Thank you wintergasp. Yes, this is what I have been doing, forward testing as my system depends on me drawing my own support and resistance level the day before trading. I need to figure out how to automate me calculating resistance and support level from past historical data. Thanks
Thanks for your insight and response Overnight. Can you explain what you mean by "because you have lost sight of the goal." I definitely don't want to waste time and use my energy in a productive manner. I agree with the pre determined target. You make a good sense.
Actually bracket trading is very effective in the right hands. Don't believe everything you read here.
Thanks profitlocker, I am thinking about how I can back test. This will be BEYOND helpful for me, cause I am tired of forward testing cause its taking me forever. I intraday trade the daily pivot points, open, close, high, and low on a small timeframe using price action in hopes of catching a momentum trending trade of the moment. I can somehow calculate these numbers from historical market data via some programs, I believe. I haven't written code in years, since college. However, I also draw my own support and resistance just from what I see. But I am willing to leave this off for now if its too complicated. For now, I just want to get a basic backtesting system for my backtesting environment. I have been forward testing for about 7 months now and if I have a new idea, its complex to test it with no automated way to do it. Thanks,
First of all.. I have to really wonder if after you do your SIM trading, if you will really be able to trade 3 contracts of CL. This thing whipsaws like crazy and you can be down hundreds of dollars on only one contract in seconds. Assume it goes against you 30 cents... at 3 contracts, you'd down $900. So tell me... will all your SIM trading really help you when you got money on the line? I bet that once you start trading one contract, all your SIM trading goes out the window and emotions take over. 2nd part of the answer ties in with the first. It doesn't matter what anyone else here says because they have no idea how you enter and where. Simply put, if your entries have price going in your favor right away, trading multiple contracts and taking some off initially would be wise. But if your strategy shows you are initially always taking heat, perhaps buying all at once isn't the best. Scaling into your position might be the best approach. But nobody here can tell you this. Why don't you do this, and either keep it to yourself or share here. Take your past 20 trades and just tell us exactly how much price went against you before it went in your favor for every single trade. If you find you're 40 or 50 cents ahead most of the time with price only going against you 10 cents, then you've got great entries and can easily load up initially and scale out. But if you're seeing that each entry goes against you usually by 20 or 30 cents, then why on earth would you go in for 3 all at once? You're focused on scaling out for profits, but you really have to consider how price goes against you right when you enter, and if you're in for 3 contracts and it goes against you right away, scaling out for profits isn't your first concern any longer.
Hmmm, this topic has gone far and beyond the scope of this subforum. Perhaps we should take it to the Trading forum?
One thing is fairly easy to see, in principle ... If you routinely enter "all in" and exit "scaling out" from all your trades, then when things unexpectedly turn against you and you're stopped out quickly, you'll always take your losses with the maximum position-size open, whereas when things go unexpectedly well, you'll often have your smallest positions open at the time. It's not easy to envisage this arrangement being the best, overall, for your bottom line. (I'll declare my own "bias": I like adding to winning positions, because I feel that my wish to have a position open at those points has been strengthened by my entry already having worked out well so far.)