Keep on withdrawing my friend. Put the money in saving. You will thank me when you are able to do your 2013 tax return and claim your losses from 2012. PA
And here is another observation, Pekelo has no business advising anyone on trading. http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=113413&perpage=30&pagenumber=2
i want to say the following. i totally understand the desire to earn money via trading. Neke indicated several times that he actually needs the trading profits to maintain his and his kids' lifestyle and education. However, let me just paint a picture of how your life could actually improve without the trading. Current situation: * Neke seems to work pretty hard on his strategies and automation, besides his day job, and on weekends. * he is under a lot of stress and time pressure * he spends less time with his kids than he wishes to * the money is still melting quickly, despite the efforts in trading. Now, by simply stopping the trading, you can improve the following: 1. Kid's education: private school may be nice and well (depends where you live), but if you actually spend the evenings and weekends with your kids, they may benefit way more! They will not become clueless dummies if their dad explains them things! Private school on the other hand is not a guarantee for anything, i think. 2. Job: i guess your performance at the job is not ideal if you have constantly to worry about your strategies and the market. Remoting into your system is perhaps even against the company rules, and for sure it must be highly distracting. If you could focus more on your actual job, you might be way more productive, way more pleasant to work with, and you might actually get raises or bonuses beyond what is possible for you now. Also if you are into computing and finance, why don't you make it your main job at some trading company? Either you are good enough, then you can join them, or you are not.... but then better not try to compete against them either. Just my view. 3. Money: well, it looks like stopping the trading will also improve your money situation, because you would stop losing large sums on a regular basis. All in all, your life could improve if you give up trading. At least you would have more control of it again, i think. Of course the downside is that you would then give up a dream, and the remote possibility of making it big with trading after all, and despite all the doubters. Perhaps you have considered these things already, but i just wanted to drop by. F.
No, the opposite trader would have been down as much as I am. That was the point I was trying to illustrate assuming slippage of 25K. Code: Fair Gross P/L 0.00 Commission (19K) Slippage (25K) -------- Net (44K) Taking the opposite side of my trade means buying when I am selling and vice versa (not necessary getting my price). If an option is bid 1.5 ask 1.60, I would be buying at 1.60 paying slippge. The opposite trader will be selling at 1.50, also being hit with slippage.
Your points are fully valid. As I stare down below at the 6-figure line (100K) I am terrified. I absolutely want to reduce the frequency of my trading as a first step. That should pair down slippage and commissions, and maybe result in better quality trades. I will see what happens from there.
I've found lately, that any setup below an hourly time frame (15 min, 5 min, 1 min) is very unreliable and tends to bring in chicken feed compared to the same setup on an hourly, daily or even weekly time frame.
It is very true what you say, only way to make a fast time frame setup work reliably is to mix it with higher time frames. Easier said than done, been working hard at this myself.
Maybe I am doing the accounting wrong. On the weekly performance chart posted a few pages back, if I add the bars for both sides (plus the last 3 weeks), the loss is about 41K bigger than the wins. So that would be the opposite trader's gain. If I subtract from that the 44K for commission and slippage he is still around break even for the year, while you are down by that much. I am not sure why the two accounting are different, and I am too tired right now. Maybe later it will come to me...
The 41K loss would not have translated to 41K gain for the opposite trader, because that loss already includes commission and slippage. To get the result for the trader try: 41K - commission - slippage - commisson - slippage (yes you subtract those twice, the first time to get fair P/L , the second time to take care of the overhead costs. Not sure how better to explain!).
OK, I guess that explains it. Have you considered to back other systems instead of trying to churn the profits? Take a look at C2 and the systems there. If you pick 3-4 uncorrelated systems, I would say their sum outcome would be better than yours. Specially if you pick systems with low trade numbers.... Also could give you a little break from trading....