When you read the detail which Brooks is able to describe the Chart in, and if he really has watched every 5 minute ES Candle since 1987, you can see how he'd be able to amass a lot of Money from the Market.
Maybe because only noobs start a journal (no offense here). And noobs are attracted by high win rate. Who are interested by a strategy offering a 40% win rate compare to another one at a 80% rate? I can provide a losing strategy with a 97% win rate. And I can provide another one, but profitable, with a win rate of 40%. But noobs will be interested by the first one, not by the latter. A 40% win rate is not sexy.
Come on, nobody in their right mind would say I only care about win rate. It's all about the expectancy, and that was my point. @Sprout says you make more doing high r:r. I said longer stagnation of those systems due to low win rates balance out the reverse r:r high win rate systems. By the way, not all noobs start journals, only the ones with something to prove. I want to see if a purely mechanical system can make money long term. Without these transparent noob journals, these forums would have zero integrity.
I did not understand. I will try to answer as much as I can. The basic probability subject I learnt was in college. However, if one did not have such a subject during college, one can read a book by name 'Understanding Probability-Chance Rules in Everyday Life' by Henk Tijms. This book poses common probability problems and makes us think. Then it introduces the real subject. I don't think one need any prior math/prob knowledge to understand this book. But your question may probably be directed from a trader's perspective. I will try to give simple examples of the problems that I face while I trade and how I handle them. When my brother asked me for some investment advice, I suggested him an alternate solution. I asked him to fund an account with a small amount (less than 200 USD) and I told him to consider he lost this money and leave the account for me to trade. I told him I will show him 100X in 5 years before income taxes. He agreed. I made trades in his account using 1 micro lot and those trades mirror the trades in my account that has been running successfully. Now my question is simple how much should I ask him to fund the account? My challenge is to never go back to him and seek funding for this account in case it makes initial losses. This is a real probability question. I had to look back at my data and use the max losing streak and asked for a cushion of 3 times over that one. My brother agreed to that extra cushion. It was fun challenge that I took from my brother. Trust me the very first month the account went into a bigger loss than I had seen earlier. It had a 20 day losing streak. The cushion saved me and in the next two months the account gave much higher profits than I anticipated. I follow a rules based trading approach. That account is a small mirror account to my own trading account and is now very profitable. In the initial days it looked like I was wasting time on a small capital account. But it has grown since. I recently used the same approach to trade another account of a family member. This came after my brothers account swung into profit. If I had not taken that extra cushion money in the brother's account I would not be able to turn it into profit in the first place and I would have lost the challenge, let alone another family member throwing a new challenge. End of the day, I should be able to meet my family members during holidays and festivals without embarrassing myself. We traders call this problem 'risk of ruin'. But it is a true probability question. Now let us look at another example. I will share that in a separate post because I got to go for now.
Yes thanks for that but what I was angling at and maybe you can explain in your follow up post.... Example; say you had a stock market or watchlist of 1000 stocks. How do you measure probability of: A) The market heading in a certain direction B) Probability of maybe some of those stocks, ie highest to lowest. Your method.
The green line is Rams Fans first Brooks trade for a 4.31% gain. By comparison, it took me 9 trades (5 losses, 4 wins) to gain a theoretical 3.29%. But i did not tolerate that long wick down. By coincidence, my first entry and last exit match closely with Ram Fans Brooks entry/exit...but for different reasons. Mine is an always in method, unless statistics tell me that certain kinds of trades in the sequence are just not worth getting into, either long or short. A blue line sloping up is a profit, down is a loss. A red line sloping down is a profit, up is a loss. You can see what four more trades would look like, the last trade not yet being finalized.
Apparently, dung beetles don't understand anything beyond dung. Everything they come across, they try to relate to the sht they tasted.