I just came out of my 9 loser in a row streak at the beginning of the week. Placing the 10th trade was a major psychological struggle. Thankfully, it was a winner and my system has been back on track since then. I'm using like 1:1.5 risk:reward ratio intraday trading so its like around 55-60% losers while the other 40-45% are winners which I might trail to 2-3 times reward ratio if it gets trendy. 0.6^9 = 0.01 Woah, it was a 1% chance that I got stuck in that streak. -_-''' To further aggravate the problem I just experienced a 5 loser in a row streak the week before. Is there like anyway to avoid losing streaks or its like part and parcel of trading like? Whats the max number of losers you guys experienced before in your trading career? I'm tweaking my position size so the next 9-in-a-row-loser don't give me a heart attack. :eek:
hey, even sammy sosa has a bad season once in a while. even the Yankees have a string of losers. But they always fight back, homey.
No matter how many trades I make, and how much data keeps piling up that my method works, the losing streaks still really beat me down. I guess it helps that my records show previous losing streaks overcome. Still, I'm working hard on being more dispassionate, in winning and losing.
"Is there like anyway to avoid losing streaks or its like part and parcel of trading like? Whats the max number of losers you guys experienced before in your trading career? I'm tweaking my position size so the next 9-in-a-row-loser don't give me a heart attack." Sounds like you need a new strategy bad. Good luck.
If I may offer an opinion. Assuming your method is still viable, you have a judgment call to make: to continue using your method "as is," or to adjust it in such a way that it generates fewer, and presumably more reliable, signals. The trade-off, of course, is that you will more than just occasionally filter out some fairly decent moves in your effort to enhance signal quality. That's just the way it goes, all else being equal. I'm sure you know that. So you have to decide what is more important to you going forward: to catch most of the "good" moves and risk catching a lot of potentially debilitating crap along the way, or risk missing some important moves in an effort to enhance the reliability of your method. Retrospectively, it is always an easy call to make assuming you have nerves of steel. Going forward, however, it is always far more murky. Personally, I favor reliability because I simply do not have the intestinal fortitude to be casual about many losses in a row. It is just not in me. I would revert to serious navel gazing if that were to occur. Turning this potential weakness of mine into a positive, I find it easier to leverage on a really good setup if I am justifiably confident about my method's overall reliability. But that's just me and my opinion. Of course, I will be the first to agree that this summer has been fairly "challenging" to date insofar as the indexes are concerned.
May I suggest you re-examine your win/loss ratio with respect to it's importance in being profitable. I'll give you an example: Monday I traded 23 orders (This was about 10 actual stock positions taken while scaling in/out). My batting average = .100 No kidding. I struck out nine times in a row (closed 9 losers in a row) with about 25-100 dollar loss in each case. I was down 600 in the first three hours of the day in realized PnL. The one winner I got made itself known early and I kept adding to it. My eventual position was worth about 1.3k at one point and I closed it for a 950 gain. In general, my winners are maybe 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 because I cut losses very quickly. Having many small losers in a row is good trading IMO - it means you are excersizing solid discipline and getting out without hesitation. Mike
You should consider the probability of having the number of losing days you've had in the last 10,20,30 and 50 trades. If all these numbers are that bad, you should reconsider the validity of your edge.