I understand that you feel comfortable doing the hedge. It must satisfy some need to avoid taking a loss. Unfortunately, hedging is an offset if traded 1:1, so I wonder what is temporary about the loss when it's no longer paper and has been made real by the second trade? You no longer benefit from any retracement into the direction of the original position, but of course the pain has stopped. It's an avoidance trade. It's analogous to the covered call writer shunning naked puts because he sleeps better with covered calls. If the additional vig allows you to psychologically-process the loss, that's fine, but you're doing yourself a disservice if you believe you're not taking another small loss with each hedge. The risk upon dissolution of the primary and hedge add additional risks. IMO, hedging is a gateway drug to other bad habits. Set some hard-stops and forgive yourself for taking a loss. There is nothing better than starting with a clean blotter.
Psychologically maybe, but not financially, that's a problem you need to address instead of masking it in my opinion. Long and short seems like a good idea in theory, take profit on one side, wait for the other to go into profit, sounds perfect as you never need to predict probable direction and you're always banking profit......in theory. It's an illusion, try it in practice. Your balance increases but your NAV remains more or less static (in fact it goes down - one side gains, the other side loses, plus you've got spread costs, commissions, and interest). At some point you simply have to make a decision and have a directional bias by closing one side of the trade, exposure is the only way you're able to profit in a strategy like that, and with exposure obviously comes risk. So, instead of going through all that performance you would be better off simply making that directional bias decision and trading it because in effect that's exactly what you're going to have to do eventually.
I don't know about you, but personally I'm a little tired of Veyron posting all about his great system with absolutely nothing to back it up. Why exactly are you all sitting here trying to guess what he's doing? Why don't we all just insist that he posts some trades here? He started this whole thing. If he wants us to believe him then he should post some proof, especially the part about hardly ever having a losing trade.
Listen vermin, the truth is I am the only one who makes money. Instead of me writing a long-winded and indirect construction of my greatness by condescending prose that wastes both our time, just send me your $3995.95 now. It pays to simply be direct with the cattle.
I would have to disagree that "hedging" trades don't work, without knowing how exactly the method is applied. General statements of the sort are wrong by default, perhaps the well known sayings of, "follow the trend", "the trend is your friend", "always have a set SL when entering a trade", "and a set TP" ...are wrong and too rigid. There are MANY ways to trade the market, what's to say someone cannot trade them successfuly by a different means to what we're all used to? Personaly, i trade on a directional, intraday basis, and yet i can see a good use of taking the other side at times, without exiting my original trade, if you're asking for specifics, i'm not prepared to give any! Good luck with your trading, i can see you're lighting your flame gun allready