You try to press the market into some kind of virtual corsage that does not exist in reality. Trying to find some rigid rules, so that you can start confident into the day, kind of knowing what will happen, what you can expect. Trying to tame the market. It might work for a while, until the market changes its face again and will wipe you off the table. This kind of stuff might work for the big players that can go for very small inefficiencies with tightest profit margins. For us retail traders, I do not see much sense in this. Invest the time and effort to learn how to trade. To understand and feel the shortterm dynamics of a market. Start to learn how to be flexible and adapt to what you see happening right now, right in front of you, which is basically changing every single day. Your numbers look nice to me, but I do not believe that it will look as good a few months from now with an approach based on a few simple rules.
As has been said... 1) you can not bank on a statistically perfect sequence of W/L 2) The total population of trades needs to be analyzed for streaks of win and lose, and also remembering the meaning of "average", some higher some lower, as applied to dollar figures. Method #1... 2 average losing trades BACK-TO-BACK requires a streak(back-to-back) of 3 average wins to get to breakeven or better... a streak(back-to-back) of 4-plus average wins or more to make ANY profit! Method #2... 2 average losing trades BACK-TO-BACK requires a streak(back-to-back) of 4 average wins to get to breakeven or better... a streak(back-to-back) of 5-plus average wins to make ANY profit. If you think 2 average losing trades back-to-back is unrealistic, then I wish you all the best in your future endeavors. Thanks for the convo. Otherwise... I'm sure there is some mathematical formula that does this but I'm not that smart... I'm sure someone else will come along and offer a more straight forward or more "educated" answer... or just rag and rant on me, whatever. What I do know for sure is that Wins and Losers occur in random sequence, no matter what we want to believe. W/L Percentage taken over a large population is meaningless and misleading without knowing the makeup(streaks) of that population.
Times have changed, but I believe some things never change ... Maybe you will be able to find something useful for your trading in these articles about trading legend Tom Baldwin: https://www.cigaraficionado.com/article/hedging-stress-7471 https://www.turtletrader.com/borish-baldwin/
Thanks tiddlywinks, I think I understand what you mean. Let me make sure I understand. Basically, with my losses being bigger than wins, if I hit a streak of +4 losses, I am trouble and will run into issues (emotions, etc.) and hard to get back breakeven? I am working on decreases does losses.
Mention of emotions takes the discussion to a different level. I am looking at numbers and likelihoods (probabilities). Method #1: 1.33 loss for one dollar won. Method #2: 1.80 loss for one dollar won. Try breaking your 420 trades into 42 sets of 10 trades. Or 4.2 sets of 100. See how, if at all, those sets differ from your total population W/L percentages. Of course you want the trades in consecutive order, not cherry picked. That's something that gets buried in the total population result. It's even possible that the total population result was caused by a only handful of sets, maybe during the starting or ending sets! Also note the "streaks"... whats your average win streak? Average loss streak? Many other useful tidbits of data in there too, much of which is conducive to improvement of trading. If you are going to play the W/L percentage game, you have to at least understand how it works within your own methods.
Thanks tiddlywinks, I understand what you are saying. The only game I want to play is the making consistent money game.
Absolutely. It's evident in my own trading. I keep taking 10 small steps forward, then one or two larges ones back, and I'm back at the start line. Someone here once mentioned that it is typical piker trading, and I'm ashamed to say, I've become one because I thought I learned my lesson in this bull market...Pullbacks or corrections quickly resolve themselves. But Q4 last year proved me wrong. Now I find any moderate pullback to be a potential 3+month affair, and cannot follow what I trained my mind to do.