Hello everyone, A bit about me: I have been learning to trade full time for the past 18-24 months. I trade price action, clean charts, and try to keep things relatively simple. I managed to develop a strategy that when back tested over 300 trades showed an average positive expectancy of 0.5R per trade. I struggled to execute it in real-time though. After a string of losses or sometimes only a few, I become too self-critical and start to doubt my own judgement (even if the trades are good to take). This then leads me to starting to misperceive the market conditions and unknowingly start fading every trend I see and going against the flow. I am now experimenting with something closer to a 1R/R setup that will hopefully keep that monkey in my brain calm with more frequent wins. So far, the backtesting is coming along well. I’m learning when, where and how I need to trade this setup in different conditions compared to my previous strategy/setup. I trade CFD’s for XAUAUD, XAUUSD, JPN225 and AUS200. Next week I am going to start posting my Daily Report Card on here each evening. I haven’t decided whether it will just be a breakdown and review of any forward testing I do or whether I will just paste the whole daily document including my thoughts during the day and other things that I’m working on. The purpose of this is so that I can get some feedback if I seem to be to going off track too much and just bounce ideas off of people. I enjoy the work and the process of trading, but working alone does make it hard for me to judge whether I am making progress or just going in circles. I’m looking forward to speaking with other traders and hopefully being able to contribute to the community.
Until you understand market makers and dark pools you will fail... Paper trades to not take those two into account...
When you are paper trading, you are not taking into account the market makers and the dark pools that change (manipulate) the TRUE bid/ask. You assume you will get your price...But they move the market once your order is placed. So they gain the advantage and you loose the trade/profit. It sound illegal...But it's not.
Ok makes sense. The indices I trade have fixed spreads and I use limit orders. The gold has floating spreads. How do you suggest I start incorporating these factors? Change to a small live account to build the strategy instead of a demo?
Not to put a damper on your enthusiasm here, but most readers of this forum will not care about what you post, because... A. You are trading CFDs, which most readers here cannot trade, as they are not allowed in the US, and for good reason. B. You will be showing everyone sim results, which is pointless. Posting sim results is like showing a simulation of what it is like to be bitten by a shark, without actually being bitten by one, if that makes sense.
Thanks for the heads up. I didn't think trading CFDs would matter as its the same underlying markets, same prices and you can trade them nearly identically. I have access to futures on the same markets but the spread isn't fixed and is ALWAYS much wider. Seems like I'd be handicapping myself trading the futures Is there something else I'm missing that puts people off? I get what you mean about the sim results. I'm not posting it to try and flex my paper profits. Its me going through the process of refining and learning to stick to my rules as I develop my strategy. I'm just trying to get proof of concept at the moment to find something that works for me.
Its your journal.Learn from it what you can. If some members choose to throw some guidance your way,it will be a bonus. Cabin has made a good contribution so far.
Hmm unless you exit your trades each day the financing you are paying for trading the cash market I would think would be worse off for you then the futures. Which provider are you using.
Sorry for the slow reply. I am using Pepperstone. I trade short time frames so that usually isn't a problem for me. Most markets they offer have reasonable funding costs (as far as I can tell). It was a problem when I would trade something less liquid like USDTRY otherwise it hasn't affected me too much.