Today, we have two videos for you. The first walks through Crude Oil futures trading from today's session (12/18/08) -- it has some good examples of filtering out trades where the risk:reward is below 1 to 1. In addition, there's a discussion of count-trend trading against the Directional Indicator and a few points to consider on those trades that put the odds more in your favor.

http://www.netpicksllc.com/walkthroughs/1218CL.html

Our forex walk-through takes you through the last week trading the EURUSD on the 144 tick timeframe, U.S. market hours. This is more active scalp type timframe, and of course, you can even speed it up further but an issue you have to weigh on forex is making sure your spread doesn't become too large of a percentage of your potential profits. We'll also discuss the 3x target possibilities, several optional re-entry trades and run up against the same counter-trend trades and lower than 1:1 trades we saw on the Crude. This will help you know what to do in these situations:

http://www.netpicksllc.com/walkthroughs/1218EURUSD.html

To visualize, here's an example where the initial set-up bar reward to risk is below 1:1. Those are set-up bars we would "toss out" -- it makes no sense to go into a trade that starts below 1:1 on the reward to risk. However, you can just wait for another valid set-up, which many times in these situations will occur on the next bar or just a handful thereafter. Then, like you see in this graphic below, you can use that with its more favorable reward to risk -- in this case the reward was greater than the risk and we used that as our entry Now, there will be times the trade will "trigger" and from that point you've missed it -- many times though we've seen these type of trades have a lower success rate and even if it succeeds without you onboard, you'll know it was smarter trading to pass on it given the context of the set-up.