A R:R of 2:1 and 60% win rate is very good. What is your rough daily expectancy? My Sim day trades can only get ~0.14% profit per day.
Good to hear that. I suggest you use SL like 5x-10x of the normal SL you used. The purpose is not to exit the trade but to protect in case your computer crash, trading software crash, internet connection lost, unexpected market reaction, etc. You never know but at least you have some protection on the server side when it happen.
Yes, I use TOS platform as well and have had some success using double and triple bracket orders. But now I'm strictly using mental stops and I have my smartphone set up as a backup to instantly exit a trade if my Internet goes down on my laptop or my laptop crashes for some reason. But I'm actually thinking of going back to a bracket order with a stop loss of about 30 cents below entry as a precaution for crashes, and a profit-taking order set for my entire position at just below a halt level for a stock. Halt levels are about 10% above a stock's current price, and they are based on a time element. For instance, if I'm trading an $8 stock, my stop loss is set to 30 cents, and my profit take is set to about 70 to 75 cents so I can capture a big gain on the $8 stock that rockets up unexpectedly without getting trapped by a halt. I've been burned on halts so many times, and they are very hard for me to trade. And if the stock doesn't rip up, then I just start taking profits between 10 and 40 cents a share typically. The other option would be to use a two-bracket order with 30 cent stop losses on 100% of position size, a 70 cent (for an $8 stock) profit take order on about 80% of the position size to capture a large gain before a halt, and a 20% profit taking order set $10 or more above the stock's current price ($18 for instance on the $8 stock) in case the stock goes parabolic through a series of halts. That way I can still potentially capture a nice chunk of $$$ when a stock halts upward multiple times while still locking in profits safely before the halts ever began.
As for daily expectancy, I have a sort of round about way of calculating something similar that allows me to project potential future account growth on an annual basis. My basic goal is a weekly target of 1.35% gain on my TAV (total account value). That's $1350 on a $100k account. If you use a compound interest calculator, you can see that a weekly gain of 1.35% will create a 100% annual return. So... for my daily target I divide 1.35% by 5 days per week and that amounts to a 0.27% of my TAV for the daily target. I recalculate this every morning so the compounding is accurate. And 0.27% of $100,000 is $270. So $270 is the daily target today, but it rises a little every green day and falls a little every red day as my account value changes. Right now I'm hitting about 1.17 x my daily target on average. If I can increase my PnL and accuracy, that number will go even higher, and I hope to start hitting around 1.5 x my daily target soon. Does all this make sense? In the past when day trading or scalping, I would set a daily target of 1% TAV per day, which was unrealistic for a person with my skill set. All it did was create fomo in me. There are a few day traders in the world who might be able to average a 1% gain daily for a year, but probably not consistently. That would equate to over an 1100% gain per year and would turn a $100,000 account into over $1.2 million in just a year. It's amazing how dropping that daily target to 0.27% is so much easier to achieve and way more realistic but still capable of producing amazing annual returns of over 100%. That 0.27% daily target has been so easy to hit that I have hit it 30 days in a row as of this morning. Now I understand how Ross Cameron is producing the results that he does. He is shooting for a tiny daily target compared to his total account value. Those tiny gains can compound and add up into something incredible.
this doesn’t make sense at all, using “your” account value to set risk parameters is a common fallacy. the risk parameters are set on each instrument’s attributions/trends, be iv, average true range, moving average, tpo, etc. once you stop watching your account balance and focus on the underlying, the account will grow.
"this doesn’t make sense at all, using “your” account value to set risk parameters is a common fallacy. the risk parameters are set on each instrument’s attributions/trends, be iv, average true range, moving average, tpo, etc. once you stop watching your account balance and focus on the underlying, the account will grow." I guess I don't follow what you are saying. Traders (especially swing traders) commonly set their risk-per-trade at 1-2% of the account size per trade as a form of risk management. For scalp plays, my position size is less than .5% of the account size and the risk on that trade is less than .1% of my account value per trade, which is extremely conservative on a risk-per-trade basis. When scalping, I'm looking at live scanners that give me lists of stocks that I'm seeing for the first time ever, and I don't have time to assess each instrument's attributions, average true range, etc. because things are moving so fast and I'm trading half a dozen different instruments or more during a 30-minute trading session. Instead, I just use candlestick formations, VWAP, support, resistance, and volume along with proper position-sizing to make trade decisions that are literally being made in a matter of seconds. In addition, the stocks I'm targeting are up 20%, 50%, 100% or more on the day and their average true ranges, most of their moving averages, and any attributes based on their historical trends are virtually useless at that point. And IV is really geared more to price options contracts, not to scalping stocks on 1 to 5 minute timeframes. I do look at their 200 MA on a daily chart, but that's about it.
I don't see any point in using a timer in trading, since different pairs have different volatility, so holding trades for a certain time will be different for each pair.