Thank you for the coaching. Yes, I am glued to the monitors when trading. Seemed to work but you get old very quickly doing that. I am going to do small live trades for a few months. If it works like the paper trades, then I will apply your suggestions and see if I could make it less burdensome. I started out with longer time frame. But the scheme has evolved into using a 1 min chart: An in-between of what some called scalping and day trading. You are correct, lower time frame like 1 minute chart gets very noisy, often lacks structure and not tradable. Everything is a trade-off.
you are too kind. actually those guys were right in a way. i was trying to understand Brooks and failed for 10-15 years. I basically had no clue what i was doing or even why i was doing it all my life i was trying to find ,what most people knew was futile, what the market is doing. this is really difficult to find out. But what Brooks said: the market does what the participants do. What do they do? they understand what they do and why they do it. what is it that profitable traders do? They buy low and sell high. yes i know you are laughing but that is what they do. Put it simply they recognize a trend. and trade it. so i have now found out, after 30 years of research, that do be a profitable trader, you must recognise a trend. those who gave me a hard time were right in doing so but they did not give me a solution. now there are as many trends as there are traders. if there is an up bar and its high is taken out, then you have a trend. now if you then have down bar and it's low is taken out, then you have a down trend. BUT if that downtrend does not take out the low of the first up bar then you have a MINOR downtrend or corrrection or pullback. if you continue this process or logic, you will see a few trends-a pull back is also a trend, a minor trend, which can always be traded for a scalp, albeit not always for a profit [!!!!!!!!] this way you will know when a trend has started , whether this is major... minor and what will then be the minimum target of that trend. AMEN.
stress comes from not understanding. there are trends on 5 min like there are daily or weekly trends. you see some people say ...'I am a trend trader!' Is there any other kind? there is no way you can buy low and sell high if you do not see a trend. you have [only] two options: sell first and then buy..... or buy first and then sell. third option is toss coin and forth option is guess
then you are not recognizing the trends ......... if you are losing money then you are not trading with the trend but against it. this is the only reason for losing trades. PS : I like BIG and RED
it is your choice. overtrading is not a problem by itself but you need a very high win rate above 85 % or so. making a lot of trades and not losing many means you have very high degree of market knowledge. Also if you trade big volume for small profit, brokerage becomes significant. if you trade 15 lots in ES for one point then you make 750 usd with a brokerage of 60 usd.[Topstep trader brokerage of 4 usd round trip] this is ok only if you do not lose.
@PPC, Fully test out your suggestion and approach will take up a lot of time but there are some simple tests I can do to test out using longer time frame. I decided to backtest the last several days of trading, using 1 min, 3 min, 5 min, 7 min & 10 min charts and my reversal scheme. In a perfect world, hindsight is 20/20, the longer time frame gave better profits, better, longer runs. However, the losses for trading in & out during choppy times were higher meaning the risk of ruin is higher. If my first priority is limit losses, I have to stay with 1 min. Your #1 to #6 is a completely different approach and require me to lay out a test plan. After my live trade experiment, I will work on it. PS: If I use the same logic, swing trade will give even better profits, in a 20/20 hindsight world. Did a few backtest and indeed true. The cum losses however were large and I don't have a scheme to limit losses without missing opportunities. Sometimes I feel like it is all random and I have been fooled by randomness. Best wishes.
Upside flies benefit from vol-corr and lose to sticky D in index. This week is a prime example (where it fails) due to the risk of govt-shutdown. Sep29 figures: 25D put: 19% ATM: 16.3% 25D call: 14.6% You cannot assume that ATM vols will converge to the 25D figure on a touch due to macro/political risk unless a deal is made. IOW, do not mark down vol due to vol-corr when there is specific macro-risk. Generally, you can ignore the vol line when you're betting on pinning as the things are all gamma this close to expiration. When trading >1M out the vol-surface is dominant. So I tell people to focus on achieving neutrality when trading long flies (natural/vert-flies) with 1W-1M. Go with upside flies when trading vol-corr (absent known events), and narrow OTM diagonals (locally long gamma) when trading into bear targets. Into macro? Wide ATM flies strangled (guts) say, 4310-4410 bull and 4230/4330 bear. You can see that the skew is fairly substantial as the call fly is the revenue side of the reversal (reflects down/out skew) shown by the large debit.