My alogs only buy when MES is under its 5 day SMA as they are mean reverting...there are some other criteria as well.
October turned out to be my best month on record thanks to the stock trading. Below are my stock trades where I am collecting stats. Some of the entries without an exit date have already exited half of the position (CLR, ICL, SAIA). The trade stats highlighted are calculated as if all of the trades are closed so obviously that will change once the trades are closed. In some trades, I will start off with a half position. If that turns into an immediate loser, the loss percentage will be reduced by half (Adj % Result). Now, if we were to take those stats and extrapolate them over a series of 100 trades (reasonable amount of trades for one year of trading) with a bet size of account equity of 25%, we would have the following: Given this info, the goal is to get optimal mix of trade volume (number of trades) and trade stats. Areas of focus are refining setup identification and trade profit sell rules. Currently, I will sell half of the position if it makes between a 15 to 20% move and trail stop the rest. This can further be refined.
All stock trading is discretionary. I still have my automation running but that is futures (MES). I will create a new journal at the beginning of the year which more accurately describes what I am doing.
Exited several trades and halved the position size of others. Bought some micro small cap futures which I anticipate holding through to expiration.
Brutal week...essentially gave back all of my stock gains over the past couple of months during the current drawdown. Having analyzed all my trades, here is some useful info. 1. All of my winning trades were from breakouts from consolidation bases of 10 weeks or longer. 2. Out of the 28 trades, only two were outright losers. Most losers I got "shaken out of" prior to the actual move in my favor. As I refine this method, I need to adapt so that I can make buying/selling decisions at the market close or with orders entered when market is closed (with my job it is just not feasible to be monitoring the market during the day). The good news is after 2.5 months of trading this style the deficiencies in my current approach are very obvious and easy to correct.
if you are convinced that your stock selection and entry has edge, you can try hedging out the market beta with short index futures
Interesting. Where I could see this approach especially useful is when the indexes are "over extended".