I'm not sure if you saw the other thread in which @nooby_mcnoob talked about his long winning streak. That resulted in him being pressured by other posters to increase his trade size. So in my humble opinion is "peer pressure" also a factor.
I was actually happy to stay making $4K/day-ish and scaling up next year... But why not now? I had never thought about it. I took in the suggestions, looked at my stats and said yeah, let's try it. So I'm currently now trading 2-3x the size I was trading at that time, but the fat loss was me sizing up 3x beyond THAT. So 9x my initial size.
Humbly, I think the way to do it is to first find a size you're comfortable with or % risk per trade which is suited to your performance metrics and then scale up proportionally as equity grows. I.e., 20K per contract => Add one contract for every new 20K worth of profits. % risk per trade = Add x contracts as your account grows while keeping the % risk stable at a maximum. This means decreasing size in a drawdown, too. Something I never did. Keep up the good work, n00b.
I actually have a script to size the trades and I follow it each morning. But the rule of thumb "add X contracts per Y K of profit" is easy to follow as well.
I've been trying too hard to get massive days after recent massive days. Consistency is better, I don't need to be aggressive every day. I'll let the automated sizing do the job.
Curious, @nooby_mcnoob. How much of your system/trading is based on rules and/or have an element of automation? I know you have an IT background and you've spoken warmly about using coding as a tool and you mention having scripts. But is all this just to assist your trading which in the end is discretionary? Personally, I have a lot of stuff that's automated. Mostly collection of statistics and metrics within a trading model and a few custom indicators which display what I want to perceive, but at the end of the day I trade on my own discretion.
Same as you, lots of trading stats and metrics are automated. Zero indicators for me though (for the most part). Sometimes I will put on a pivot indicator, or plot round numbers but other than that it's straight price action.
Gotcha. I don't use any indicators which signals entries/exits per se, but I'd love to. Just haven't found anything that works sufficiently or is properly auto-adaptive. Just basic stuff which plots some stuff I like tracking without my lazy ass having to plot it manually (and even risk messing it up). The less I have to do, the better.
Past couple of days are in the "one or two trades per day" regime, which is what I have been fearing for a while (low vol uptrend). Fortunately, I have been trading these successfully and I am glad that I was able to adapt very quickly. If I were to have a year full of these days, I would still be a medium-high six figure trader which is alright by me. The key thing is I adapted quickly without needing to change the system. No FOMO, no stubborn trades. The job also got confirmed this morning. All I do is win. jk, this is hard work.