It's been another exciting week in the markets. Last Friday, the CiG trade sent up a buy signal on S&P Futures. At the close, I dutifully bought at 1297. Monday morning, all looked well as the market opened nearly unchanged and immediately rallied a couple points; that would prove to be the best price this position would ever see. It fell the rest of the day, closing at 1285.25, a loss of $587.50/contract. Tuesday looked great for a while, accelerating upward overnight to 1292 and reaching a high of 1295.5 - only a $75/contract loss - before giving it all back again in the last 2 hours of trading, ultimately closing at 1284.50, down another $50 from the previous day. Wednesday was uneventful but painful, opening at 1282.25 and closing at 1277.5 - total per-contract loss: $975, ouch. But then something interesting happened. Another buy signal came along, this one on Russell 2000 Futures, giving me a decision to make.
In a previous trade a few weeks ago, I found myself in a similar situation: S&P had continued to move down for a couple days after initiating a position, costing me losses and threatening my stop-loss; then Russell signaled. In that previous trade, I elected not to take the second entry signal, reasoning that in a real money account I probably wouldn't have or wouldn't care to risk additional margin on what I knew to be a highly correlated market. That time, I watched as the Russell rocketed up the next day - I think I ended up scratching the S&P position, and missed a $1500 winner in the Russell. After thinking about it some, I realized that a secondary entry like that is an even stronger signal. CiG is a mean-reversion trade, entering a buy order when the market has sold down too much. When it moves down even further, even more correctional pressure builds up, indicating a higher probability of the market returning to (or near) its previous range.
Or else it's the beginning of a downtrend, and your position is doomed - you never can tell which.
Since I try to learn from my trading mistakes (my many, many trading mistakes), this time I decided to take that secondary signal. I bought Russell Futures at the Wednesday close for 787. Thursday was the corrective rally I'd been looking for, with Russell reaching a high of 796.70, and S&P a high of 1294. When it was clear I was seeing my rally, I changed my stop-losses into trailing stops so that I wouldn't have to babysit the position (I do have work to do, after all). When the market started to sell off hard after 2:00pm, both of my trailing stops exited me from the trade at better prices than if I had waited for the close: 1289.50 for the S&P ($375/contract loss), and 794.10 for the Russell ($710/contract profit).
NeighborTrader pointed out that technically there was no exit signal in either product, and he's right. But it was clear to me that the corrective rally had come and gone - staying in the trade any longer was asking for trouble, in my opinion. Sure enough, Friday was another down day, with the S&P and Russell closing at 1269.75 and 779, respectively - representing a total stop-constrained loss of over $2000/contract.
I'll take a $365 profit while avoiding a $2000 loss any day, won't you?
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