Instynct, great to see you transform this year from a restless scalper to a more fine tuned trader. Wish you a Merry Christmas, and hope to see you reach another level of trading next year Schaefer
I don't think it's a terrible idea at all. up your size to trading 2 lots. trade as you would normally. if you drop 10% of your account value, pull back to 1 lots. or generate stats on the previous years trades. analyze trades going forward (trading 2 lots), and make sure 2 lot trades fit within the previous year's PnL distribution. again, worst case, you drop 10% and begin trading 1 lots again. merry christmas, all.
i agree, Art. 2 cars on 20k + account sounds perfectly reasonable given Instynct's consistent results. Merry x-mas Traders ! jas
Damn it's good to be back! Taking a couple weeks off feels like an eternity to a trader Hope everyone enjoyed their holidays, now it's back to work... thank God. I'm thinking about implementing a new goal-oriented strategy in an effort help further my consistency and make trading a bit less stressful. In Jas's journal, I talked about eliminating as much ambiguity as possible when trading. The markets is chaotic as it is, no need to confuse yourself anymore. And one issue I struggle with is finding that balance between going for big winning trades and days, vs grinding out a decent and respectable daily profit. Because more times than not, I end up taking too small of profits on volatile days where I should be going for larger wins, and on less volatile days I end up trying to go for larger wins instead scalping them for what their worth. And that results in a losing day rather than a profitable day. So here is a very simple objective that I will be aiming for on a daily basis. Keep in mind this will be very simple because that's just my style: 1. Extract a daily goal of 10 pts net with whatever trading method I decide to use for the day. 2. Once I reach the daily goal, I will continue to trade until I have a losing trade, at which point I will cease trading for the day. 3. No more than 3 pts can be risked on the last trade. 4. Stop trading for the day if I'm down 7.5 pts ($150/contract), or even before that If I'm too tired and/or not being able to read the market correctly. I hope this will ease my life a bit and result in more profits. Some people automate their trading strategies, I'm simply trying to automate my psychology. Today was an ok day, small but decent win to start the year. I Did not implement the new daily goal today as I'm a bit tired and would like to start the new year on a positive note. I did a stupid thing today by trying to front run my setups before they cofirm themselves, so took a couple losses there. But I was able to pick up a nice long at 2312 towards the end of lunch when sellers tried to retest the lows, +10.25 pts on that trade.
Nice Job! Executions plotted on a chart. Trades # 3 and 4 are part of the "front-running" strategy lol.
Profit goals are tricky for me. (maybe if i had more profits it would be easier). I've thought that if I were up say 12 pts then took a 1 pt loss then I stopped for the day i'd be rather frustrated if the market then offered another 10 or 20 + pts. Some kind of overall trading and mental consistency may be the trade off of missing large profits on outlier days. Perhaps, knowing when to break the rules then comes in to play. I'll be curious to see how this works for you. Thanks for sharing. Great trading to you this year ! jas