For me, it was really a process of elimination. Consistently finding what did not work, scrapping it but also holding on to what kinda worked and then whittling away from there. If I look at my system today, I sometimes think that it's fairly simple but getting to this point was a painstaking task that I believe most wouldn't have the time or energy for. It's not that I am super intelligent or anything, it's more a function of desire and persistence and motivation. I think that these sequences work pretty well because, within randomness (or perceived randomness), there are trends that form. Once I was able to objectively determine what a trend was, then I discovered that, more often than not, I was entering at opportune times during the pullback. Further testing revealed ways to refine my entries even more. The whole thing is really just a step by step process. A pain in the ass with no guarantees, but a rewarding journey nonetheless.
I was doing similarly to what you did as well. I got to the point where after filtering all the stuff that I came across, I'm left with nothing that works. At least now, I know what doesn't work for me. Thank you for sharing.
tangentShot Did you follow your trading plan to a reasonable degree? Doesn't matter if your plan is crappy. I followed a mostly useless trading plan for a while just as an exercise to follow it - It didn't make any money. I was just making my broker rich. Once I got the discipline to follow my plan, I started to tweak it and it gave decent results. Still not there yet.
He asked about a "huge majority", not our individual situations. There's no possible way for anybody to know about whether is a ''huge majority", so I just poked fun at his time here as a member.