At least he didn't lie about "patterns"... when someone starts with that crap I cringe.. Some of us may a nice living off of 'those patterns'.
I am way late to this thread, but for God's sake people...Stop with the damned ES ES ES! Why in the hell is the ES the only thing new traders want to do? WTF is that shit? Dudes, there is more out there in the trading world than the bloody ES! ES ES ES ES ES ES ES ES ES ES ES ES ES ES ES ES ES ESES ES ES ES ES ES ES ES ESES ES ES ES ES ES ES ES ESES ES ES ES ES ES ES ES ES. This is the only thing the new traders seem to want to talk about. ES. Jesus bloody Christ! Stop with the ES shit, man! ES is not all that! Try some LIVE, REAL LIFE REAL MONEY trading and you will know that ES is not the bees knees! OK?!?!?!? OMG you people and your ES addiction! What, is it laced with heroin or something? ES ES ES... Just ENOUGH already with the ES! P.S. Anyone who gives me any argument about liquidity is in for a knock-down drag out fight. Just don't go there. If you do, be prepared for a bloody face.
Am an old trader and I found that if you specialize worked for me, so what do I mainly trade? Y ES. LOL I prefer over forex for scalping and other index futures do not have enough volume that I require. Granted Eurodollars certainly has massive volume but often times it does one tick for hours. I found that each market has it's own personality, just easier for me to scalp what I do. NQ at $5 bucks a tick is better for younger traders to learn, YM and Russell are too litely traded so it jumps around great deal more. Crude is good market and knowledge is king. Well, all my automation for day trading don't use hard stops at all, so I wouldn't even know what R:R would be. I never learned R:R to be worth any consideration as R:R is a dream of what people would like to make. I make very low per trade from 1-2.5 ticks and always have an "Uncle" stop where obvious system exits, and yes, has some bad days when trading goes out of cycle, always worse than on good days. And yes, I still average down limited on all trades, overall works to degree I require. Certainly not a get rich quick system. Are there any get rich quick methods, am sure there are, but no one would ever disclose but I bet it is a KISS method.
so are you saying your "uncle billy bob" stop is a mental belly up stop, not a hard stop? Or is it a hard stop placed at the outer limits of your system? What do you see as the difference in averaging down and scaling in?
They must have forgotton to fedex them to him. He is in a bad mood. ES must be digging in his billfold.
No stop at all but system has hard coded rules based on swing projections(Elliot waves from #1 to #5), so based on "normal" waves, so protective stops change on every few ticks, system assumes it will have a retracement in which system has good attempts to exit with a gain. One studies swing movements and Time movements long enough, you can see retracements right after trend changes and so much time needed, my system has multiple trends, delays, has complex movements that I have trouble manually trade, many rules cause face it, there are many patterns that tells us beforehand what will happen most likely, so like one of several "edges" are knowing the percentages tested over much data over fifteen years. Being it is a scalping system, over 20,000 sample size on each signal, each averaging down position taken. If you can get your risk(losing percentages) down low enough and if cost effective, and if your testing shows it very doable to average down, why not? Say you have a system that loses 15% of the time(only 1% are full losses and remainder are much less) , is profitable 50% and 35% it make 0-1 tick, so to ave down, 85% or higher profitable trades as perhaps many losses lose 1-4 ticks which is the amount of ave down is, so gains will always be few more ticks and losses are few less ticks. I get so many many signals to enter, your "scaling in" not necessary. System seeks a certain profit and shuts down, being a pig in trading not worth risk to me. Have a partner now who can code the impossible quickly. Most of systems I have built have a formula of not having protective stops but it does have an "Uncle stop area" and if market is running fast, no orders are placed cause I will get creamed, fast markets movement often do the same, so not looking to get out at extreme bottoms and often will completely reverse. Half of the systems are SAR, stop and reverse are the intent, but times out of the market, might sound like an insane way to trade, but it works for me and all that counts. You listen to enough people on this forum of what can't be done, pretty soon you are testing nothing. And account is well capitalized, size traded is based on percentages of full averaged in so size at levels can change based on each trade. Trading is about 99% back testing and 1% trading, pre-surgeons watch and very slowly evolve into an experienced surgeon, baseball players start some at 6yo and evolve, some become incredible good and other good enough to make the team and still make millions.