The real question is: Can YOU do better than a coin toss and/or can you come up with some rule set that does better than a coin toss in a reasonable backtest or forward-test?. You don't have to predict every outcome of a roulette wheel to make $. If you can rule out a number that will NOT come out (on average) you are breakeven, if you can rule out 2 numbers you are on your way. As also demonstrated here, standing aside and NOT trading some days, is a variation that improves over the basic method.
I completely understand that you want to increase the frequency of flipping, as that increases equity exponentially if you have an edge. The main trouble is that overcoming slippage and commissions is rather hard for a trade-once-a-day trading method for most people. (as demonstrated in this thread, and more so with increasing size). And your potential coin flipping every 5 minutes for instance...would yield a potential net total of 81 tics per day (RTH only) in costs to overcome, just to break even, and a full focus for hours, which is not easy to maintain. A titanic task to breakeven it seems to me. I have been receiving persistent coaching from someone I believe to be gifted at intraday trading with a no-nonsense method, and so far, I have failed miserably at the task of duplicating his results (not sim, not hindsight, not mental masturbation, but actual trading) despite my best efforts. I currently feel that the subjective-intuitive-experience component that each one brings to the mix is a crucial determinant of the final outcome, especially intraday trading.
You must provide proof that you are not a self-deluded and pathological liar or I must consider your post without value.
No no, why dont you prove it DOESNT bring in at least one extra tic per day? Why dont you backtest all of these suggestions, come back and tell us what increased your expectancy?
now, time to get serious. Here is the problem, the market is not 50/50 as a coin flip is. The fact is there is a small edge towards closing higher than the open on any given day. This means there are more up days than down days meaning your coin flip is not a good representation. In fact, you would be better off going long at the market open everyday than using just a coin flip. My suggestion, look at the prior day action, calculate the percentage from the open to the close. Calculate the average percentage for the past 1000 days. If the day in question has a higher percentage than the threshold, take opposite direction trade.
I edited this paragraph in the 8 year old rule set. Pt 2 was incorrectly stated as a trough. So substituted pt 3 for point 2 to make it correct. My thanks to our Sunday morning session which sets up the stock trades for the following week (PVT trading on a 4 to 6 day cycle, this fractal is 1/50th of the SCT fractal and both operae on the same foundation) and does the carryover for the SCT trading of the ES e mini the intrument of the 8 year old game.. Since I mentioned that the four team batting order was set up this am, I will passon the work results for teams A through D. Team A: sell IPI on monday and buy HGG for a five day hold. Team B: buy CFSG on Monday and sell on Thurday and buy TLEO at that time. Team C: buy IOC on Monday and sell on Friday and buy ULTA. Team D: On Monday buy ZUMZ and sell on Friday and buy TRLG. As a hilight, look at ZUMZ to see the recent R2R 2B 2R pattern used in the 8 year old game. Monday we continue the B2B. Note that the B2B 2R 2B in the preceding half cycle flowed quite nicely too. Also note how nice it was to pick up IPI by following the last Sunday's batting order. sorry about the pt 2 /pt 3 typo. Our two pinch hitters this week are BLKB and DCOM. I will post on how eliminating the cion flip comes into being based on deduction and the use of nested fractals which are tuned for the nesting. this will be ES oriented to stay on topic. As you will see the first calls of the day can be made well in advance and carving the turns of each call is done on the 8 year old still using volume but not having to flip a coin since the coin outcome would be known as a certainty. Only one account is needed until we adopt a AMT4SWA strategy for trading small blocks inside of large blocks which are tied to the market's bias. Is the plan to take the sophisitcation up about six levels one level at a time?
Of course you can. If you ever take the time to empirically study simple probabilities, you would realize the market is a bent coin (from a binary perspective). Predict heads every day and you will beat a fair coin. Big problem that no one seems to notice is that markets returns are not binary to begin with. Therefore, you are starting out with a poor analogy to begin with. Which would you prefer? 99 winning Coin tosses and one loss that netted 1 dollar? or 99 losing coin tosses and one win that netted 10 dollars? Before you waste any more time on the thread concept, I suggest you all think a bit about this perplexity, because it will hopefully give you a bit of enlightenment.
Translation... There are (keeping it simple) two major issues: 1. Up/down days don't occur in 50/50 ratio. 2. The movement of a "typical" down day is not -1 * the movement of a "typical" up day. Ie, the absolute value of the expectancies does not match. #1 can be dealt with in a couple of easy ways. #2 is Alice's rabbit hole
Take a look at the compound interest formula. Where is margin in the picture? It is the capital being compounded. How does that grow? In two ways: the profit per trade and the number of cycle per unit time (or the speed of making those profits. Since it is possible to trade under conditions of certainty, it is a great idea to apply all profits to the margin and run margin at max. The above comment is antithetical to you. To others it is not. At some point in trading you get to have orders filled with partial fills. the reason is that you are trading with a number of handles that is above average. If aperson averages 6 partial fills per trade, does that have a meaning? It does. It means he is making more profit per trade that the average trader. Do you have losses when trading? If not, it means you have learned which side of the market is the right side. One consideration of trading is being on the right side of the market. the 8 year old trading game is on the right side 2 out of three time when flipping a coin. So the OP has decided to not flip coins, almost. He may get to that point soon. He will get there when he discovers how to determine the right side of the market. when he does then he make profits on doing turns. as each turn makes a profit, he is entitled to use more contracts since he gets more margin. Keeping track of the contracts a person can trade is a good idea.