if you can hold your winning position for one day, you can break even. if you can hold your winning position for consecutive three days, you will be rich.
Quite true, though it depends on what you're trading of course sometimes there just isn't enough velocity in the market those days so you have to wait longer and you of course have to time it right and make sure you buy or sell correctly.
How do you know in advance that it is a winning position? In hindsight, everything looks obvious. A 2-day winning position cna turn into a huge loss by day 3, for example. Unless you got an edge you did not follow.
I agree with you. My modest experience also shows that anyway one has to take the losses. The issue of that is to squeeze as much as possible the winners, as a lemon, when they come.
I have not been trading too long but I am finding I am too much of an optimist. I am always hoping for the larger profit and miss out on the take and have to wait for another opportunity. I need to convince myself into the thought that it's better to lament having left a larger profit on the table and live to trade another day with a slightly larger account than to waste time hoping for a bigger cash out. I really need to hone my skill on gauging the stock's range intraday and stop thinking about going for the "big" kill on every trade. Just this past week I have missed out on taking in $4k [no kidding!] simply because I could not wean myself from the thought that the stock will run higher than where it was.
I would be very leary of your backtest, i ran into similar scenarios backtesting trending stocks a long time ago when i just started trading, and i thought i had found the grail, until i realised i was using my backtest on stocks which had already trended thus producing a result which was obviously heavily skewed, and meaningless, this kind of statistic will most likely be proven wrong when traded in real time. You have to remember that when testing how to get in on future plays your test must always anticipate something, i.e. it has tof igure out whether or not something is a winner or loser before the three days, not after. Now if your test was something along the lines of looking at every single trade you took, and testing whether or not you are more profitable holding for three days vs. holding for one day then you are on to something. I constantly test time vs positions which i take to figure out whether or not on average i should hold stuff longer or close it out sooner, but the only way to test this is to test ALL your trades vs. testing just your winners or just your losers. Or else you have to test knowing that if it ever goes down by x% it is a loser no matter what, otherwise you dont ever know whether or not a trade is a winner or a loser until you close the position.