Mine is, and my definition of a Holy Grail is to find your DEVELOPED EDGE. This is what will get you into the ZONE. Is is easy? Absolutely not. Is it worth the effort?.....You decide that for yourself, because no one else is going to do it for you....
For commodities futures indexes (intraday): Staying in the market all the time and being on the right side of the market when I am in the market. Two themes: hold and reverse. Right one third of screen is annotated with all applicable fractal channela at all times. Sweeping the proper and complete display on three levels: coarse, medium, and fine. And repeating continually a sequence of indepentent thought processes which include monitoring, analysis, decision making and acting in a timely manner. SCT trading. Target 3x (H-L) daily range. For equities (position trading natural cycle). Cross trading the natural cycle (long half (4 to 8 days, presently)) Using a small universe (125 nominally) of excellent stocks (Based upon EPS, RS and 10 to 50 dollar price range, set float volume range and high beta). Add delete to list every 3 to 4 days. Stock must be repeatable (5 swings over 20% in 6 months), reliable (follows P, V relationship). Ranking by money velocity of five last swings. Hot list from stocks in 7, 1, and 0 scores of the cycle. Daily bulk scanned review. Never hold more than 100,000 shares and never trade more than 10% of cummulative daily volume and always in T&S block sizes for the partial fills needed to cross trade. Target: 10% per trade over 6 day period. There are many many profitable ways to make money in markets. None of which will ever influence the market to any statisically significant extent. Macro is not a quality assurance possibility, only micro approaches work. No edge approaches meet the test of performance vis a vis making money (a long term 1 point average on ES is not making money).
Your welcome. I did some editing after your post. Sorry I do not track your problems. For me to track any particular person, there has to be a value in doing so. If I track someone it is because of the potential that they have related to their knowledge, skills and experience. Especially the rate of change they are experiencing in their efforts o make money. I support an open exchange of ideas, definitions of difficulties and especially the favorable resolution of problems. I am an advocate of passing things forward and I track others who do this so I can learn from them. 4 out of 5 persons have significant and important (to them) critical views that basically oppose what I do. As big points out what doesn't work for you may work for others and vice versa. What I do does not work for most others. What I do is in a very well defined minority and should not be considered by persons of your nature. You are in the majority at ET. You have always had a deep need to comment negatively (but without helpfulness to others to caution them against what I do) in my regard. It is a good idea for you to keep it up (as you see it) but, on the other hand, it has no effect on my views nor "contributions". Finally, I am an advocate of doing "drills" to affect individual improvement. It is not a good idea for anyone such as you to do any of these individual drills for self evident reasons. Once an apple cart gets upset, it is not possible to put the apples back in the cart and expect the apples to have any value in the future. Nor can any bad apples be fixed no matter what the cause. Were a person to want to make a better place or situation or to grow, he usually engages in a constructive pro active process that begins from any self realized point of departure. It is my opinion that big started a thread to be helpful to others.
Here's a hint without going into specifics... My trading is very time specific, i.e. Strategies that work well at one time of day won't work well at other times. Every day trade I make has different profit targets and stops depending on what time it is.
My holy grail comes from having confidence in the complete plan that I've researched, tested and validated -- whether automated or discretionary...I've traded both but prefer discretionary models. The key to this confidence is the process of developing a good plan. If I have backtested a given trading model over a period of at least two years, identified the strong and weak points of the model in different market cycles and across different instruments, and get a positive equity curve, I'll commit a small amount of K and forward test for another few months. If I am comfortable with the entire model, from business plan to trade plan to money management rules, then I've found a good plan, bot not my holy grail. Comfortable means being able to follow my money management rules and execute my trades without too much emotional stress. The process of discovering a model that suits me is the holy grail for me, not the model or the result...although a good result is nice! The process is what I focus on more than what the process involves, because the models are always changing, albeit incrementallly, with the markets that I trade as the markets themselves change. Does it require knowing myself? Nothing beyond what doesn't drive me crazy or blow my account. It certainly doesn't require a spirit guide, personal guru or psychotherapy. Does it require discovering a "market secret"? Only if I want to keep what I have developed from others, which I'm very bad at doing. Does it require esoteric knowledge from a mystical bygone era or some imagined cosmic forumla? No way. It's the process. My process. And it's probably similar to yours but different in ways that make it difficult to replicate. This is why the best mentors and coaches I've had have always focused on this instead of how to execute their own models. They didn't even know they were my mentor/coach, but they knew exactly what I needed...to develop my own process. That's the holy grail for me and I only really discovered it two years ago. It took another few months for the realization to sink in and another few after that to document it. Cheers
have to say mine is knowing the limitations of my strategy and recognizing and avoiding trades/conditions that it will perform poorly in.