Scientist, just to obliterate your cockiness. i will make it clear why your reply to me was unjust. my statement: the cockiness in your reply that disagreed with me: what my point was (that you seem to FOOLISHLY disagree with): the long/short entry is probably going to be close to random. however, you can still choose to make entries at times which big moves may occur. THIS is what can make an entry important, EVEN WITHOUT BEING ON THE CORRECT SIDE. a newbie can take advantage of fat tails by entering long/short randomly at random times and use a trailing stop on winners. A PRO CAN SEEK OUT ENTRIES WHERE BIG MOVES ARE LIKELY TO OCCUR AND ONLY TAKE THOSE TRADES. i guess you're not a pro? Bye now, don't ask me anymore. ~Your idol.
estrader: If you think that your long setups/signals offer you better probabilities on getting into winning short trades, and vice versa, there's no one stopping you from backtesting the idea. In backtesting, though, you're going to discover that you don't get the "opposite" outcome you expected. One reason will be because now your stoploss will be on the other side of the trade, the side that before (when a long was a long and not a short) did not have a stop. So before, your position may have moved quite freely about that side before losing and getting stopped out. Now it won't be able to move on that side as freely without getting stopped out first.
it won't work. the problem isn't the entry - the vast majority of ticks can be profitably shorted OR longed. the problem is managing the losses and taking appropriate profits. and fading yourself won't do anything to help with that.
You can turn your monitor upside-down, use mirrors, switch bottons or stand on your head reading poetry while trading, it will not help. What you really need to do is switch your fear with greed and greed with fear!!! TM Trader
You're only partly right. From a magnitude point of view, you're right. From a principle point of view, you're not. What I mean is that more fear and less greed will hardly make you succeed. In fact, it would make your trading even worse, not to mention stressful. The point I'm getting at is that both fear and greed are emotions that are there for a reason. As a trader, it is your mission to be a self-examining psychologist, to recognize, balance and isolate / suppress these emotions as required. To ignore them, however is foolish and leads to self-destruction as well. <i>"Only a fool knows no fear...!" - Worf, Klingon Warrior, Star Trek.</i> ~The Scientist