+1 1. Get rid of ALL indicators. Take a fresh look at your charts and try to see what they're telling you. 2. Try to figure out how the price moves from one level to the next, particularly make note of the distance it travels with the trend and on each retrace. 3. Try not to have any bias (long or short) at the start of each day. The point is that even though you may be right about the general direction, price rarely moves in a straight line, there will always be wiggles and retraces. Rather than trying to fight these, learn how you can take advantage of them and make them work in your favor.
I usually do this every 6 month to figure out if there's any correlation with my results and the S&P returns. It's usually very small (between .2 to .38 at the highest) however right now (last two years) I'd have done much better just mirroring the S&P returns.
Yea, I can't say it's fun, however this is the mini version of this roller coaster. When I was more leveraged (beginning of this thread) the results would be at least twice as big (up and down).
Absolutely correct. that's where my trading comes short. I'm a true believer in mean reversion, so anything that trends will throw me off. Having said that, I don't really day trade, so most of my positions are swings and there's over 300 total positions, so they will always skew the results regardless if I have a bias that day or not. What I mean with that is if I put on a new trade (like when I entered UAL and YHOO [out of yahoo by the way]) both of these positions were very neutral, however there's already 300 other ones out there that will make a much bigger dent in the daily P&L and those 2 will be not noticeable.
I just actually took the time to read through this thread...most of it anyway. Gamblingman, do you really have 300 positions on ? and if yes...why ?
Most of them (270) are auto-pairs trades. Don't need to monitor much on them. I glance through them once a day to make sure nothing broke in the algo or there's no take overs/mergers but they are minimal management. They do however run for several weeks as typical swing trades, so I can't just take them off. I monitor about 30 positions which are put on manually.
And the streak continues. I entered a couple new orders this morning and turned my computer off when I realized it's just another roar up day. My issue is that once I realize that an hour into the trading day, the market really didn't move any more but hung around 2 S&P points. I guess we're back to buying everything. Only position that saved me was short bonds, at least those guys caved for once. Unfortunately my auto-trades also sucked and accounted for most of today's losses. Here are today's results: Auto Trades: -3003 Everything else: -780
When I was looking for a picture that expressed my thoughts today I ended up seeing this one. As I click on it, the link goes to a book page. Funny that even this book is finance related. So many thoughts that go through my head, however it all comes down to this. I'm already down 10k for this week. Today was a pretty bad day. My Auto trades were short HD (which blew through the earnings like it cured Ebola) and long RDEN (Another big earnings loser). In general I must be the last short out there cause the way the market moves it can rally up without any pull backs (2 points in the S&P feel like a mini crash, they just keep moving up and away). I'm back to hedging my shorts and can barely keep up with the hedging, as my P&L shows. I'm basically back to where I started this year with nothing to show for. No fear, whoever heard quotes like "be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful" must no longer be involved, seems like those quotes are turned on their head now. Buy when others are greedy and sell it 10 points higher the next day. dotcom 2.0. Here are today's results: Auto Trades: -1170 Everything else: -6096
Seems to me that the markets rally & you lose money. Why not cut the trade size on short trades by 75% ? Or just trade on the long side ....?