I do it the old way, paper, pencil, highlighters and an Excel spreadsheet or two. When I see success in a given pattern, market, etc, THEN I use the language of the charting software and trading platform to duplicate what I already did to achieve those results. Authoring a system is more than computer code. You have to dream it up first.
***Deep, VERY Deep Sigh*** OK...the only thing I came up with so far to avoid being taken out with such spledid regularity is to extend my wait to at least 10:30AM (as I pointed earlier I used to jump on stocks that exceeded their 10:00High and moved higher). I backtested today, I would have only had 4 Buy Orders initiate and with the same Trailing Stops I'd at least break even (depending on the position size). Any ideas? Still manure?
Um, what I did when I was new to cash trading was trade a sim side-by-side with the cash account. I used IB at that time, and their demo system is pretty good for fill realism. The analysis after weeks of doing this was that there was only negligible difference between fills from the two platforms, but in fact it was I that changed between the sim and cash. Even side-by-side on my monitors, how I traded will be different between sim and cash. This is purely psychological, and indicates you have not yet conquered emotions in your trading. You can only do this by continuing to cash trade with minimal money involved until you are confident with adding one contract at a time.
I hear you. This is why my entry points are Buy Orders above certain price levels and this is why I am using Trailing Stops. I do not trus myself. At all. I did trust the system enough to follow it in cash trading and it worked fine...for a day. Last 2 were a complete disaster. Worst of all, I now find myself so emotionally invested in my system that I am now sitting here, trying to tweak it so it'd work still... Noone said it was going to be easy, but 11 losers in a row...Come on!
just don't trade right now. Try backtesting with a filter that halts your system when the VIX is over 30. I take only my most probabilistic trades when the VIX gets between 27-29 and don't trade at all 30+. The stops are too wide and the chop is too much.
AMT - if you entered at 36.69, how could you have lost $$? The 2 times today it traded at that price it went straight up. CMCSA - 19.95 was near the top of the morning run up. Both times in the morning it traded at 19.95 it was in an overbought condition and therefore a poor long entry point. DIS - 32.88 was the high of the day and extremely overbought at that point. Why not short? ARO - same problem - high of day, overbought, time to short. PL - At 32.55 it moved up. Not sure how you lost $ unless your stop was too tight. MYGN - 68.63 near high of the day I suggest you use a stochastic indicator in your charts to help you locate overbought and oversold conditions. If you go long when oversold is indicated and it pivots up you can set a tight stop and limit your loss with a high reward opportunity. The opposite applies for going short. I attached my chart of the day so you can see how the stochs give you fairly solid signals. (my chart says "oversold" when it should say "overbought" )
I can tell you that you are doing the exact opposite of what I'm doing and i win 90% of the time over the long run. It sounds to me that you are chasing the market when it goes to new highs. That's one of my highest quality shorts. I will short a market that goes to new highs and buy a market that goes to new lows. The market moves in waves and it sounds as though you are buying the end of the second wave. Or, it is possible you are buying the end of the third wave. You rarely get a 4th wave so it sounds like there's a high probability you are buying the end of a run. If you want PM me a chart and I'll look at what you are doing.
Thank you for your replies everyone. I will analyze them and post tomorrow. Probably more questions, too