I am honored to be grouped with SML. Strictly speaking I am not his pupil because I don't use his recipe, none of those channels, lines... I borrowed the concept of R:R < 1, grab profits quick, TR, averaging down, etc. and set up my own recipe. To be honest, we are after different things, you fixated on his credibility, I focused on if the approach/method has merits. I bet you never even analyzed his system and simply jump to your conclusion that since you do not trust him his system must not be good. A true professional never does that.
They don't like me because I speak up for Trump and neither of them can stand Trump so they can't stand me. That is quite clear. LOL But that is their problem not mine. They down Trump but just listen to their yap. IMO a lot worse than Trump Yap. They don't like you because you stand up for me. There is no winning this. They will also argue against any thing we say or do.
That may very well be true, however, just because you don't have formal students doesn't mean there are not people here who's literally studying your 'techniques' thinking it will make them rich. I just think it would be fair to manage people's expectations. From what I've understood you're a retiree, so maybe you're just playing the markets on small size as a hobby? That's very different from actually making serious money from the markets. Again, I don't know. Only speculating because you're not transparent about your results. Exactly what do you mean by this? What are you warning them against? Pursuing day trading to begin with? Knowing very well how difficult day trading is and the enormous amount of time and dedication it takes just to become marginally profitable, I find it very hard to recommend the pursuit of this to anyone. Hence why I tend to suggest to people that they give up and do something better with their lives. Invest your money or swing trade (less time intensive, more profit potential and less opportunity for f**king up).
Stay small see how your equity curve is like in a year see if that's the way you like to trade, a 50%+ drawdown will come one day and take away months of your profit. I used to trade like that. Sometimes adding size after each losing trade. 99% of the time I can scalp my way to green even I am deep in a hole, I like it when I have no losing days for weeks. But twice in a year I would experience 50%+ drawdown. This killed my confident and quit this way of trading. By reading the thread I know that OP is a pretty experienced trader reading PA, but I am curious on how often he gets a drawdown day, because I am sure it happens. Showing winning day is easy because the system has high winrate, what's even more important is how many days to recover from drawdown.
Exactly. The problem is that if you're experienced this actually works. But by the law of large numbers you're bound to one day take the mother of all losses unless you have extremely well defines rules and risk controls to lock you out. Another user that I don't need to name who ran a journal here, posted daily small green gains for at least 6 months and everyone thought he had it all figured out. The inherent problem was that he went into deep intraday drawdowns (like 3 weeks of profit) routinely just to grind out a small green day. Eventually, he went bust or at least lost all his gains on just a few red days. This was also pointed out in advance by other users, but ignored of course.
Thank you for the constructive post. This is what we need to have a meaningful discussion instead of simply calling him and me names and said we are full of shits without providing a counterpoint. You are absolutely right about a black swan wiping us out. It is a real risk and my number one fear. One major difference between me and @volpri, I trade stocks without leverage whereas he trades futures with significant leverages. It is hard to get wipe out in a day if I go flat every day trading names without margins. I am also using Kelly. I have scaled up to $10K a trade now and if that continues to work next step is to scale to my size. Take care.
You are right, I can't argue with that because even for me it is very tricky and very judgmental to make it work. I have no idea if it will continue to work in the future either. Let me ask you, how many new day traders on ET, applying the conventional way, high R:R, risk control, let profits run.... didn't get wipe out? My guess, 1 in a hundred? On this side, I can only honestly speak for myself and have to take their words, I, @volpri and SML, 3 out of 3 successes.
The failure rate for day trading is likely very high no matter what you do. I'm not sure that what you say is the conventional way is the conventional way, though. That was what I was trying to communicate in that other thread of mine, i.e., understanding the math behind what it is you're trying to do. In the real world I don't think many would buy a lottery ticket for $500 if the ticket gave a very high chance of winning $100, but a small chance you'd lose your $500. Yet, that is what so many seem to want to do in trading. It seems a bit irrational in my world.
Actually you got still get wiped out, by that I mean big drawdown not literally wiped out. For this method to work you need to trade small at first then add when trade against you to take advantage of the probing action of the market. Say you start with 10 shares then you start adding 20 40 80 160..... So if scale up, you need much bigger account size. When things are not working, it could becomes a disaster. What % of your account did you risk on your initial position? Keep on and give us update, would be interesting to see how one handle the drawdown period which I didn't see volpri discuss