May 02 Context Trades Note: Regarding to this day I am embarrassed of myself because of all the overtrading that was done, at this point I knew I should stop trading because I felt emotionally bad for what I had just done
Whit these the combine is finished the results are shown in the image below, in any case is important to mention that during the last two days the Trades were done with five contracts.
You are ashamed of overtrading yet you use a timeframe as fast as the 1min. It's similar to taking a junkie to do inventory at a pharmacy.
Not necesarly look at this although I am aware that 4 trades were taken, there should be only 2 and is the same bar interval.
Clean PA, not necessarily the preferred state of the 1min timeframe. It's easy when the action is clean, real question is, how clean is it really for the vast majority of the trading hours?
Given the gaps I see, I assume you're "discussing" this with a troll or trolls. There isn't much point in engaging in that as none of them has any idea what you're doing. The fact that you made a profit, which is a rare occurrence in trolldom, is enough to irritate just about all of them. I hope you're happy with this because it is excellent work. However, now the real work begins. You now have an enormous amount of data. At this point, you are in a position to sort through it and determine what it all means. For example: What are the characteristics of your winners and your losers? What makes a trade a winning trade and a losing trade a losing one? Look at the context, the depth of the retracement, the relationship of the retracement to the line it just broke. Look at the length of the bars in the retracement. What is the optimal distance for your stop? Under what conditions is a tight stop possible? Are wide stops being used as a rationale for less-than-optimal entries? (Regardless of what the guru wannabees preach, correct entries are essential; the correct entry will put you in profit immediately.) How much can price break a line and still stage a successful continuation? At what point do the probabilities shift from continuation to reversal? What do the numbers tell you about the desirability of using a wide stop and hoping for the best as opposed to using a tight one and re-entering after a failure? How many times are you allowing a trade to fail before you stop trying? Keep in mind that beginners don't have to bother with any of this. All they have to do is follow the rules. But if you're going to use this as the basis of your trading, you're going to have to reach a level of exactitude of which beginners are incapable, at least until they straighten themselves out. You want to get to a state of not having to think about your trades at all, only the executions.
Because when I started posting here and making questions to Db, was at the beginning of this year, therefore I decided to start my process (Observation phase, Backtesting and Fwd testing) from the beginning of the previous year, therefore I am still following the chronological order.
Thanks Db, with the results of the Simulated combine, I was a little bit down but I know that this is a profession where one needs to keep going forward after failures and as you say now is when the real work begins Now I understand the importance of these questions and I will try to answer all of them, also try to do something similar as the gamera's work in BM. In any case I will continue gathering parallely more information in the forward testing and sim trading but in a personal way in order to avoid all the Troll thing. Once again thank you so much to you and all those who have helped me in this journey (40D, Gringo and the others)
Put one way, backtesting is the process of determining what might work out, or what seems to work out. It can't be much more than that because the charts are static. Forwardtesting is the process of determining what does work out, if one is using replay. Simtrading is primarily a confirmation. However, not everyone forwardtests "live" charts, and if the charts used are static, or if replay charts were accelerated, the simtrading results can be quite different. Some people push on anyway to RT trading with unexpected consequences, then complain about how useless simtrading is. You, on the other hand, are in the position of knowing exactly what questions to answer and exactly what to look for. (There are also those who let the computer do the backtesting, and of course the results of RT trading are wildly different, so instead of doing the testing over again manually, they decide that backtesting is useless and start trading RT with real money instead, figuring they'll work it all out by doing it, which to a large extent is where trolls come from.) This came up yesterday after you posted your results and it provides a perfect example of what trading by price is all about (as opposed to focusing on software programs or indicators or patterns or various exotic-sounding displays, which is why I don't become involved in most threads, such as the current one on trading breakouts: we're looking at very different things). After the bell rang, there was no opportunity to enter, unless I just jumped in with a stop far wider than my risk tolerance and hoped for the best. So I waited until we hit the upper extreme so that I could catch the ride down. Price then topped, broke the DL, and fell to an extent that suggested a reversal rather than a continuation. So I waited for the retracement. This coincided with a shorter bar (the shorter the bar, the more likely traders are approaching equilibrium). So I prepared to enter a short. However, price dropped so fast, I couldn't even transmit the order, which went past my trigger instantly. Rather than chase it, I was prepared to let it go and wait for the next opportunity. But price instead had some sort of spastic reaction to all this and shot up to the retracement high. BUT. It didn't make a higher high. This suggested that traders were going to try again (the only other option was to go sideways). Now I had time to place the order, which was then triggered, in the same bar, all in less than a minute. After the RET was confirmed, price waffled around for four minutes, then plunged (that green marker is the first scale-out). And if it hadn't, so what? I'm out a point. I'll grant that it takes a while to reach this sort of understanding, but the longer one focuses on bars and lines rather than what traders are doing, the longer it will take, if one ever reaches it at all (most would be so disappointed by missing the first short op here that they'd just slump and give up and direct their attention elsewhere, missing the second short op entirely). And if one is focused on the kind of kaleidoscopic display that one gets with, for example, market profile software, it's surprising that any decisions can ever be made at all. Ever. I can go over the entire session, if you like. But not here.