTrend was a highlight on the day. My platform crashed mid-day as well to add to the frustration and automation errors.

The Stock Index Portfolio 27 E-mini was down - $2,535.00

The Stock Index Portfolio 27 Micro was down -$253.50

It was a very difficult first week of trading for 2024. I'm very disappointed and frustrated with the results. The price action seemed/felt intentionally vindictive with so many reversals against our net position as we have been out of sync with the market during this holiday shortened week.

We are down about -4.6% to start the week, month, year.  January 2023 was one of our best months last year so we wanted to be pro-active and step in here. It was a holiday shortened week so we look forward to next week for a full 5 day trading week (before another holiday shortened week the following week) but will limit our risk to 2% or 5k before pausing again since we are at the worse case drawdown levels in the hypotheticals (we waited for a drawdown to start live trading) for the portfolio.

We start live trading during hypothetical drawdowns to manage worse case drawdowns. We have struggled to get as much out of sample performance lately in this low VIX environment. There have been a high percentage of choppy days. We see markets pop and run away from limit orders (for profit targets) while anxiously chasing down stop losses.

We've seen markets return to more "normal" price action as the calendar changes and we wanted to step in at the beginning of the year.

The constant prop up related to downtrends that we have seen since mid 2022 is sticking around so far in 2024. It's not reasonable price action and you can see the human bias of bulls with excess liquidity and endless churning at the lows of the day before the markets pop higher. Even in strong bull markets, you get distribution days. Historically markets "breathe" a little more. We continue to take long day trades when the opportunity presents itself, but a good wash out would make the market more honest.

While we continue to see a strong trend on daily charts, intra-day price action is at its choppiest levels. We saw 12 days in December where the Nasdaq had higher lows. We have now seen about 7 days in a row of lower highs.

Here is a chart of the E-mini S&P futures, the last 3 trading days - intra-day price action.

My research in other markets continues. Lean Hogs has had some nice price action this week. Euro Currency and Japanese Yen also look like more favorable markets when using the Commitment of Traders Report in the strategy development. If indexes remain difficult, we will reduce our exposure and take our liquidity to other markets.