Seriously? So you going to have series of losing days cause you took 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 trades which were all losers and evens were huge winners? and hopefully vice versa? How back did you test this idea?
I agree with H123, as you have to be able to take the opportunity when it arises, even though you will never know for sure what trade is going to be a winner. Missing a trade is fine if the setup is not there, but the setup can suddenly appear and you must be willing and able to act, otherwise what is the point of trading for a living, you might as well become an investor. Some would consider your edge being the fact that you are able to be there on a daily basis, sitting and waiting to move when the opportunity arises. J_S
Not everyday is huge winners, but here is the thing, I never know which one can be, my job is to keep feeding in trades into the "hopper", enough ten and 2 ticks winners adds up, if trade doesn't work out in three bars am seeking to get out at minimum of one ticks to preserve capital.
Day #42 (Mo Step #14) - Slept well, and woke up ready to go. I was getting close to my trailing max drawdown, so I reminded myself that no matter what happened today, I was going to stick with the game plan and not break any rules. Same old same old... trade, checkmark... Mo trade, record. Repeat, repeat. However, I have to say I found it really frustrating to trade this way. It is hard to describe, but I just found it really hard to get in sync. I would write down what I was feeling, so stuck with that plan. I kept reminding myself, that the goal was to stay disciplined and stick with the plan. At point I put a trade on with larger size than normal, realized it was a result of frustration, and just closed it out almost immediately. Then took a break. At the end of my trading session, I put on a trade with proper risk management. I got stopped out almost exactly at the high. Once I realized what had happened, I was certainly tempted to jump back in again... but I was at my $400 daily loss limit... and I reminded myself of how important it was to stay disciplined and stick to the plan. (That trade then went over 70 ticks in my favor) I am finding this process a very frustrating way to trade, and yet some of it I find very helpful. I am a bit concerned about creating some bad habits. Hopefully, this weekend @monoid and I might be able to have a discussion on it. On a more positive note, this is the longest I have gone in the combine... a total of 27 days traded. (total losses = $1988.66) A significant difference the last couple of weeks is shutting down if I hit that $400 self imposed daily loss limit. -401 +110 Mo ticks
Yukoner, A question for you. Do you have an excel spreadsheet on your PC when you are trading, showing all your live trades with date, market symbol, size traded, entry target, exit target, $ risk, time of entry, time of exit, P&L per trade and running P&L ? I believe the % risk per trade of available trading capital is crucial, but some do not want to show this column, for obvious reasons. J_S
Is it possible the Mo ticks do well cause you have no stress since it is a sim trade, my thinking. You might start thinking of showing your entries, cause I really believe your method might not be as good as it is or you have lost faith in it.
I think this is great advice and I'd be curious to see this as well Yukoner. (It would kind of be a follow up to where I asked you a few weeks back about what your profit would have been if you traded according to plan, even from a hindsight chart, and hence trying to figure out what the profit would be from your trading plan, which is of course seperate from what the profit is the way a trader is trading the plan in actuality) I think you've been pretty good about being diligent for the past few weeks in terms of taking trades as you should from what I'm reading... correct? So if this is the case, after a few dozen trades, perhaps even after 50 trades, would you not expect your trading plan to have produced more profit than loss? I wasn't quite sure what the Mo ticks were earlier, but since you say these are trades you don't take, would this, combined with the trades you take, add up to a profit? I myself was always on the hunt for raw stats from traders, trying to figure out what is possible. The numbers I've come across range quite a bit, anything from about an 83% win rate, which Alpha Trader was kind enough to share, to perhaps only about a 40% win rate, but the risk:reward ratio was a good 1:3, so its easy to see how this is still statistically an edge. I also did quite a bit of reading through Lescor's journal, and he had some good stats as well. His average win I think was 3k, average loss was 2k, and although he had maybe 1 out of 5 losing days, there was hardly ever a losing week (perhaps 2 in the whole year). I'm not sure of the breakdown for number of winning trades vs. number of losing trades, but it was all in the stats of what he provided and that first year I think he made about 700k. Anyway, for some reason, these stats I find very helpful. So to follow up with what Handle is saying, I'm curious about your entries and stats of what should be expected from your trading plan. We of course never know the distribution of wins and losses, and its quite possible to have even 4 losing trades in a row, but I would expect that after a week of trading well, the trading plan should have put you on the positive side. (There was also a great journal here that NoDoji also found very helpful which was from a guy named geez. He would always win either $400, or lose $200, but his long term win rate was 50%. Some days he did actually lose 4 in a row and hence was down $800, but other days he won 4 in a row and was up $1600. So in the long run, a 1:2 risk to reward ratio with a 50% win rate was more than adequate. Hope you don't mind me rambling, I just like the math aspect of all this. Its good to focus on the statistics side of things I think, which really helps to detach oneself from any individual trade.)