here's acrary's edge test. I didn't want it to get lost. http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=134947&highlight=edge+test#post134947 The idea is, you take what you are doing, and compare it to what a random trader with no brains would do, and you see if you can at least beat a coin flipper. He describes how he uses it intraday using settlement price, but I am curious if anyone has ideas how to use it to test scalping moves of less than 30 minutes duration.
and then if you can figure out how to do that, you can also use his 20% stop loss method (I don't think in real life he uses stops, but this is the idea) You figure out the loss on the worst 20% of your trades with no stops, then you set the stop loss so that it would have elimintated the lowest 20% of trades. So here's 2 brilliant ideas that are light years ahead of us stress and mess traders.
I am a huge fan of acrary... I have been following his posts for more than a year... since his traderclub presence... the man is the most generous and knowledgeable person I have met on these forums... he is one of the very few reasons I still spent some time on elitetrader everyday... any one of his post would have more to say about trading than aphie 's 1000+ post ...combined thank you...Alan you change the way I look at markets