Your welcome. In my early years I use to think of never sharing entries or parts of my systems, but......let's face it, failures written in some of the books out there-so nothing new except nuance of showing added Bollinger Band failure on most, don't see it ending unless world stops trading. I have a system that is automated based on 35 chart patterns, 3 patterns I have offered in prior charts posted on Yukoners' journal, some seldom come up or they are much more different that I would care to explain, but perhaps I will eventually, but it follows over 40 commodity markets intraday and Dow30 stocks both intraday/daily. You know if you have a decent method when it works on any timeframe. Works on weekly as well. The "secret" of Failures is figuring out what the "mean" of a swing in each market as those offer longest profits, so say ES intraday swing is 8.00 points and more likely a rotation of reversal going other way "or" sideways chop then resumption of current trend, but end of 8pts I be expecting Failure.
Do you have an idea of ave time to breakeven on winning trades? If you have this, you can see what affect that has on total wins. If it greatly shows inverse affect would say you getting in way too early and by knowing this time, how would changing target on losing trades affect those losses? I found years ago using time rules to alter my overall trading hugely changed losses into winning one tick wins. Yes, very occasionally missed some winners, but that is offset by other side of not having losses PLUS stresses of having losses.
"Average time to BE" Would you mind clarifying? Is this "avg time" the time it take a winning trade to get to BE after entry, or is this the time it takes a winner to come back to BE? if your AVG time to BE IS 5 minutes, are you setting protection immediately at BE based on your testing? Thanks. -JS
Woke up to an email from Facebook... So today was a day I just tried to get a feel for the market because I was too pissed off at my X, who hacked into my deactived Facebook account! Obviously really ticked me off... Demo trading for this week.
Your testing should show how far profitable so you can lock in plus one tick on trades that become winners but often times it is done manually as in case of my targets are changed due to chart patterns or reversals as well as getting full two points. You can also discover some info on losing trades as far as if they even got to 1-2 ticks profitable before becoming full losses and knowing how much time it was till it turned against desired direction. Mine is 3 bars for day trading futures regardless of duration of each bar's time. So take one minute bars, at end of 3 bars, if I am up 2 ticks plus, I lock in one tick, if I can hit bid/ask at one tick but watch DOME to see if it going to go in my trade direction, I will give it more time, but if at a loss, I will place limits on some positions to lock in one tick and others will hit bids/offers so as not to show my position.
Have you ever considered doing this each day, heavy duty exercising hour before trading, really put out some exertion so if you have bs drama that could take it away and go back to concentrating and making widgets, when you done trading, file with police or sue your ex in court for harassment, sue for damages. People don't stop till they feel some type of pain.
Yukoner, I think (just my opinion of course) you might have a serious timing problem, and a few other issues as well (all are related of course) in relation to method and approach. BUT, you must of course make up your own mind in relation to what you are doing and how you want to trade. I do not trade crude oil, but I have heard it is not the easiest market to trade, compared to other exchanges. If it was me in your situation, I would look at my chart setups and try and improve on my entries. Trying to improve on psychology may be of little use if the basics are not fine tuned, which I believe they must. One can always improve on what they are doing, and it will more than likely require some drastic changes to current circumstances, which of course is the hard bit, for it is not easy to change bad habits, no matter what people say about what they have read elsewhere. J_S