I noticed that big losing days are preceded by some disturbing event in my personal life. It does not have to be a big event but it seems sufficient to start causing damage. The other observation I have is that I lose concentration if there are no setups for a long time (many tens of minutes especially if the market made a big move. In such a case I start bending the rules little by little and I see setups where there are none. Gabe
So I did the following (suffering through countless "You Know"s. And this Still boring but I promised to do it so I did it. I get the idea. Had 4 trades today. 1 profitable and 3 not. All entries were by my rules. Moved my stop closer to my entry and was nailed to within 1 tick. (I am not upset) the other 2 trades just happened to be stopped out. (not upset either) missed all the big move down due to lack of a signal. I will continue without tweaking my system for a week and then decide what to do. In Market Replay and manual back-testing everything looked OK so this could have been one of those days. Gabe
So nothing system related... Either find a way to minimize these events in your head OR don't trade those days. If minor events are causing issues then there is work to do... maybe some mental exercise before the trading day?
I am just going to observe that you are not giving your trades enough breathing room. You are getting kicked out on basically noise. It is a fallacy to think you can control risk by using smaller stops. All you do is get chopped into smaller pieces. Stops have to be determined by MAE, time frame and market vol. I suppose what you are using is some big secret, but they are clearly too tight.
No secret. From my back-testing I found that a stop of 11 ticks on a 5min chart,works for me. I don't look at volume. Today, I was taken out of trade #3 for 7 ticks. The MAE on that trade was 10 ticks so had I left the stop @ it's original 11 ticks, I would have been ok. I moved my stop up because price moved above the high of the entry bar. I should have waited for the bar after the entry bar to finish but I didn't. Trade #2 and #4 clearly went against me. I will continue with my Market Replay back-testing tonight. Gabe
After the breakdowns there weren't ANY signal to follow the trend?? Where are your level lines? Seems you find a way to trade just the chop (slower market) and avoid where the quick money COULD be. Same happened last week on that day when you traded ALL the chop and the chop only.
Still think there is a buried reason for much of this: you don't want THIS trade to be a losing trade so you seek the absolute lowest TF and stop possible.. A fast trending market in your mind means you could lose a lot so maybe you subconsciously avoid it. You may also think deep down making money in trends is something anyone can do (too easy) so not as emotionally rewarding.
Between 10AM-1PM EST I I got only 1 valid setup (~80% valid). There was nothing for me to go by. I will continue with what I have until the end of the week and then reassess the situation. Gabe