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I'd say the key is first to be right a good amount of the time and then to cut losers quickly. If you just know how to cut losers quickly, you're still losing money
Plus you dont want to get into the habit of getting rattled every time the mkt ticks against you a little bit. You can condition yourself to take tons of small losses just because you are trying to keep losses small. Death by 1000 cuts or whatever is the saying.
Unbelievably, I experienced EACH of the above when sim trading the ER2 contract this past summer and fall. I hadn't traded the eminis a while, so before I went live, I thought I'd get a read on my trading technique and performance. First off, I was going short most of the time....I'd wait for a peak, then a fall-off, and let it rip. Natch, I was selling right as the "buy-on-the-dippers" were going long....and I was wrong, really wrong. I'd sometimes get stopped-out in 2 seconds. I never had any large losers...always used stops. At the end of 6 weeks, I saw a win rate of just 20%.....and I was down $1500 per contract. Near the end of that "experiment", I was taking small profits....fearing to lose them back. So bottomline: many small losers, some small winners, few big winners, and no big losers is a losing strategy. The market will just take your money all in good time, instead of all-at-once a la Vic Niederhoffer. Good posts all - obviously you are experienced traders.
Not that simple. It's a formally fallacious statement. It assumes you know which trade is going to be a loser. But trades rarely are winners from start. What matters is the relation of average win to average loss, success rate and profit factor: http://www.tradingpatterns.com/profitability.pdf Ron