I am the supreme master of making mistakes...both common and uncommon. Unfortunately I have to live through them and experience the pain of stupidity for myself and cannot simply learn from what every successful trader ever repeats constantly.
Choppy channel, not CL on Friday? Guess which was the right setup to trade - 1,2, 3,4,5 or 6? Hint it wasn't 1,2,3,4 or 6. Can you tell why?
my not making money on thursday or friday was so much more proof than needed to tell me something is bad wrong in my trading. luckily i had enough sense to reduce my size to 1/10 and start experimenting. Essentially, after taking a step back and objectively looking at everything I was making some obvious mistakes. 1. The vast majority of my discretionary calls are absolute dog poop...I need more structure/clearly defined strategies. 2. My execution is better than it use to be but still needs improvement. I truly do well on honoring stop losses...exits don't really cause me pain at all anymore but I was trading way too much size and unable to accept more than a 5-10 tick MAE so of course had a high loss rate as result. -> I've been collecting data on ETD and MAE during the live trade...its tedious but its giving a reasonable picture of where to place structural SL or max ETD for my particular setups. Its pretty surprising how much I will realistically have to risk for chance to get a good roll of the dice. But I am able to accept it before entering because i have confidence in the numbers. As of now I have 3 daily setups and usually only 1-2 trigger. 3. I was using the wrong time frame as well as type of candle. I started using HA candles a long time ago because I use to focus on trend trading the daily chart and I do feel they offer some advantage for this but intraday they conceal some pretty useful information. When backtesting 15min candles some very obvious looking entries/exits would have (in reality) severely menaced your ETD/MAE numbers when live(a) and what looks like significant odds in hindsight just was not panning out live as trend bars morph into dojis etc...Bars IMO are better for me 4. retested and trimmed some useless indicators that produced no above average predictive value -and- stop trading P/L (such a frightened, worthless thing to do). Results are the name of the game though so well see this next week. I'm feeling pretty sincere about the work but am aware that I could be sincerely...wrong lol. PS. i cant really say based on your chart, but my entry would have been long at $74.14 (worst price). It will be my third entry of the session (after 2 failed), and upon entering I would be down -32 ticks on the day. Friday was an incredible opportunity to make money and I completely shit the bed.
1, 2, 4 & 6 were against the main trend of the day - so longs only on Fri. #3 would have been fine but I like to see a close above high of swing low before entering. So train left without me on that one. Also it didn't close below BBand (which BTW is 3 sigma displaced 3 spaces to the right) first before being followed, within next 3 bars, by an up close. Which leaves #5 close below BBand, an up close next, then a trade above high of up close bar.
I had a 35% win rate last month and still made money. Don't necessarily get scared off by a low win rate. It sounds like I am similar to you in the sense that I've never had a problem honoring my stops. I don't widen them or trade without them. That is a huge mental/personality advantage to start out with. But the way I use it is like an anvil, and my hammer is "small losses". Then its about knowing when to swing the hammer, and how hard to swing it. Not fucking around with stops is one of the few "gifts"/advantageous predispositions I came to trading with. But it was useless until I got over trying to chase high win rates/patterns/perfect entries. I have some journal posts here from over a year ago that make me cringe to look at now lol. I can see I was just sitting there in the dark waiting for patterns to randomly occur. Just glancing over your stuff, I see a fair amount of self-critiquing on your execution and "performance" type stuff. But what I don't see is any mention of time of day or context of where the market is and how it is structured. Like with your problem about how to find the end of a choppy zone and catch the larger move...if you know what tends to happen at what times of day, and if you know whose stops are getting ran or just recently got ran, it can help out a lot with that. I guess what I am trying to say is, you recognize that you need more structure. But it can't be just arbitrarily imposed structure/rules for your behavior, or random pattern classification/entries. It needs to be actual structure. The easiest jumping off point I can think of is the fact that NY lunch hour often tends to be choppy/slower. If you have been watching the market for a while, you probably know and recognize that. I used to sit there too scared to trade all morning and then buy the first cute, safe looking pullback at exactly 11:53 NY time lol. Then I would blame the resulting loss on my lack of aggression to jump on the trend earlier, and lack of discipline to stop overtrading after I took that first loss at 11:53. Now, I just don't trade at 11:53 NY time. There are lots of other important times like that. Similarly with important prices like the low or high of the london session. Or the previous day's RTH closing price. Time of day (and day of week, etc) and structure are soooo important, but I used to be too stubborn to accept that.
Man some of the stuff you said ^^^ sounds exactly like what I've gone through recently. What I've done at this point is create a simple way to force myself into the first major move of the day. I don't always catch it early and often the winning trade is third entry POOP (sometimes down more ticks upon entering than I fully recover) but I am at least on the right side of the 1st of 1~3 largest moves of the day. Once in, maintenance and exit signals come into play. Of course this is in hindsight fantasy land but it looks pretty good...the best that I can do at least. I do truly believe Execution will be everything beyond this point.
Well, learning when stop runs tend to happen can help a lot with that issue. I bet a lot of those failed attempts are in those time windows where stop runs usually happen. I think its easier to just wait for everyone to get blown the fuck out like clockwork and just transact with them. Just my thoughts on it, because I sense that self-directed crucible you might be trying to run yourself through when it might just be that you are missing some familiarity with the repeated tendencies of ES to meander around filling orders in places/times where they tend to accumulate.