Hello Alex, With my automated strategies, I have no defined stop loss. With my manual trading, i just cut losses when I reach a mental stop loss and sometimes I make emergency cut when markets is going fast against me. I have never more than 3/4 2 lots positions which may represent 1/4 of my account( 60K ) in margin. If everything goes really wrong in all positions at the same time( pretty unlikely but who knows), I think I can lose 5-10 % of my account. The graphic shows some longer trades on daily datas too.
<i>"Turnover, in this example, means guys retiring a series of user names when their credibility is shot and/or they make a bad prediction, etc. Turnover also implies there are alot of now defunct user names. After all, of the entire number of users registered over the past 8-9 years, a very small percentage of those people still post."</i> All very true. If each alias here were attached to one person only via credit card verification, etc the number of total "members" would be slashed to something like 1/5th current historical tally. Why do people quit posting? Many reasons. Some wash out, for sure. Others simply tire of the atmosphere and fade into the background. It was interesting that someone of stature like lescor recently posted actual trade results in P&L 2007 and got flamed for that act. Other guys get deified here while refusing to ever post a single trade blotter that shows actual proof of any live trades, out of sample or otherwise. It was telling that lescor referenced a private room he and other real-money traders gather in these days instead of this forum. Sounds to me like many - most of the real elite traders are gathering elsewhere. I pass thru here infrequently myself. The list of topics for the most part miss my areas of interest more & more. Very seldom find a constructive topic to converse in, so there's not much for me to say. Some days I don't even think about logging in, and that seems to be more often lately. The OP here is feeling good about what was accomplished. Who hasn't turned a net-loss day into net profit and not felt layers of warm emotions about that? This is a grueling, grinding, roller coaster emotional profession. Learning to manage that inner minefield is the biggest learning curve for any of us. I didn't perceive this thread as boasting... the OP is doing a fine job of learning the ropes. All of us are constantly learning, no exceptions. Actually nice to see a thread about live trading, for a change.
WTG TraDaTor! Thanks for sharing your success. For me, I think it is cool as sh*t to get in to a live trade with my money and see the graph lines on the charting software go in my direction. Yeah, yeah, yeah! MORE good trading to you.
Thanks. In fact, I started this thread 'cause I thought sometimes there's a lot more than the final blotter of the trading day. Sometimes, at my humble level, 1K+ days are not that intense emotionally whereas some + 100$ after a deep negative day seems way cooler. Tuesday, I had a 475$ loss that led me to - 1K in the middle of the day. I watched my past month' results for the particular instrument I was trading and thought I may reduce my size to 1 lot on it. I had 1 more loss with one lot and was tempted to stop trading this contract for the day. Then I made a last try and in 30 minutes, trading one lot I just made it back through a dozen of trades...- 900, - 670, - 420, -210, -70, +20...Those were the best 30 minutes I had for a while and all my worries were gone. I felt really happy at that time. That's just one of the good things in trading. This week, I have been quite struggling so I will be happy with a 200$ day tonight while I would consider it low last week.