EOD AUG 12 Halfway through both the profit target and number of days traded -- time to reduce the max. MES position to 10
I see that the Avg Winning PnL and the Avg Losing PnL are very small. Trying to increase the Avg winning PnL by holding the position longer can be very difficult. My personal experience is that taking bigger profits will increase the difficulty exponentially, or even faster than that. The more points you want to take the more difficult as you have to know further in future what the market will do. Example: if you make 1 points ES per trade and want to increase it to 2 points ES, the profit will rise 100%, but the difficulty will rise much more. I can give an example about the acceleration of a hypothetical car that might be easier to understand: 0-60 in 10 seconds needs 100 HP 0-60 in 5 seconds needs 300 HP 0-60 in 2.5 seconds needs 1000 HP So the difficulty grows exponentially faster than the net result.
The difficulty in gaining more points per contract per trade is when you try to squeeze from the same TF. Right now, my points per contract per trade are only in the single digits because as a day trader I am using the 1-minute chart. As a swing trader, I normally look at 1HR and higher. Using your HP example, you need to upgrade the car and add performance enhancers such as exhaust, suspension, computer chips, etc -- each upgrade makes the car essentially a "different" car and in some cases, you need an altogether brand new car to be able to safely reach your speed goals. Same thing with charts. If you want to extract more points, you can not use the same timeframe and same indicators -- this is the common mistake that traders make but don't realize.
I agree. You can probably still squeeze out a bit, but your actual system has limitations so at a certain moment you will have to switch to another strategy. That requires a lot of work and might even lead to starting from scratch again (but using you experience and knowlegde that you aquired already). Exactly. But that also means that the results from past trading can be completelly different. Like bigger profits, but also bigger losses. Less winning trades, but (hopefully) much higher avg profit per trade while avg loss per trade will not move in the same proportion. I would in each case not quit my job before that new system has proven to be solid. Even not if you would make 100K before switching to longer trades.
Let's first see how the "existing" strategy works a little longer before switching to another strategy. There is no reason to change something that needs no changing. The stats speak for themselves.