I'm planning to stop trading after Wednesday this week. Thursday will probably be a low range day for the US stock indices. EURUSD might also get thin during the US session. I'm not sure if I'll trade next week. I'm not travelling so I'll be around. I won't trade on Thursday and Friday. I'm not sure yet about Monday-Wednesday. -------------------------------- ***December 20, 2004, Clearing House Advisory 04-240: Holiday Schedule - Christmas Eve, Friday, December 24, 2004 Thursday, December 23, 2004 CME Floor Trading Commodity futures, foreign exchange, interest rate and GSCI products will close at 12:00 noon. Commodity options will close at 12:02 p.m. Equity index products traded on the trading floor only will observe normal trading hours on Thursday, December 23, 2004. GLOBEX Foreign exchange and interest rates traded on GLOBEX during Regular Trading Hours (RTH) will close at 3:15 p.m. (same as equity indexes). Commodities, GSCI and Weather products traded on GLOBEX during RTH will close at 12:00 noon. There will be no overnight trading on GLOBEX Thursday night. CBOT Floor Trading Agricultural and Financial products will close at 12:00 noon. Mini-sized Ag products will close at 12:30 p.m. Equity products will have normal trading hours. ecbot Dow-AIG products will close at 12:00 noon. Financial and Metals products at 12:30 p.m. There will be no overnight trading on e-cbot on Thursday night.
chinook, Is it possible to change your exit strategy where you can capture bigger moves? Sometimes large wins can help pay for many losses and still come out ahead.
That's possible but you pay a price for it-- larger drawdown. Smaller profit targets tend to make the drawdowns smaller and more consistent across different data sets. Also, there's a chance that in the future you might not get these larger moves. So I prefer the system trade more often and take smaller profits. This lowers Avg. Win/Loss and $$/trade but makes the equity curve smoother. My number one criteria became minimum drawdown. Expectancy became the second criteria. Third criteria is number of trades. So in summary: 1) Minimum drawdown 2) Maximum expectancy 3) Minimum number of trades Edit: For 1) I'd like to also see maximum (Netprofits/Max Drawdown) ratio. But of course, you can't achieve all of these simultaneously. So I tweak things around the minimum drawdown. I read that when instutions look for investing in hedge funds, they don't "care" about returns, they want to see minimal drawdown. This makes sense. They want to go with funds with minimum risk exposure.
Gart, For the intraday system trades, I'm comfortable if the average trade > 1 tick net after commissions. For the actual profit targets set in the systems, I'd like to see at least 8 ticks.
I have learned the same also. I think minimal drawdowns with good returns is a great combo... not just huge returns alone. Changing exit strategy isn't going to improve your #1 priority, but it could help your #2. I try to find a happy medium where I can still take small profits every now and then, but give myself a good chance to capture bigger moves. My first strategy didn't have very good accuracy, but the exit strategy sort of made up for it. That's why I suggested the idea. Drawdown has more to do with the actual setup/method, isn't it? I mean, some setups/methods have good reliability and some are not. Filters can help eliminate some of these unnecessary losses, but filters can also do more damage than good also. This is why I focus more on exits. what if you could find a way to move your stop to breakeven soon enough to give you that reliability, and have an exit strategy to capture larger moves? This is my style. So now you have the reliability you want, and have better expectancy too.
If your profit targets are large, then trailing stops definetely help. If you have small targets then it's better to have fixed stops. I also implemented stopping trading after about 2-3 losing trades per day.