Oh for crying out loud, I should have thought of this right off the bat. The reason it is hard to scalp es at $5 rt is simply the rt is fixed. one handle rt is 10% of profit. 2 handles rt is 5%, the more handles the smaller the cut. and like I said, at one tick, IB is darn near a 50/50 partner. So how much is your accuracy going to improve as you drop down to smaller and smaller targets? It better improve exponentially because the rt percentage sure is increasing exponentially against you as you narrow things down. If you think of the first tick as cost, but everything after that toll free trading, you might want to hang on a little longer.
I'm a doctor not a math professor. It's like if your brain stays the same size but your head keeps getting smaller, pretty soon there won't be any room in your head left for anything but your brain.
ok, lets say my target is 1 piont NQ i get $20, when i win, $5 are going to IB. i need to achieve a 80% hit rate, otherwise i will drop it. my avg loser is 1.5, my avg winner 1.0. on 100 trades, this looks like: winner 80p x $20 = $1600 looser 20p x $30 = $600 comm = $500 net = $500 per contract so, the question is: how long will it take to make 100 trades for 1 contract ? i would say it takes 10 days or more. the paper so far.... ...in real trading the whole thing will turn out like: looser 20 x 1.5 avg winner 60 x 1.0 avg b/e 20 net = $100 per contract lets see
well far be it from me to say what's possible and what's not, but generally speaking, 80% hit rate is considered unsustainable. Try it with 50% hit rate and 1 to 1 win loss ratio, and then you will see where you need to go from there. You can either try to improve hit ratio or try to improve reward to risk ratio. Under the guidlines of acceptable scalping practices as outlined in the rules and regulations for trading and horse betting, the rule of thumb is 3 to 1. Now, if you were to eliminate the 1 pt target and perhaps replace that with a 1.5 trailing stop, you might hit a big winner. BUT...if it takes a big winner to make your system work, why even bother trying anything else? It would be best to focus on what works. At some point, you are going to have to break some rule, because the way they have it set up, if you play by the rules you lose.
with 25 contracts 5 days a week 52 weeks a year, it's $83,200. If you want me to work out any more complex formulas for you, just let me know. I'm pretty good with a calculator.
what i have in mind is something like: 5 trades per day, 4 winner, 1 looser. a specific method, that selects high probability trades. just points, where the probability is 80%, that price will make 2-3 ticks in your direction. thats all...i dont know, if this is working in real. i know that you can hear from everyone, that this is a fools game, trying to aim for a high hit rate + and trying to pick tops/bottoms. its the definite foolsgame for everyone that is soaked with the teresa lo-linda raschke gameplan. im trough with that
What about holidays? Remember there are no holidays on globex. Sure, it's not that liquid, but you make it up on the spread. Like right now both the bid and the ask are 908.50.