IMO, you put your stop too tight - within the daily ATR (average true range) of the contract's previous day's closing price. You will have too high a frequency of STOPs. Looking at the attached5 min intraday chart (Dec 31 is the 2nd Monday), the previous day's close was ~843, the ATR is ~15, 843-15=828, at a minimum, I would keep any daily stops outside this range. As you can see ... yours was well with this range. Some traders use 2 x ATR. Yes, Pit Bull (Schwartz) used a 10 day ema, only traded one side (with the trend), and essentially entered towards the bottom of the range Previous Close - ATR, and exited towards the top of the range PreviousClose + ATR (on an uptrend). BTW, i don't think this style would be as effective (as i said in last post) with GC0802. A trend approach may apply to Metals at this point in time (see Curtis Faith new book "Way of the Turtle"). Pit Bull's style is may apply best to equities currently - not metals (as i said before). And Pit Bull's style is not for the casual trader (lunch at desk, planned bathroom breaks). danoxp (btw, not a "Vet")
That helps, thanks. A stop outside the ATR makes perfect sense. Why I didn't think of it at the time I don't know. Actually... I do know. I was doing the calculations in my head and playing the money and not the position. I just got the Natenberg book from Amazon last night and I am also realizing that I could have used an option strategy to mitigate the loss of unrealized profit which was inevitable after the big upswing that I caught. Whether or not there exist options on the mini-gold, I'm not sure, but I could have done some sort of hedging trade as opposed to just getting stopped out.
Is hitting your high water mark having a casual effect on your trading performance? Highly unlikely. There the most likely scenario is that your observation is just random noise. Sometimes you hit a new high and then get a pullback; other times it keeps going higher. Why do you think 2 observations give you enough data to work on? IMO your positioning should be based on your market assessment and your risk tolerance, not on day to day equity fluctuations. A market does not rise of fall just because you recently made some money.