I would suggest two things. There have been a lot of threads like this over the years. You might want to go back and look at some of them. Second, I would urge you to do some serious backtesting. It's not so much a matter of inventing a system as learning what doesn't work. It's also very helpful to understand the effect of stop placement. It sounds like you have made a few changes that should be helpful. Personally, I try to always trade in the direction of the trend, as determined by the next higher timeframe. For example, if you trade on 1 or 5 minute bars, use the 60 minute. There is a tendency in daytrading to be a fader, ie to sell new highs or buy new lows, looking for a regression to the mean. I think that is a very tough way to make money. Often, your biggest enemy is overthinking it. Respect price action. I know some here disagree, but I think the opening hour is a great time to trade. You need to learn how to trade gaps though. The guy who runs the Quantifiable Edges site has a lot of material on them. The most important thing in the stock index futures is support and resistance. You need to learn which prices the market is drawn to and why. Past highs/lows, for example.
Thanks AAA, agree with you and have to make some remarks. I used to buy lows and sell highs, but that was not working for me at all, my stats showed me that clearly but I did not need my stats to know that this way of trading was going nowhere. Instead I enter when i see a break out to to upside or downside. for example, simple trendlines. Or when the market is pushing support and is not able to make higher highs from the support level. It looks reasonable that the support will break and i would place my sell order just below low. This is also were some traders wo would be long have placed their stops so you might see a brief spike as thee market picks-up some stops (see how I am now bascally at the other side of the market compared to my previous trading) and you can scalp it quickly. These , to me, seem quite obvious scalps. And if every market is making highs or lows it seems obvious that NQ will also trend in the general market environment. Ofcourse there ar no guarantees, but it just seems logical to watch were the price is going. Also, when a session was trending, daytraders at the end of the session might close their positions (not overnight), causing a move. (I tend to trade a lot in the last minutes of a session, and not take ANY trade the whole session and just watch price, and understand what the market is doing). For example a market has pushed for highs in the beginning of the session. And then flattens out. The market makes some intention to sell of but does fail to pull back. Many traders on the short side might close their position if the market fails to correct or pullback from a high and close their position, causing the market to push up at the end of the session. This all seems quite niormal behaviour to me and now I am trying to take advantage of the traders that have entered the market, but are wrong. I don't know if this all makes sense or if it only makes sense in my own head, but sofar so good. Thanks for the help!
Hey Noobs - The biggest problem here is you don't have a trading strategy at all that you believe is profitable. Read again your 1st statement. You jumping from RSI, Bollingers, Patterns and so on .........my advice is find or develop one strategy and then concentrate on following it. By the way 45% win rate - I will take that anytime.