That screenshot tells me that Zen Student does not understand the cycles in the market like he would put it himself. Anyone who`s been paying attention knows that Blotto or Zen Student is merely repeating the stuff he read from Cheese without adding anything new to the flavour beyond unwarranted condescension. Incidentally, I highly recommend the posts from Cheese which contain extremely valuable lessons both about trading and life. People who are not familiar with Cheese will quickly see the same as I upon reading his posts.
Update for week 3 ending Apr 13, 2012 : -900$ for the week. Miscalculation of stop point and then few losing trades in a row took my account intra-week below 2k, finally ended the week at 2100 USD. When account is very close to 2k, it requires extreme patience to take those 3 trades in succession which can't go wrong as just 1 or 2 bad trades can take the account below 2k and if it stays there, it means more funds must be added to the account to comply with IB's minimum capital for trading to continue. Finally, my internet is fine - a cable had cut and they came and fixed it. Weekly Stats: 1. Week PL: -900 2. Start Equity: 2900 3. End Equity: 2100 4. Maximum equity run-up: 2900 5. Max Win day as % of that day's start equity: 10% 6. Max Loss day as % of that day's start equity: -19% 7. # of Systematic Trades missed: 0 8. # of Trades other than Systematic Trades: 0 Below stats are from Journal start day: 1. Total PL: -400 2. PF: 0.84 3. RoI: -16% 4. Max. DD: 36% 5. Current DD: 29% 6. # of winning days 40%, # of losing days 60% 7. Av. win day: 15% 8. Av. Loss day: -10% 9. Sharpe: -0.24
I'm not sure why you say you plan to run your risk close to Kelly. Given you had a negative record in the past, combined with the flaws of Kelly with regards to trading. I'd say you should stay far away from Kelly as possible. I'd probably be paper trading if I were you
You should probably cut your losses and go straight to sim until you can demonstrate at least 3 consecutive months of profitable sim trading. Think about it for a second, if you can't even be profitable on sim then you have no business trading with real money......what you may find is that you will never be able to get profitable...but...at least you didn't use your real capital to find that out......
Fair advice so let me do a quick reply: I maintained a separate account for sim on which I ran just my strategies and I was profitable 6 months out of 6 months. My last journal was not positive because I included strategies + discretionary. So I was net negative on discretionary. This journal is pure systematic - so no reason it won't be positive.
I plan to reduce risk after I am able to runup the account say 10x or so. Number one reason is I am starting with a very small account so even if close to kelly leads to losses, it wouldn't have any effect on my living standard. Point to note is that I need to be extremely unlucky to blowup using Kelly because that fraction is based on worst DD of last 10 yrs which is around 90% DD. With current risk, I would have around 20-25% DD every month, and occasionally say 50% DD (say once every 4 months). I am betting that I won't get to a 90% DD within 1st 6 months (Agreed it can happen - who knows). After 6-9 months or so I do plan to reduce the risk maybe to half of kelly.
Where did you get the systematic strategy?If you came up with them yourself I'd say they correlate with the discretionary since they are both the product of a person's intellect trying to beat the market. I'd be quite skeptical of systematic systems for foreign exchange markets, they are the hardest markets to trade
Yes came up with them myself. Took hundreds of hours of research and playing with data (making sure not doing much datamining) and many thousands of dollars in losses (when I was very new). As per your point that FX markets are hardest markets to trade, I found them easier to trade compared to ES. I haven't traded stocks so can't comment on that. But yes looking at number of traders on ET who trade stocks profitably, it does seem that trading stocks would be easier than trading FX. Thanks for stopping by on my journal btw
If you are counting on money that you have outside this account then I myself wouldn't call this trading close to kelly, because you know you will put more money in the account in case it goes to $0 Effectively you will be trading under kelly