Demoralized. Is 14 losses in a row normal?

All strategies work until they don't. Yours seems to have stopped working. 14 losing trades in a row is too many. It's time to use a different strategy. Sorry, that's how it works.

 

You know nothing about the skew of the strategy returns and the magnitude of the losses, so you can't claim that 14 losses in a row is "too many".

 

No Sir. For Financial markets the exact same strategy that has worked since biblical times and the dawn of the universe, continues to work juicy well today. Buy when there is blood in the street, sell when ET is euphorically Long. Ditto for all moving average crosses, trend lines, channels etc., these fail in the bend in the trend but patience is the best tool in the bend/bear

 

I am re-optimizing my system at the moment. It's going to take me about 2 months to draw concrete conclusions... what I noticed though:

• widening out stops by 180% (almost double stop distance)
• Cut trading size in half
• production returns/results are almost the same
• Half commission

essentially giving the trade more room to work with less size equates to the same results.

My basis, I know my entrances and target exits are statistically significant...it's just a sizing and risk management optimization adjustment I am testing out. So time consuming though.

 

You need to learn some basic maths and stats.

 

Sounds like a good move. Smaller size equals less stress. The one thing you can count on trading is that eventually you will make a series of dumb mistakes or you will encounter some sort of air shaft drop. Trading small means the difference in a bad day and getting blown out when that happens.

 

Better to invest that time in building a better system that can challenge the stats.

 

and for the original poster. I listened to an ernest chan interview recently, some notes from a quant:

Ernest Chan:

· Be prepared for failure

· Success is an outlier

· Failure is to be expected

· Don't quit your day job

· 2 years of success before you consider full time

· Do not be overly excited about a 1 year positive return

 

It looks like you are new to trading, take some time to verify your strategy and to improve on your stats using a smaller trade size .

Use some kind of filter to reduce the number of losing trades.
Confirmation using a higher time frame is good but the time of the day can also be a good filter.

Take care

 

I am surprised that no one asked him to list his winning traders and compare them his losing trades.
How could you develop a whole discussion over something random such as "14 trades"?
Also, during what period were the winning trades versus losing trades? These small factors would reveal his strengths and weaknesses.