I am not 100% confident. and I am nervous about my position. Today is election day, and I have full size position. I've been in this business long enough to know that anything can happen.
lovely market action so far As posted, I entered at yesterday's close. If I waited until this morning, I could have 5 or 6 points better entry. When trend is confirmed, is it better to enter or wait until next morning? I used to think a lot about this question. My conclusion is it is better to enter right away at market close. this morning's price action just means unrealized temporary draw down but if I waited until next morning and market gap up and straight up then it is a permanently missed profit. In trend following, get the trend right is of 90% importance. any other factors rarely matter.
Have you done a study on this? You should be able to statistically find out which entry method is better.
I haven't. I don't have a tool or data set to do that. I just think entry at market close is better because of temporary dd vs. permanently missed profit aspect of it. maybe I am wrong.
wow, do I need to exit at the close if price is above 2146? it is +20 points from the second lot entry. probably I will exit. and regret it in couple of days when price reach 2170 area.
Should be pretty easy to find out if you really want to. You likely don't have a ton of entries so just pull back up all the charts and manually look and see which would would have been better over the course of the last 6 months or year.
I think you need more than a year's data to have a statistically significant test. more like 20-30 years data especially trend set up happens only 4- 5 times a year. Another problem with backtesting that I have is it does not consider headline news that caused market price action. we all know last week's correction is due to FBI letter to congress. without that background knowledge, it is just an orderly correction, but weirdly long 9 consecutive days long correction. I believe you need to have headline news included when analyzing market data. I don't know if there is a way to do it yet. How do you include past market moving news when back testing market data?
for example, if you want to back test SPX gap up is a good entry. every significant gap up in the past must have some sort of headline news that caused it. without that knowledge, simple data backtesting can not yield profitable trading strategy.