The issue isn't about surviving longer until you eventually die. Proper leverage via position size mangement gives you time to fix problems when you see small holes in the dam. The dam's purpose is to protect your little pond (trade capital). You can then go to work and plug those leaks you see in your dam. More time is needed if those leaks are via psychological reasons too. In an odd way, you're now forced to only trade 1 contract when in reality is what you should have been trading when you were @ 20k. If by miracle you can rebuild your account back up...stay @ 1 contract and as Overnight suggested...trade the micro MNQ futures only when volatility is like this...seriously. There's no shame in making a few hundred dollars here and there. Sometimes the hare win the race. wrbtrader
If you don't have an edge, yes. Better just get it over with, then. You've been overleveraged all the way. No doubt about it. Nothing has changed from that first post I'm quoting. I think deep down you're overleveraged because you know you don't have an edge and you're trying to get lucky on a few big wins. Successful trading is about consistency and compounding that consistency over the long term. Even if that consistency means small daily profits. Not wild equity swings where you're betting the farm each day and putting yourself in a position where you can actually lose 80 % of your account in one day. That's simply flat out gambling. You will blow it if you continue like you've been doing. When you lost 80 % in a single day, I knew you would lose the rest also. Not only that - but you're very emotional now and in a lot of pain. So, you will probably try to blow it just to be done with all this. I know it sucks to have invested all this time and money and have nothing to show for it. I've been there too. But don't blow your last bucks now. It IS money, although you may seem to think it's just numbers on a screen. Take a break and figure out your next step. Maybe it's better for you to do something else. If you want to pursue trading further, it's clear you need to do a lot more work before you do any more live trading. There are people on this site and elsewhere who have studied the markets for years and simulator traded (or with one contract only) for long periods of time before earning the right to size up. Good luck whatever you do.
I am positively surprised by the level of honest support here. Of course Hilmy83 might feel different about it because what several posters write is not what he wants to hear. And they are not sugarcoating his mistakes. But from the sidelines it is clear that all advice is 100% useful to him here. Hilmy83, the way I see it you have to choose between wanting to be a trader or giving up. If you choose the latter take the money that is left of if you have to gamble put it all on red. You will probably have better odds in the casino. If you choose to become a trader take some time off and let the good advice here sink in. Then start in the micros focused on plugging leaks and compounding consistent profits. Whatever you decide; thanks for this journal and your live streams.
I’ve been following you @hilmy83 for while and your strategy base is there. 2 things I noticed that probably damaged it is the mental stops and entering limit when you are looking for mean reversion. Why not look for confirmation when entering for mean reversion? Some of your reversion trades worked when price came back inside and you looked for a pullback. Yes, profit is reduced but at least you got a decent stop placement and confirmation too. I am not so sure about mental stops with your reversion strategy. VWAP is constantly moving. When you are in the red your profit is reducing slowly as well. When entering the trade why not simply see the range to VWAP and do a fixed 1:1 stop? If wrong, you are wrong, get out. Hoping it will come back is the issue. I like your transparency, very rare. So thanks and keep going.
These kind of emotions are natural given the circumstances. It is no more than a temporary setback, see it for what it is and get your shit back together. Don't know if you are a reader but there is a pdf kicking around that has nothing to do with trading. Worth skimming if you have the patience. The meditations of Marcus Aurelius. In short it is thought provoking on how to conduct your thinking in times of adversity. After all there is nothing more rewarding than the feeling of coming back from failure?
I am still not sure your problem is due to the flaws of your strategy or your deviating from your discipline.Did you have a conclusion? Did you try trading ES instead of NQ? I have been daytrading GBP/JPY but recently tried daytrading ES with the same method, with promising result.I have tried NQ but the result was not so good because SPX seems to be leading index.That means moves on ES are more decisive and moves on NQ tend to be false moves.
He has a problem with leverage, positions size management and volatility. It's not a good time to be switching to the Emini ES futures until he's backtested whatever trade strategy he's using to determine if Emini ES, micro MES futures, micro MNQ futures or whatever is more suitable. In fact, its not unusual to see highly successful traders switch to a different trading instrument or don't trade at all when market conditions change to high volatility or unusual volatility that they already have experience with not being able to manage trades in such. Yet, I strongly suspect there's a problem with the psychology. I'm just not sure about how much of that is impacting his trade decisions and trade management decisions after entry. Too many holes right now in his trading plan that he has to fix on his own because he doesn't reveal any statistics of his trade strategy to get specific help with it if he were to ask for such. Don't forget the purpose of his thread here...he stated it earlier in the thread...becoming a CME leasing member (B3). Oddly, the position size he was trading did not correlate with the account size...he was over-leverage and if I'm not mistaken...the CME membership requires them reviewing your trade history at the brokerage. If that's the case...they would have denied him membership or recommend he use their education tools at the CME Group website about proper leverage....something I wish all brokers would make a client take that course and answer the questions (pass the class) prior to trading with real money. In the old days, to become a CME member...you needed a recommendation from another current member. He may just goes down with the ship without giving any answers about his statistics and its odd that he has no live streaming videos on his biggest trade loss trading days during the increased volatility of August so far. Also, as stated a few times earlier...without the live streams on those key losing trading days...we can't see his position size management for each trade because there's no screenshots of timestamp trade fills in his broker trade execution platform. Yet, hats off to him for showing what he has shown for some of his trading days because most can not be that transparent. Yet, at the same time...he's clearly withholding info for whatever reason that would allow others (as in us the viewer) to see between the lines about what's really occurring in his trading beyond the obvious of over-leveraging. Its very similar to the problems he had in the high volatility trading month of December 2018 in which the only clues about his trading in that month is that he stated he lost 1/2 of his trading capital in one trading day during that particular month...a month that volatility broke out of a range of increasing volatility that occur earlier to the upside in October - November 2018. That alone reveals he's a consistent / profitable trader when volatility is normal or boring. Yet, when volatility is active and far above its mean...he can not resist the seduction of the volatility because it would require him to resist the lure of the price action making those big price movements. wrbtrader
Even if he blows up the last remaining capital, i can assure everyone that is not the last we heard from him, he will be back in MHO. It was not that he did not have an edge, it is just that he didn't really care much about trade management and was over leveraged. If he took it slow and utilized proper trade management he could have easily made it to 100K. I personally think we will see an improved version 2.0 of him in the coming few months. Especially with draw downs, you can be lucky 10 times but that 1 time you get unlucky it will make go you belly up. At some point you have to let trade go, for that you need to be rational and not emotional. Anyways i will look forward to the new and improved version 2.0 hopefully with all chinks taken care of in near future.
No, you probably never traded on parameters, so you don't understand what I meant. When I switch from GBP/JPY to ES, I just put up ES chart and put my parameters on it, and go over like past one month data.It did not take much more than half a hour to decide if the method is likely to work on ES. And it only take a few days before I can comfortably trade ES. Since he also trades on parameters, it should not take too much time for him to decide if ES is better than NQ .