1.8% Profit per Day Compounded over 220 Days
- Thread starter expiated
- Start date
Tuesday, September 10, 2016
I began trading with real money once again today, so no more posting of results until after I file my taxes next year. I thought I would at least continue being public about my virtual/demo account, but until I've built up a nice comfortable cushion by having at least doubled my initial account balance, I suspect I'm going to want to devote 100% of my attention to the live account so as to come as close as possible to avoiding a single losing trade.
I began trading with real money once again today, so no more posting of results until after I file my taxes next year. I thought I would at least continue being public about my virtual/demo account, but until I've built up a nice comfortable cushion by having at least doubled my initial account balance, I suspect I'm going to want to devote 100% of my attention to the live account so as to come as close as possible to avoiding a single losing trade.
Actually, it turns out that my first day of live trading was all I needed to feel relaxed enough with the process to do several things at once. So here are the results of my most recent virtual trades, roughly reflecting how things are progressing so far.
I'm going to abandon this experiment as originally envisioned.
While waiting for the last installment of compensation from the project I completed at the end of August to clear so I could deposit it in my OANDA account and resume trading full-time, I decided to bid on another job I saw offered online just to pick up a little bit of cash in the meantime.
However, the potential client somehow got the impression that I did not understand his offer as written (I understood it completely) so rather than respond to my proposal, he sent me a clarification.
Given that I debated doing anymore contract work at all (since my desire is to generate income via the markets rather than by working for others) I decided to just blow off the whole thing and I withdrew my proposal.
But the guy got back in touch with me anyway and indicated he really wanted me to compete for the job, so I figured, "What the hey, I'll just go with the flow."
And as it turns out, the client chose my submission over all the others he received and offered me the contract, which I accepted. But the thing is, with the size of the compensation he offered, I can keep depositing addition funds to my OANDA account every single week, and once the project is finished, begin trading full-time starting off with multiple thousands of dollars to work with rather than the two to four “Benjamins” I was planning to start off with now and am currently trading part-time.
If the goal was to grow my trading account exponentially and as quickly as possible—and indeed, that was the whole point—then this would be the faster way to do it. Ergo, this is what I’m doing.
In the meantime, I’m continuing to implement my Dynamic Price Range approach to buying and selling using a pseudo-swing style of trading so as not to get completely out of practice during the months ahead. Therefore, the account is going to grow faster via regular deposits than it is via trading—hence my original plan no longer being applicable/relevant.
The one thing that is pretty clear at this point is that I am finally genuinely finished making significant modifications to my chart setups, seeing as how I've been using the exact same basic configuration for several weeks now.
While waiting for the last installment of compensation from the project I completed at the end of August to clear so I could deposit it in my OANDA account and resume trading full-time, I decided to bid on another job I saw offered online just to pick up a little bit of cash in the meantime.
However, the potential client somehow got the impression that I did not understand his offer as written (I understood it completely) so rather than respond to my proposal, he sent me a clarification.
Given that I debated doing anymore contract work at all (since my desire is to generate income via the markets rather than by working for others) I decided to just blow off the whole thing and I withdrew my proposal.
But the guy got back in touch with me anyway and indicated he really wanted me to compete for the job, so I figured, "What the hey, I'll just go with the flow."
And as it turns out, the client chose my submission over all the others he received and offered me the contract, which I accepted. But the thing is, with the size of the compensation he offered, I can keep depositing addition funds to my OANDA account every single week, and once the project is finished, begin trading full-time starting off with multiple thousands of dollars to work with rather than the two to four “Benjamins” I was planning to start off with now and am currently trading part-time.
If the goal was to grow my trading account exponentially and as quickly as possible—and indeed, that was the whole point—then this would be the faster way to do it. Ergo, this is what I’m doing.
In the meantime, I’m continuing to implement my Dynamic Price Range approach to buying and selling using a pseudo-swing style of trading so as not to get completely out of practice during the months ahead. Therefore, the account is going to grow faster via regular deposits than it is via trading—hence my original plan no longer being applicable/relevant.
The one thing that is pretty clear at this point is that I am finally genuinely finished making significant modifications to my chart setups, seeing as how I've been using the exact same basic configuration for several weeks now.
I have decided to accept that, given my personal trading system, as long as I am pseudo-swing trading instead of full-time trading, on most days my average profit trade is not going to exceed or even match my average loss trade.
This is because I have to set my stop loss levels where I think price might go so that the market makers won’t hit my stops and turn what would have otherwise been a winning trade into a loss, yet set my take-profit targets where I “know” price will go so that a given asset does not turn against me just fractions of a penny away from my target levels and, once again, turn what would have otherwise been a winning trade into a loss.
But I can get away with this given that I’m in the same camp with Martha Stokes, meaning nothing less than a 75-80% success rate is acceptable to me. In fact, I consider days like today, where my success rate was only about 77%, to be a rather spasmodic (almost mediocre) performance.
To be honest, I prefer my daily success rate to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 85-100%. But again, to attain this kind of rate consistently, I need to be monitoring/managing my positions full-time, which once again, looks to be several months away at the least.
Two days in a row of substandard performance, but I don’t mind so much this morning, partly because a mediocre day is better than a losing day, and in part because it helped me finesse my protocol ever so slightly such that a repetition of consistently profitable (though smaller) trades is probably a bit more likely now.
This is largely due to a kind of chart amalgamation I slapped together. Though my chart configurations are essentially set, I have a basket of near identical versions that I scanned this morning in light of today’s so-so performance, and combined what I liked most from the different iterations.
The results are more-or-less represented by the image below, constituting a somewhat “tighter” version of what I was using before, still based on the directional tendency of tsunami or tidal waves as opposed to narrow moving averages, and on locating entry and take-profit levels on the banks of price flow near the crests and troughs of smaller waves as they cycle in oscillating patterns.
I am all finished trading for this 24-hour market cycle.
Unfortunately I had to enter positions based on structure yesterday as opposed to relying on key moving averages to tell me the precise moment to pull the trigger. Those potential pullbacks turned out to be wholesale reversals (as the moving averages eventually revealed) which got me started off on the wrong foot.
Nonetheless, my average profit trade outstripped my average loss trade, which does happen from time to time, and I managed to come out ahead anyway, even though my daily success rate this time around was another lackluster 73%.
Unfortunately I had to enter positions based on structure yesterday as opposed to relying on key moving averages to tell me the precise moment to pull the trigger. Those potential pullbacks turned out to be wholesale reversals (as the moving averages eventually revealed) which got me started off on the wrong foot.
Nonetheless, my average profit trade outstripped my average loss trade, which does happen from time to time, and I managed to come out ahead anyway, even though my daily success rate this time around was another lackluster 73%.
Yesterday's amalgamation worked, but it was a bit "clunky." I made modifications this morning resulting in a configuration I find a tiny bit more "elegant" if you will, but more importantly, slightly more practical for real-life trading...