CALLumbus, I appreciate the detail response. Once, I get to $6000 in sim trading one contract, I will go live. Thanks.
Plotted your trades on the chart to visually see them. What's interesting is that you don't seem to follow any general rules. For example, trade 1 goes against you heavily before it recovers and turns into your biggest winner. Same thing with trade 4, where the risk is much bigger than the reward was. In contrast, the short at trade 3 could have been a much bigger winner, but you got out for a tiny profit. Not knocking you of course, since the PnL speaks for itself, but its obvious that each of these trades is quite different. Perhaps its your algo that is calling the shots.
I stopped using the algo Sunday night, even though it makes money in the long run, it’s not suited to the week challenge. I don’t follow any general rules, the market is point of reference, meaning it’s dynamic. I’m not patient, I enter too early or get out early. At each moment in time it’s tendency can change. You can’t fixate on what you did previously. One mistake very easily leads to the next. It’s like letting trades initiate based on the momentary reference in time and how it’s behaving. Just because you had a big intratrade MAE drawdown, doesn’t mean you wait for a large profit before exiting. It’s like taking snapshots and not remembering prior snapshots in current analysis of its tendency. When I take that snapshot I can tell what it’s tendency is for the next few seconds to minute to hrs. Of all the algo that I have programmed, I can’t beat the internal tendency I’ve developed from screen time. I won’t trade discretionarily unless I have a read on it. That read can be affected by many things. It’s not as simple as the market is going down I’m going to short. The way the tics move and create patterns implies tendency internally for me.
This is all very interesting to me. I like that you're also saying this from the point of view of someone who has done a great deal of work on the algo side since your remark is a very informed point of view from both sides. So the question that remains then is what made you hold through such a deep drawdown for trade 1, but then not be willing to do so again for trade 3, the short that would have done well if held for an hour. Similarly, trade 4 had you hold for a bounce, but on trade 5 and 6 you got out fairly quickly. Perhaps we are getting close to the end of the day, and by then of course, the down move is well established with successive lower lows.
On the open market likes to test VwAp highs and lows, plus bond market didn’t confirm downside move, risk was it reverts and blows above 40s. It was trying to get confirmation from other markets but it never did. Thus wedge creation.[/QUOTE]