The markets seemed quite dicey today with a gap down and then very strong bars to start off with.  It always makes it difficult to gauge market sentiment when the market opens like this.  It’s days like this that make me glad that I mostly ignore the overall market action.

I know a lot of traders worry about the overall market and which way it seems to be leaning and trade accordingly.  Unless the market trend is completely obvious, I mostly ignore it and simply take the setups that I see.  I used to watch indicators to try to gauge the market, but I found I almost always either overtraded or undertraded when I did that.  If the market seemed to be trending up, I would feel like I needed to get on board and would overtrade.  If I saw a perfectly good setup that seemed to be contrary to market action I would ignore it only to see it turn into what would have been a great trade.

Perhaps I could squeeze another R or two out of my system if I did things differently, but I’m perfectly content at this point letting the market do what it wants - I’m just watching for setups.  I’ll repeat, though, that when the overall market trend is completely obvious, that will weigh into my decision, but less than you probably think.

I’d like to hear how other traders handle overall market action as it pertains to trading their setups.

On to my one trade today.  It was a boring day, really.  Only two setups that even had a chance to materialize: SIGM and CWTR.  I halfheartedly traded CWTR and it turned out well (almost 3R).  I entered off the 10 minute charts which I’m becoming more and more comfortable with.  Hope you had a good day!

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