I do miss trades now and then. Of course, the ones I miss are the ones which end up making the highest return. I guess when I said before that my confidence was unshaken I meant unshaken in the fact that I do not doubt whether or not I can succeed ultimately. I am not, however, that confident in my strategy.
Here is an exercise. Go over your brokerage statements and figure out the total amount of commissions and fees you have paid during the time you have been trading. Then compare this number to the amount of your total loses expressed as a %. Next, do this same exercise again, but this time add 12.50 (bid-ask spread) * total number of trades to the amount you have paid in commissions and fees. Once again, compare this number to the total amount of your loses, expressed as a %. This will give you an idea of if you are basically just throwing darts (losing transaction costs) or are actually making trades that actually have a negative expectation beyond that.
do this when you want to buy -instead sell- then place a buy 2 sar some amount you determine above like 2 points. be sure and move the stop down as you make money from the sell. this is a quick easy no pain way to be right in the wrong direction. paper it and see how it works.
You're still experimenting (in the R&D phase), so avoid live trading until you have a plan, applied the rules to 500 appearances of your chosen setups and logged the results, then practiced in demo mode until you're consistently profitable and stick with your plan. I manually backtested. I had a core setup and a method of entry and with my spreadsheet open I logged the stats surrounding every entry. The only filter during that phase was no trades withing 10 minutes of a major news release. Every appearance of the core setup had to be logged and evaluated. Do you know the win rate % and risk:reward ratio of your pin bar strategy applied to, say, 500 appearances of the setup?
No, because I have not back tested that much. My trading method has a built in reward/risk ratio of about 3:1. I'll back test further. I'll back test to 500 occurrences.
Pin bars, engulfing etc should be used in context of support and resistance. Bar closes inside and outside of key levels are even more important IMO. NoDoji has the best advice as usual. Ignore the rest of the dicks on here. They're just taking their week out on you.
Its gambling and you are trading against computer generated systems which cause big whip saws that cause stops. You will make more money working at walmart, trust me.
I feel like I am good at identifying these support and resistance levels. Maybe I am not as good at it as I think. Would you suggest a way I might get better at it? A book or something that you found helpful.