Just really quickly. You have the makings of a great system. Record your trades everyday, record the $ made/(loss) as well. Tally them up for the week and see what trend emerges (it's going to be positive). Start studying risk and money management, so that you'll have a pretty good idea of when to add contracts and how to management them as you add on size. Keep good records and review them every weekend, your mind will start figuring out a lot of this stuff for you. Keep good records. The potential in this system is as clear as day to me. Good trading, Jimmy Jam
I agree with you 100% JimmyJam. If you do this approach Jasper, I'd suggest recording the max. profit potential for each trade too so if you decide to scalp you can figure out an average max. profit to shoot for with each signal. As I mentioned previously in this thread, I trade a similar system and have attached the tallied results looking at the charts each day. System is currently in a drawdown however. I don't want to get into the details. I'm just posting this to show the results of a very similar system to encourage Jasper and others. I realize one could argue that 3 months of backtesting data does not sufficiently show anything...
Here's the same system but improved by applying a couple filters based on studying the data and attempting to optimize. Could this be curve fit? Sure - time will tell going forward...
Hi Jasper, Good on you for starting and continuing with your journal. Maybe it would be helpful to see next week as an experiment: - take all the system's signals; - exit (stopping & reversing) exactly as the system indicates; - use no discretion; - focus on a complete week as a performance period, rather than an individual day or indeed string of trades. While I think there some value in the above, feel free to throw this idea straight out of the window. All the best, AM
The day speeded up right quickly on this one. If you caught the trade, you are doing the process as required. If you didn't you should page back through your trades and see where you've missed the big move previously. It's going to take a certain type of psychology to trade this system, because 80% of the wins are going to come from 20% of the trades. Make sure you do the mental preparation before your trading day. JJ
You might want to think about using a reference point on which to base the direction in which you initiate a trade. For example: Using a Woodie's Pivot Point (the main one) as a reference point, take all LONG cross-overs which are ABOVE the Pivot Point and take all SHORT cross-overs which are BELOW. This will begin to get you focused on seeing the patterns of the market as they unfold and get you out of the mindset that price action is random (it isn't). So try it out, put a woodie's pivot point on your charts and review the price action for the last couple of weeks or so, i think you'll be pleasantly surprised *** Otherwise you're just flipping back-and-forth which you actually could make money with, but you would most definitely have to take every flip of the coin, and I don't think you're willing to do that, at least I haven't seen that to be the case in your journal. Good trading, JJ
Here's an example of the logic and thinking (examples.xls) While these trades will not happen everyday, you will certainly get enough opportunities 3 or 4 days out of the week, and you will begin to develop a consistent mindset where you are prepared to take action based on your strategy for trading the markets, using your volatility cross tactic to enter, hold and exit your trades. Good trading, Jimmy Jam
Jasper, I don't see a plan to take profits here... (which may be the problem) could you elaborate on your exits? And to filter out some of the bad trades, try only taking trades in the direction of say the 15 minute or 60 minute trends - it will cut your losers in half... And is your stop too tight? Thanks, Paul