setting weekly goals is a mistake. Take what the market gives you. By setting weekly targets you risk selling yourself short on trades that might have more potential. On the flip side you might find yourself scrambling to meet your weekly goal when market just doen't dictate it. in that case you could lose $ for no reason. TAKE WHAT THE MARKET GIVES YOU!!
Holy Cow, Am I reading that correctly, 1200 Rounds? I would love to watch one of you hyper-scalpers trade. Not that I want to do it, I like what I do... But I think it would be a great joy watching Man Vs. Market on such a microscopic scale; might be a new spectator sport i.e. poker (I am in Austin, and will buy lunch if anyone wants to take me up on it).
Hi syrre, For clarification, are these 1200RTs for a single contract or say 120RTs for 10 contracts each?
Backtest your system over 1 year. Make a 21 days MA of the profit it generated. Add 2 standard deviations for the upper limit, and deduct 2 standard deviations for the lower limit. Your prfit target will almost always be between the upper and the lower limit. Realistic profits are different for every trader as they trade different systems.
syrre, your approach amazes me. Those are some big dollars off of a relatively small sized point profit. I would imagine you have found some very high probability setups that work for you. I applaud you for that. That's something most of us wouldn't explore. It shows that those who think different have an advantage. I always prefer to think of profits in terms of the average daily range. I started a thread back a while ago that dealt with this. I pull out just around 10% of the ATR per day. This is not much but it adds up over time. I would like to boost that number and am looking for ways to add trades or branch out into foreign markets to extract more money in the same 24 hour period. So how much of the ATR are you pulling out per day?
I think its good to set goals, just don't let your goals change your trading plan when its in motion. For example if you goal is 5 ES points per week and on Friday your still at break even don't let that make you deviate from what you know to do. I keep my goals low compared to most people that i talk to. My goal on my ES method is 10 pts per month and on my NQ +25. Right now i'm at +6 and +27.5 pts respectively for the month and if i end the month at +6 on the ES then thats fine with me. (STOP YOUR SNICKERING) I know lots of guys are laughing as they read that I hear a lot of talk about trying to capture 1/2 the daily range, the daily range, or even 2x the daily range. For the most part unless the daily range is very tight over a month it hasn't made that big of a difference to my trading. For example on Monday 7/18 i made 3 points on a 5.25 pt range day and on July 11 and 12th i made nothing when the range was around 10 pts. Someone said earlier if you make 1 pt per week you'll do fine, and that is true 1 pt per week if you don't have many trades could produce a very fine life style. 1 pt on 6 trades and $5 comm. on 100 contract = 2k weekly Pierson