Hi maydel,

Playing devils advocate with you tonight.  I don't mean to be disrespectful in anyway so, please don't take it that way.  I am the king of making mistakes.  I am not perfect, nor even close......so with that being said, let's take a look at your statements.....

I know exactly what you are saying.   My mentor always hammers on me that you get what you deserve going inside a swing with your stop.  He would know as his job is to take those positions.  I went inside on a ES trade earlier this week, collapsing risk because I was going to be gone.  It ended up costing me 30 handles per.  I knew better, but I did it anyway.  Point is, if you place your hard stops behind structure (which only was a pitance away in my case)  where price shouldn't be if the trend was to continue, you will rarely get picked off.  He states that the reason for this is that the whales orders, as well as the limit orders from the people taking profits will keep price from reaching your stop.  Anything else, and well....you get what you deserve (and I did).

I always trade with hard stops.....NO EXCEPTIONS.  Personally, I think you are playing in a fireworks factory with a blowtorch not using stops.  But, I spend more time trading in the currencies than I do anything else, and they have a tendency to move in the middle of night.  I don't like loosing capital, but, more importantly, I want to protect my mental capital, if that makes sense.  If I didn't have a stop in, and it went against me big time, I would be preoccupied with recovering my loss, and would be BLIND to what was really going on, and more than likely flat out missing a beautiful low risk opportunity one way or the other...  If I am wrong, I want to be proven wrong quickly.  So, I can see.  Again, that is just me, but you won't catch me without a stop......EVER.

When looking back at that trade, I may need to apologize a bit.  I had been stalking that long as well, and I was pretty bulled up too (bias). I was monitoring the beans on two different time frames( daily and 240 min) - another sin.   I chose to ignore the inital overshoots that were possible warning signs and didn't point them out to you.  I had switched my fork to a Mod Schiff, and it was working beautifully.  I wasn't suprised when price started running into trouble, but expected it to pop through.  Didn't happen.  My point is, when you have a bias, you are blind.  You will not see clearly.  I will also add that if you have a position, you likely have a bias, and so you cannot see.  You probably have seen it yourself when you go back to a chart a few days after the frenzy, and something just pops out at you, and you think... "you big dummy.  It's right there in front of you."  If I had just listened to price.  Case in point on the bean chart.  I was gone for a day, but when I returned home, the first thing that jumped out at me was the zoom/retest of the LML of that small fork.  We had context of sellers above, and they were aggressive enough sellers to have lowered their asks......we never even challenged the highs.  We had an upsloping fork that was screaming to you that price wasn't that strong.  Then a Hagopian, and a zoom out below the LML.  The retest was beautiful.  It would have been an awesome place to get short, and would have been instantly profitable.  So, what I am trying to stress, is that having a bias (market sentiment)  you will never "SEE" what's right there. Yeah beans are fundamentally bullish, but where they going to rally from?  15,14,13, 12........  Think of all the people that sold the equity markets all the way up because fundamentally, the economy's a joke, unemployment, etc......They might be right, but will they be around when its time to be short?  

Glad you took some cash out of the market.  Sounds like you have a great grasp of things.  We'll just have to see what they want to do next week.