As I said I have almost no experience scaling positions, so I'm not qualified to pass judgment on it. I have only my opinions about it. My mentor does not scale in or out and he's been trading for I don't know how many years. Another professional trader I met when I started day trading, who's now in my Skype group, trades multiple lots, all in/all out. We trade similarly, with precision and tight stops. In my situation mentioned, I basically violated my rule, so whether or not I traded multiple lots is irrelevant. If I traded 2 lots and took one off at 10 ticks, I still violated my rule. I reduced my R:R, even if it was on part of a position. I've had many conversations about this. We're always debating the value of trading multiple lots and taking off part for a scalp, letting the rest run (Al Brooks and Mark Douglas seem to be much in favor of this). I would like to see the trade blotters of those who scale in/out, because it would help me understand the environment in which it's used and how the profitable traders handle it. xxxskier posted a few blotters in the past and it was enlightening to see that style of trading.
Good record keeping can solve your dilemma. The records will show what would work out best, taking a small profit on x% and letting the rest run or taking it all off at a certain level.
I usually move the stop to B/E when my first profit target is hit. If there are profits to be taken after an entry, the entry is good enough for me . I trade stocks primarily, we don't have to be as precise as you futures traders.
Yes, that's quite different. When I traded POT, AAPL, AMZN, I could trade 100-600 shares and I occasionally scaled out of positions. Trading 1 lot CL is like trading 1000 shares of stock ($10 per tick).
Perhaps a backtesting of the trades taken this year, comparing all in/all out to scale-out. This comparison would enable you to see the impact on your P/L with each methodology. Needless to say, manually backtesting it would be extremely labor intensive. However, I believe there are programs that supposedly can do it. Walt
As someone else said, comes down to outstanding record keeping, and knowing your "MAE," Maximum Adverse Excursion. Normally, shorter timeframes will produce higher winning percentages but have to accept smaller profits, such as in Scalping - if you designed it right, as timeframe becomes larger, winning percentages go down and hopefully profits become larger. I risk 10 tics with my targets being 4-20 tics, but more times than not, I grab 4-5 tics. The only reason I use a stop at all is for Catastrophic reasons, very seldom do I allow that stop to be used. Now, since I have done thousands of trades, I have a huge amount of data I can review to see how many tics against the trade it has gone before turning around to be either a winning trade or to get out at breakeven. Most will tell you never Average down, but that is exactly what I do, I will get into a trade one tic worse from where I want to enter, wait for price to come to perfect entry, and have another entry 5 tics even lower for longs. Each entry has same stop price. So if trade becomes profitable, I make 5 more tics, if I need to get out at breakeven stop of perfect entry, trade comes out net plus 4 tics. And occasionally I lose the extra tics, but the way I see it, any time I can come ahead on a breakeven trade, I am ahead. I have eight different "patterns" that I wait for, seven of them are waiting for price to come to my limit order, so that also means, each had to go thru backtesting to find the best "MAE" to Average down. One of the biggest problems that never crossed my mind when I was first starting, the better your record keeping, the better you can fine tune your trading. Just like using "MFE" Maximum Favorable Excursion, finding the best place to use as your first target. I scale out of my position if price is really ripping, but I take off 80% at first target, I am not a homerun type trader, maybe once a week I will get 5pt in ES per week, but it is on only a couple contracts. As far as when to go to breakeven, there are many factors to be considered, your timeframe, whether it is a breakout entry or deep retracements. Perhaps you might notice that most of your winning trades allows you to get in and price never comes back to your entry, what does your records say about duration of winning trades? Perhaps after so much time, you go to breakeven stop, or breakeven plus one tic. Go to breakeven when first target is made, or new high/low is made for that area. There are literally several ways to tighten up protective stops, time, price and sometimes volume.
I thought I would take a break from trading this morning as my trading has rapidly turned to crap today. Started off the day with a huge winner followed by 4 losers in a row b/c Im trading terrible...Anyway, need to get caught up a bit on the journal... Friday, I totally forgot I had family coming into town so I had a ton of things to do and I missed out on most of the day. I was in front of the computer here and there. Actually, not a terrible day for how inconsistently I was in front of the computer. Friday December 3: Total Trades: 5 Winners: 1 Losers: 1 B/E: 3 Avg. Win (ticks): 27 Avg. Loss (ticks): -11 Total Ticks: 16 Total Win Rate: 20% And the drama starts...(not trading related ) So we've been having issues with our little woofer so he wound up having surgery on Monday morning. I didn't sleep all that much over the weekend and then I was dealing with the pup a lot on Monday. Monday was really slow moving and I had other things on my mind...due to this, I probably should've sat the day out with the concerns and running around I had to do. Monday December 6: Total Trades: 4 Winners: 2 Losers: 2 B/E: 0 Avg. Win (ticks): 13 Avg. Loss (ticks): -15.5 Total Ticks: -5 Total Win Rate: 50% Moving on to yesterday...Again, didn't sleep well b/c the pup was up off and on all night. I was totally exhaused when I finally woke up around 7:15ish. I opened up my computer and I should've been foaming at the mouth will all that movement, but I couldn't keep my eyes open and I was pretty much over it. I took a couple trades in the morning, but when I tried to take a S/R play and misread the action big time...decided to call it quits for the morning. I came back towards the end of the open pit hours but again, really still in half zombie mode. I actually had a really good trade at the end of the day, but again, started dozing off at my computer and a 30+ tick winner turned into a B/E...luckily I had already moved my stop to B/E. I feel fortunate to walk away with some profit since I was in zombie state. Tuesday December 7: Total Trades: 3 Winners: 1 Losers: 0 B/E: 0 Avg. Win (ticks): 36 Avg. Loss (ticks): 0 Total Ticks: 36 Total Win Rate: 33.33% So thats the summary... I think the moral of the story is I need to do a better job of balancing life stuff with trading. The dog was an exception since that was somewhat of an urgent matter that was unexpected. But on Friday, definitely should've been in front of the computer all day. I guess I also need to figure out how to balance my health/sleeping and whether or not to trade/not to trade. i don't want to not trade just because Im tried, but yesterday, man, it just wasn't happening. But since Im a newb I also need to be on top of my game mentally so I think trading tired may do more harm than good at this point. Would love for it to be muscle memory automatic, but that is a long ways away. Im still really tired today and was again late waking up...I think that may be part of my dilemna today...think Im going to go take a nap...but I really want to trade since the action is so good...hmmm...nap...trade...nap..trade...ya going to nap.
Wound up being an mediocre day... I had a big 60+ tick winner on the big move in the morning and I got fixated on the 100 tick mark since it was just around the corner. I think that also aided in some of my poor trading. Maybe forced some stuff and took 2-3 bad trades. Total Trades: 7 Winners: 2 Losers: 4 B/E: 1 Avg. Win (ticks): 37.5 Avg. Loss (ticks): 10.75 Total Ticks: 32 Total Win Rate: 28.57% I haven't gone over my stats for November (my first full calender month) so I was doing that earlier today...Here they are: Total Trades: 131 Winners: 40 Losers: 55 B/E: 37 Avg. Win (ticks): 23.975 Avg. Loss (ticks): 10.67 Total Ticks: 372 Ticks/days traded: 18.6 Total Win Rate: 30.53% I keep gravitating towards the 30% winrate, which is something I really need to improve. For rough numbers, I avg about 1 bad trade per day...that would bring the win rate to around 36% and ticks per day around 29 but I still need to be better. Im happy with my progress because my losing days are becoming smaller in terms of total ticks lost. I had one bad day on the 29th, but other than that the month progressed nicely in terms of keeping the losing days small. I think Im doing a pretty good job of catching runners...but where Im faulting is where I get stuck in the 20-30 point range on the winners. Instead of taking some profit, a lot of those trades are turning into B/E's which is hurting the ticks/day. But I think that will come with time. I really want to focus more on winrate since I feel that shows how well Im trading. For now, Im ok with my strategies, but in the long run, I may need to add a strategy or two. I think the days where there is lots of movement I will have no problem hitting 50 ticks./day but based on my current stats, on the slow grind days and/or chop days Im usually under 20 ticks...the slow grind days, its usually me, the trader, at fault..so I may not need to do anything other than trade better. Anyway, Im approaching my 40th day of trading the CL and I think things are continuing to progress and my mentality is also improving. As I said earlier, I also think Im understanding my mistakes sooner, I just have trouble pulling the trigger to get out and fully admit my mistake.
Im really happy with the way trading went today. I really wanted to focus on getting out vs. staying in on the 15-25 tick winners that I seem to have trouble with and today was the perfect day to do that. There was pretty good movement but a lot it was short lived. This helped out a lot with my training because I had numerous trades where it would head in my direction and then stop. There was really only 1 trade where I wish I handled it differently and got out for a small profit vs. a b/e. I ended the day a bit frustrated b/c I missed out on a couple of 20-30 points winners b/c I missed a fill by 1-4 ticks. Im happy, however, that Im getting better and better at finding these places where price reacts, just need to hone it in a little further. I was late waking up today again. I finally feel like Im caught up on sleep. And, I had more doggy drama yesterday so there was no trading. Results for today: Total Trades: 9 Winners: 4 Losers: 2 B/E: 3 Avg. Win (ticks): 16.5 Avg. Loss (ticks): -13.5 Total Ticks: 39 Total Win Rate: 44.44% Im hoping these are more of the stats I can keep on a consistent basis. As I said, the fills were an issue today, but if I can get a couple of those filled and keep on making proper decisions about exiting vs staying in, the stats should take care of themselves. It would've been nice to catch one more big move/trade today,but oh well...thats the way it goes sometimes. Stats on the week (4day week for me) Total Trades: 23 Winners: 9 Losers: 8 B/E: 6 Avg. Win (ticks): 25.75 Avg. Loss (ticks): -9.94 Total Ticks: 102 Total Win Rate: 39.09% Not a bad week considering I had a bunch of other stuff going on and couldn't be trading full time. Definitely happy to again end up nicely in positive territory.
Kinda an annoying day. I had a really good morning up over 50 ticks and I felt like I was trading really well. The 7-8 hour was a bit hard to trade...i thought it would chop around all day but it fell off nicely. Anyway, I picked up over 50 points out of the move from the 87.49 level till it found support around 88.35ish so i was very happy with that (well as happy as I could get, my internet went down for a couple minutes towards the bottom of the move so I got stopped out at the .55ish level) ...I was feeling really good about myself and my trading...price started consolidating...I needed to run errands...good time to take off. I was gone for about an hour came back and my trading went the other way. Took 1 bad trade to start and then had 2 trades not work out. Really annoying. I think I did a good job this morning of taking the 10-12 ticks or profit when price started reversing. It was a bit tough before the big move. There were a lot of 20 tick bars that were red then green or visa versa on my screen. I hate those long bars...unless they are going in my direction So, twice I was able to walk away with a bit of profit vs. a b/e by recongzing I probably needed to exit...which in turn also helped out my winrate. In the end, not a very exciting day: Total Trades: 7 Winners: 3 Losers: 4 B/E: 0 Avg. Win (ticks): 16.66 Avg. Loss (ticks): -10.25 Total Ticks: 9 Total Win Rate: 42.8%