For what it's worth, and that may not be much, I'm trading a scalping strategy myself now in a separate account. With the current volatility I'm targeting 3 points per day x 5 contracts. That's my goal for the day. I will take that with 1 or 2 trades (2 x 1,5). Today, I took 3 trades. 1 x 0.25 points (B/E + 1 tick stop out). 1 x 3.0 points. 1 x 3.0 points. For a total of 6.25 points. Trading wise, I was done after 29 minutes (excluding pre-market preparations). What I like about this strategy: 1. It's measurable / realistic. 2. Everything after my buy/sell order is submitted is automated. My trading software will lock in 1 tick of profits after 2 points MFE and my exit order is automatically submitted based on fill price. 3. Instead of trying to squeeze every single tick out of a trade and constantly monitor the market/trade, I'm thinking: "Where can I get in and out safely for 3 points?" There's no FOMO if the market runs away from me as I accomplished my goal. In and out. Ring the cash register. 4. I'm usually done very quickly and can choose to continue trading or not. In my main account I'm attempting to catch the larger swings of the day, but I'm not as consistent doing that and it requires more screen time. So, I've been doing something similar in my main account except that I will allow myself to trail a stop behind price in order to catch bigger moves when my read of the market suggests that can happen.
@Laissez Faire Welcome in LF!! The path is clear Though no eyes can see The course laid down long before And so with gods and men The sheep remain inside their pen Though many times they've seen the way to leave
If you have a trade plan that provides signals which contain an edge then mathematically, the more signals you take and manage according to your edge, the more profit you realize. Any arbitrary limits or "goals" are by definition limiting.
61% win 21% scratch (+/- 3 ticks) and the rest lose. P/L was about 750. That number is about the 50% range of deviations for daily P/L (High-Low Water Mark). Largest loss was 16 ticks. Largest win about the same but as mentioned left some big runners. The trades per day will get smaller and smaller as the system gets refined. Right now I could eliminate 2/3-3/4 of the trades and get a higher P/L, but that is not the current plan. Not going for the P/L so much as the consistency and reliability because the plan is to scale. As mentioned, it is in development, test, refine, repeat . PS: Days not over and at 57 trades again coincidently. Down 520. Mostly from the system getting whipsawed on the open for -1400. The Open and Close are not friendly to the system as same thing yesterday and now 75% of the time and will probably be eliminated-excluded tomorrow.
I don't have an edge, so I like to take my money and run when I get lucky. No, seriously. What you say is of course completely true, however, I don't think it's that easy either. As a discretionary trader - one could argue that it's hard to sustain top performance/discipline over an entire session. And the more discretionary the system - the more prone the trader is to making a mistake. I'll bet the chances of this increases exponentially with the duration of a session. Of course, if one have a system that works across all market conditions and can trade it tirelessly and non-emotionally like a machine - there's no reason to turn off the money machine ever.
That's approx. $13 net per trade. To be perfectly honest - that sounds like an awful lot of work. Have you considered reducing your number of trades and simply being more selective, i.e., reduce your losses and increase your winners? Maybe you enjoy this style of trading and it works for you, but I bet you could achieve the same result with less work. Respectully, of course.
Yes, limited personal resources such as stamina to focus or simply wanting to do something else for part of market hours are legitimate reasons for imposed limits.
Seems to me self-imposed legitimate reasons are one of several draws for wanting to trade/be a trader in the first place!
I very much agree. Not a system to live with! Expectancy was so low at 17.00. TBH, a lot of the work on the system is to determine what does not work and what is sub optimal. Most people just choose to find out what is optimal and stick with that. Since I am measuring, the data provides insights into reliability. This is a new system and on paper. My older system was having issues with high volatility days*, so I went to paper. It had an expectancy of about $130 per trade and about 15 trades per day, but I did not like the draw downs. Most of the trades that "are not worth it" are from the old system. Rather than just assume, I wanted to measure it. The system won't go live until the expectancy goes above $100, or about 7-8 ticks (per contract). The new system will be a hybrid using the best of both. Of course, hopefully, all this discussion will help other by showing what one other person does to develop a system, FWIW, versus, discussion on single trades or guessing what makes a system a "good" one. Respectfully, of course, too. * I think one can assume the rest of Oct will be "big daily bar" days, hence the move to paper.