I have made approximately 147 trades in this tiny, but funded with real currency, trading account since November 11, 2018. The first 20 or so trades did not go all that well, but the second 20 took off like gangbusters and everything was looking extremely positive. However, since then, it has all been in decline until today (or more like yesterday). Today's results: I resumed this particular quest on November 11th base on the belief that all my “fooling around” was over, thereby making it worthwhile to initiate a second “pilot study” after suspending the first to look into newly imagined possibilities. But the fact of the matter is that even though this system is probably 90-99% fully developed, a number of ideas occurred to me since my 43rd trade that led to my “fooling around” a little bit more. Chief among them was the development on Saturday of an offshoot of my Numerical Price Prediction system which I am calling Dynamic Probability Trading. Subsequent testing has led me to resolve to never abandon the use of the associated chart setup, but to merely add any future developments to the growing arsenal of tools that might become available to me. Moreover, the 1-10% of “fooling around” I have done since my 43rd trade appears to be, upon deeper analysis, essentially a reshuffling of how I was using tools and principles already employed in the past—more like modifications in implementation rather than any real changes to the system. I am therefore hopeful that the decline I experienced this last week will, in the end, prove to be nothing more than a momentary setback resulting from my taking the time to figure out how to do what I was already doing, but do it even better, so that now with my hopefully having completed this process, I can resume the performance I enjoyed from trade 20 to trade 43, and perhaps resume it with even greater efficiency and effectiveness.
At this point I have not made any progress toward reaching my goal of doubling my initial $100 account. I chalk this up to my having been continuing to experiment with what I was doing, but that essentially ended yesterday. My efforts have culminated in a so-called “triple zone” strategy, with the resulting pseudo-swing trade system so far delivering a largest profit trade more than double my largest loss trade—the opposite of past performance. Moreover, the ratio of average profit trade to average loss trade is at this point almost 1:1. However, my daily success rate dropped down to approximately 67%, but as I finalize the guidelines for using the system, I should hopefully be able to get that back up to well above 80%, and perhaps even as high as 90%+. This is especially likely given that the ability of this system to return a gain of $5 or more from a single trade means that, theoretically at least, I might potentially have the power to be extremely selective in terms of the trade opportunities I opt to act on, selecting only those with the highest probability of ending with success, with the greatest potential returns per trade. This should also make it possible to do multiple times better than the 1.8% daily profit benchmark.
Professionals can’t make 1.8% monthly and you say daily. Just because you made that return a few months doesn’t mean it’s repeatable annually. Btw paper trading doesn’t count ...
This experiment was suspended when I opted to continued working on my system due to a nagging suspicion that it could be made better. These efforts were completed in March of this year, but I no longer have the free time to trade diligently, so I am debating whether to resume full-time trading via OANDA in September, when I am finally finished with a project I committed to last year, or to get started sooner via NADEX upon my next influx of funds sometime between now and June. Trading through NADEX would not demand the time that would be required to implement the system properly using a traditional broker like OANDA. But the way that NADEX is set up would make it necessary for me to purchase 20-minute in-the-money binary option contracts at a ridiculous 2:8 reward-to-risk ratio. On the positive side, my win rate would be nearly 100% if I continue to maintain the level of success that has been typical in the past. At the moment however, I am still of the opinion that I should refrain from making this choice, at least for the time being. Also, I would be starting with an initial balance of far less than $8000, making it impossible to abide by the 1% rule for managing risk. I will therefore continue to trade 20-minute binary options in my NADEX demo account, and if at some point I conclude that what I observe in terms of the price action displayed by the major stock market indices manages to somehow mitigate the folly of setting aside standard cautionary practices, I might give it a shot. Otherwise, I will just have to be patient and wait until September.
Yesterday's balance I'm finding that things are a bit different trading via Nadex now that 5- and 20-minute binary options are a part of my repertoire—choices that were previously sources of regular losses as opposed to consistent wins. This means I now have many more trade opportunities than I did before—a lot more than I actually or really need. Consequently, I think what I'm going to begin doing is evaluating which type of situations constitute the absolute surest trades, and define them in precise terms. Then, should I eventually decide to go ahead and defy conventional wisdom, I will only enter positions when circumstances match the descriptions that come out of the above analysis. Today's balance two hours into the New York session
At this point, here is the situation that appears to me to offer the surest opportunity to execute successful trades—a black, red, blue reversal in partnership with one-hour in-the-money binary option contracts: