What about decreasing losses vs. trying to make more money? A lot of traders look to make money but if you ask a lot of successful traders they will often say "not losing money" is more important than making money. Can you look at your average holding times and then simply say that if a trade is break even or negative after X amount of time it needs to be flattened out? If your average winning trade is 5minutes long and your average loser is 10minutes long then why not start watching all trades that have been open for more than 5 (or maybe a bit longer) minutes? Am I missing something?
I find time based bars to distort the price. Just because 1 or 5 min passed, does not mean something should happen. A more appropriate measurement would be tick, range or volume bars. They do not depend on passing time but on real market action.
Funny ... my best system trades off a 100-volume chart on CL, however I had to take time in consideration to get it resilient to volatility-induced noise. Also, when the avg volume per minute drops "enough", setups outcome tends to be more random. In my experience, both price, time & volume are important elements of price action, and "classic" approaches whether using time-based charts or tick/volume/range-based charts only consider 2 of these 3 factors - it is not surprising that they are not stable across various market conditions.
Thanks for your comments WinstonTJ. Yes, this would be the natural conclusion. So far the various ways to try to get out after a certain time has passed and position underwater have not improved the strategies. It seems the waves and frequency varies so much so getting out after a certain time will many times get me out just before a big move in favor etc. The simple versions have sofar worked most stable.
I was reading up on old notes and remembered that scalpers will often go for much shorter times so I suppose there is a niche for everybody. Last night I was trying to perform more CPR on a losing crossover strategy. There were many times that it would flutter around the crossover point. If I based sell decisions on crossing back the other way, I would sell very early--often within a few 1-minute bares. Well, generally the entrance on those was also stupid. But let's disregard that in itself. What I thought was interesting was that for every transaction that was 6 bars or less, I lost money. So I started trying to filter them out. I threw some babies out with the bath water with the filter I applied, and the strategy still doesn't work. However, now I wonder if I should be doing some kind of short scalp based on those little blips.