I just hope I get there before I'm too old to enjoy the easy money! It's on the one hand frustrating to have these 105 charts and not see anything that works every time. (You did after all promise me the Holy Grail ND.... so you better deliver! ) On the other hand, its good to have such a good mix of charts. The last thing you'd want to do is a trade a plan that only works 20% of the time. So as long as I make something that keeps the losses small on the bad days, and captures most of the good, this should be that holy grail. This is where I do get a bit stumped actually. I get too easily discouraged and start over again or throw something away before I really tested it or tweaked it. My brain just doesn't accept the loss too well, so I feel as if I need to start over again because what I've got isn't any good. I guess I just want something to work 75% of the time. But what I really need to focus on is that even a 30% win rate is plenty good enough if the profits are at least 10 points and the losses only 2. Now I would like something with at least a 50% win rate, but the take home message for me is that there absolutely have to be losers. Just because a 6/3 profit/loss setup nets a couple of losses in a row doesn't mean it has to be scrapped.
Interesting. So you're using the 1 tick, as ND does. Its curious how the thing that scares a person, and the things we do to prevent the fear, often can end up causing more harm than good. I absolutely believe how given enough testing, the gain of 3 ticks profit (via the 1 tick vs 1 point entry), and the gain of 3 ticks less loss, more than likely offsets the times where you might be sucked into a bad trade. This would take hardcore testing, but this is what I'm reading between the lines and I believe what ND saw with her testing on her own setups. So by using an entry further away from the signal to prevent bad trades and the fear of losing money, may in fact not have the effect of keeping loses smaller or making bigger gains. In terms of your stop loss, this is juicy as well. I often see that on 5 minute bars, this stop loss works really well. The 1 minute bars tend to be a bit erratic for me, but I really need to explore this more. For myself personally, I can remember so often holding trades for 7 or 8 point losses, which was not only a loss of money but also emotional energy. By taking the quick loss, one is able to be prepared for the next trade if he has his solid plan at the ready. I hear over and over again to cut losses short. I think this preserves both capital and mental energy. One of the things I really gained from your insight is that you a) waited for the right setup after the BO from the range, even though this is well above the BO level now. And b) you took your exit where you should have but had no problem re-entering again. Lastly, in terms of your exit, all wonderful ideas, and all horrible because the testing for this would be horrendous. I mean how the heck does one define distance already travelled... espeically when this has to be in relation to something (ie. some days a 20 point move is the entire move, other days 20 points is done in the first 5 minute). Then sluggish momentum is almost not something you can even see on a chart. The failure to make a new high in 17 minutes is golden, but once again... you'd have to test 10 minutes, then maybe 15 minutes, etc., just to see how long is too long. But I like it FeetFirst... I really like everything you say! You can post in my journal too... and please do! (well anyone can... even Blotto, but not if his intention is to crush me emotionally! )
And here is what FeetFirst is saying... once again... drawing it out to both test my understanding skills, and to build muscle memory in a way! If you're still reading FeetFirst... a question about the signal bar. I understand the entry is the retracement, so you're just trailing your 1 tick entry above the high of each of these bars.. correct? So then your Signal Bar is the bar before the bar above which point you have the entry. The next bar is the trigger bar. So in essence, the lowest bar is the RET, you get filled on the next bar, and the bar before the RET is the signal bar. Or is a signal bar the signal bar for a reason other than the fact that the bar after it has the lowest high? Lastly, at what point would you stop trailing this buy stop above the bars?
Here's our friend Geez with his 48% win rate, not worried a bit about taking every valid setup despite back to back losses: As I recall, he more than doubled his account that year while I, in my quest to avoid losing trades, ended up with very little.
Yup... he reached double even before his time was up, and also I think he had some significant drawdowns because he left some trades on accidentally. You mentioned before that he just put in OCO orders, but from what I recall, his bet was limited to using a platform/broker that didn't allow OCO orders. All he could do was set alerts and then he had to log in to change the exit strategy to either a profit target or loss depending on which alert triggered as price got close. So he had quite the logistical nightmare to contend with as well. I see in my own trading that often if I just put the trade on and walked away I would have done so much better. Watching the push and pull on 1 minute bars is just too much for my nerves at the moment so when I get back to trading a solid setup, I will I think just let it go to either profit or loss and hence leave it alone. This also makes me think of the points that toucan was making yesterday. If every day I tinkered with the trading plan to account for what worked and didn't that day, I would be a mess. If geez did this after 5 losing trades in a row he might have been fixing something that wasn't broken. I'm all for always updating a trading plan, adding stuff to make it better and such, but to second guess entries at the end of the day means probably not having faith in your plan. There sadly aren't any running journals of people with a solid plan that are actually trading it and sticking to it. All of us are testing things but none of us have a solid plan that we trade each and every day.
Not sure how to take this comment. Taken at face value, this simply means that those who are doing it right aren't providing anything to learn from. Nothing wrong with keeping it one's self of course, but this therefore serves no purpose.
I'm not experienced in the slightest, but I think you were on to something specifically testing a break out pull back set up. I've seen that so often. I think you could build a GREAT system on that one signal. Do you?
LOL.. where have you been hiding? NoDoji has been trying to get this point across for months. First you gotta of course define what you're breaking out of. Then you have to pick your entry criteria. And then of course you need to know where to get out in case its not working. Price can often often fake breaking out... so you gotta know how to deal with this. It can also sometimes drop back into the range and still exit in the same direction, so perhaps you're not wrong, just early. The hard part is also defining your range. Hardly are the limits so obvious. But yet, if you can build a system around this... its a cash machine!