Trading Day Recap - Tuesday, 4/29/25

I did not take a trade the last two days. Mainly because my primary or secondary Edge did not appear during trading hours. We had a nice V shaped price move in the indices yesterday - Monday - and a rally in the market with retracements today, none of which fit my trading criteria.

But on reflecting on the charts the last two days there were ample opportunities to make money. Should we as traders then only be satisfied with the one or two Edges at our disposal or should we be constantly working to find new new money making opportunities in the market?

The latter of course.

I had posted this article below on here sometime back that I had found on the web a decade ago and from time to time I like to go back to some of the writings I have collected over the years and pore over them to see if I discover anything new.

This excerpt below especially struck me as it has in the past.

Trading is about being okay with ambiguity. It's about tolerating confusion. It's about sitting with discomfort and being at peace with it. It's about not having an exact script of when to trade or not to trade, or what's really a high odds trade, and being okay with that. It's about exceptions to the rules. It's about contradiction. It's about uncertainty…The bottom line is, every trader needs to learn to READ the markets. There has to be a synthesis of different elements (whether they be price action, indicators, inter-market themes or whatever), and real-time interpretation must take place. It has to be all about CONTEXT. Once you can read the markets, and don't fool yourself it is a very complex process, then you can choose to employ your Edge to enter and exit.

In bold, it is all about trying to read the markets and trying to figure out why a move is happening. Yesterday, why did the ES sell off to 5494 and then catch a bid in the afternoon? Today, why did the market slowly drift upwards even though sellers kept pushing price down from overnight price highs?

A curiousity about the market and an understanding and acceptance of probability is the minimum that is required to graduate to the next level of having a sense of what the market is going to do. Of course, you and I do not know what price will do going forward but sticking with charts, making note of repeating patterns, adding economic news to see how it influences price is the the way to be to see what the market is attempting to do.

Even when waiting for our personal Edge to form it is always better to have a general sense of what you think are the external forces on the market. Again, there can be many pieces of information that can cause confusion to the trader, but only putting in the work day after day will the trader gain the experience and confidence to read the market and more importantly execute on his thesis.

I hope you have been trading slowly and deliberately.