I am still not being patient to wait for my set-ups. Yesterday I made 3 trades and 2 were losses and 1 was profitable for 9 pts. I should have only taken the third trade. Similarly, to day I made 4 trades and all were losers. I am just going to post my set-up and tell people what I am looking for so that people can follow more closely.
Please do. If it is simple enough, I may be able to code and test it for you. No promises. But I have a stable full of dead-horse loser systems that I can readily adapt. One of them might even be yours.
Don't despair, GS, and forget about the occasional trade that gets stopped and reverses (if it happens all the time, backtest indeed). Profit/result goals are not a good idea at all and will interfere with your trading. If you want to have an estimate of how much, based on backtesting, etc., you should be making, so that <i>over a long period of time</i> you can have a reality check on your system's expectancy, ratios, etc. that's fine, but feeling that you have to make X dollars per day, week, etc. will cause you to overtrade when you're not seeing the market clearly and to stop trading when you're up some amount, so that you won't "give it back". Edit: focus instead on process goals: not jumping your signals, taking every valid setup, going to bed early and waking up with plenty of time so you won't be sleepy, etc. Best trading to you.
Okay here we go. Although I started just using PA, I noticed that I could use an indicator to filter out good ones from the bad. I have 30 min, 5 min and 1 min chart. I have the CMF on the 5 min chart. Basically I want to see a divergence on the 5 min chart. Current 5 min has to have the same low or less than the previous 5 min bar but the CMF has to be either higher or same as the previous bar. The immedite next 30 min bar (2) has to have the same or lower low, then we'll buy after that low is broken. Entry: We'll wait for the low of the second 30 min bar to be touched and we'll buy after the 1 min shows some strength. We want the 1 min to be down but above the recent low.
In the above 5-min chart, we got a divergence at 7.00 cst (1). The next 30 min bar made a lower-low (2), and the next bar (3) made another low. Now we go to 1 min chart and at (4), 1 min had a down bar but the low was above the most recent low, so we buy at the high of 1 min bar. Exit is Three 30 min bar after the entry. So if we get in at 7.01 or 7.30, we'll exit at 9. This is not going to work on strong up days. We are buying sharp-pull backs with a 2 pt' stop and the reward is usually 10-20 points.
Here is another example from yesterday. At (1) we had the divergence. At (2) price made a lower-low. At (3) price went below the low of (2). At (4) we had 1-min make close below the open but above the low. At (5) we exit.
Here is the execution report. It is the third trade, the first 2 were my dumb mistakes for not being patient.