It depends on the nature of one's trading. I pair trade and tend to rack up larger losses than gains per 100 shares - oddly, in both the down swing of '08 and the up swing of '09. Yet both were really good years because my win rate was 70+ pct... I made it up on volume
If the name of your thread is actually âTrading pivot reversalsâ then I may be able to answer your question. I have been trading reversals systems in Tradestation full time for many years. My reversal system does not trade tops and bottoms. One profitable system I have trades Apple on daily charts. It has a long profit factor of 3.38 and a short of 1.46. This is normal. My long trades since Feb 06 have lasted about 25 price bars. This was more than enough time to trade the upswings. However the short trades lasted on average 10 days and on many of these shorts the pivot was not large enough to make a decent profit. But when you put longs and shorts together the combined profit factor was 2.43. What was happening with Apple during this time frame was it was trending up for the most part. The shorts in this part of the reversal system are there to mainly act as the reversal entry point to get me into the profitable long trades even though these shorts are losers for the most part. The more important reason I keep reversal short trades is they are very profitable for me during congestion periods. Without the shorts in congested periods I would have too many consecutive long losses in a row and probably not want to trade the strategy continuously which is my method.
It is immaterial to me, if as here, the concept is 'trends' and 'trend' tops or bottoms. Likewise the absolute price (ie price as considered in a hierachy of too high or too low) is immaterial. There are simply price gyrations, upswings and downswings. That is factual and that is discernable, daily. Gyrations do of course have tops and bottoms. A gyration is an upswing followed by a downswing (or vice versa). An upswing stops at its top; a downswing stops at its bottom, obviously. If I take NG during last week (5 days Jan 11-15 2010) there were open to close a total of 57 swings at a mean average of 80 points per swing. If you put a reliable and tested methodology on that then you play the swings with a reversals system buying the upmoves and selling the downmoves, sequentially, as they follow each other. You can therefore see that making yourself rich is a choice.
we've been in an uptrend in your 4 months ,so the longs would've been more profitable,........on avg , 3 days a month there is a trendday, most contrarians get hurt on these days, the chart below is fridays selloff , a trendday. Its a uvol/dvol comparison chart. the blue line represents the down volume. the yellow(uvol) went horizontal or flatline for the entire day,if you watch for this pattern,you will do allright on those 3 days........as far as giving up on the shorting, that depends if you want to cut your profit in half, even a smaller profit is a profit.... You have learned one way to profit from the market. Put that in your toolbox and make a living from it...,there are times when it won't work,.... continue to search for other tools to use to profit in additional ways, ...good luck
"In a down trending market/ stock/ index you can make money going long or short â but the odds favor making more money going short" i am finding the very opposite to be true buying small rally during down trands has become my bread and butter the chart illustrates my point it is my last 3 trades in oil small gains tight stops on buys from a downtrend
sorry i massed up the pc i am showing that i am buying in the down trend small stops small targets but this does not work with longs as well
sorry again wrong pic that is old data the new pic is of recent oil action people say this cant be done so i don't know if i am doing something very right or very wrong
Since the trend has been up grinding up over the medium term, it is no suprise that your longs have been more profitable trades. That is what they mean when they say "the Trend is your friend".