@Laissez Faire: high win rate is easy to achieve... just take small wins, and very large losses. If you do that, you will get a high win rate, even if you try to avoid it. The thing is, to make this work, to be net profitable over time, your win rate has to be high ENOUGH. High enough to compensate for the big losses that come once in a while. Just like an insurance company. How does a trader do this ? No magic trick, this is where skills and experience come into play. Thats what many dont understand. R:R doesnt matter. You can be an excellent trader with a high R:R, or with a shitty R:R. What counts at the end of the day is if you make money. To make money, you have to be good. To be good, you have to work hard. I just checked out hilmy83's journal, and one of his streams. Kudos to his transparency, but I dont like his trading, to be honest. Looks more like some low frequency, intraday swingtrading to me. Not my cup of tea. But the idea to offer insight into our work, maybe in form of some kind of stream for one day, it is interesting. Maybe even a small competition ? I dont know how we could set this up, technically. How do you guys do this these days ? Youtube, facebook, instagram ?? I have no idea
Yeah. Big kudos for his transparency. I believe he went from 20K to 100K and back down to 20K. So a good primer on risk management, too. I have no idea either. But I'm sure you'll quickly find some commercial software for free which lets you record your screen while trading. Actually, I just remember that I had to do a demo of my trading software to a programmer not long ago. I believe I used something called Bandicam. It's free. https://www.bandicam.com/ Just record your screen and upload it on Youtube. Hope that wasn't too much derailing of your thread, sstheo.
If you are talking about multiple DIFFERENT contracts i.e. ES, NQ, RTY simultaneously, I could understand that....I don't think it's possible to MANUALLY scalp 3 DIFFERENT contracts at once. However, if are talking about going from 1 MES to 3 MES, then you are not making sense. If you have a good system in place, then it should do just as well with 3 contracts as 1 contract.
@Laissez Faire I know about recording and uploading, for example on youtube. But thats cheap, or no ? Lots of room for manipulation. It would be a better idea to let one trader or a few traders stream their screen LIVE here on Elitetrader, realtime, without recording. But I have no idea if this is even possible.
It is totally possible, I can tell you from my experience. What is so special about it ? It can even help you, you can get clues from correlated markets. But the question to me was, is it necessary ? Today my answer is no, at least not for me. It is possible to make good money from just 1 nice instrument. Never say never to anything. There are crazy guys and girls out there who do stuff you cannot even dream about.
Huh ? If you throw NQ aka "The Beast" into the mix, I doubt seriously that you can also effectively manually manage 3 other positions in 3 other markets. Well, the experts like champion trader Kevin Davey say it's best to diversify....multiple markets, multiple systems. Jim Simons from Renaissance Technologies also espouses this approach. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies
I do a mix, depending if we are in a range or not. I have always been a scalper. I have been trying to get some bigger moves to go along with my scalps. My first mentor, Mike Reed from TradeStalker.com (now defunct) always said "Every trade starts out as a scalp." I think you know what he means. If it doesn't go his way quickly, he scratched. He did his best to NOT let his emergency stop get hit.
Respectfully, this is like comparing apples and oranges: automated trading systems versus discretionary/point & click trading. If you're fully automated - you'd definitely want to trade multiple markets. And if successful - you'd eventually need it because of liquidity constraints. That's why Simons had to pay out external investors since they had grown too large to manage any more money.
Sorry to disagree.....if you trade only one market and it starts to "flatline", you're not going to make any money. Now if you are trading 4 markets, you have a much better chance that one of them is moving. Take CL for instance...today straight down.
I really like the "correlated markets" idea. It helps me so much to see all 4 going the same way. Likewise, if the market is going to stall, then one of the 4 often gives a heads-up. The disadvantage with multiple instruments, of course, is occupied screen real estate. Could I trade just one instrument, MES (best liquidity). Yes. I have. But sometimes one of the others is screaming far ahead up or down. I am going for the "high probability" trade. So I have learned to go with the biggest winner up or biggest loser down.