$2,000 to $200,000 in 2020 at 2.00% per day.
- Thread starter sstheo
- Start date
Moving from 1 micro to 2 micros is also a 100% increase.
Your suggestion is based on the nominal amount of money and not on the trading.
And there is nothing known that would prevent, with appropriate account size, trading 1 (or more) minis, with micro bumps on way to adding another mini.
In it's current application, the OP is not snowballing his opportunity nor is the OP working on his fear of zeros flashing across the screen. The OP is merely wishing and talking the big talk of trading 1 or more minis. Although the OP has "allowed" himself to trade up to 7 micros based on account value, he has not traded beyond a concentration of 2 micros in a single trade. He is far away from trading even 1 mini confidently.
my bad, i thought he was an all in all out each trade with whatever size the account lets him trade.
i'm an all in all out trader, i don't scale into positions. only exception is if the volatility is crazy and we start getting 10 pt range bars on a regular basis i would cut down my size to manage risk better.
He was posting a daily blotter that showed the trailing four or five days. Then he had a losing day which I believe he posted. But then the blotters stopped and so did his regular posting. Then the posts began again but no blotter.
The loss was said to be the result of loss of discipline:
After that, on the next trading day we were told:
Then he went dark, came back after a week long absence, and told us:
He then went on to explain why the world was going to end because of coronavirus, which means he had a short bias while the market was ripping higher.
I don't mean to be negative, but if someone is going to run a public display like this there ought to be quite a bit more transparity than we see here, right? Imean, this isn't calling trades in real time. This is supposedly sitting on the screen doing manual high frequency trading all day and then reporting the results. So, I agree with Des - , er, poopy ... a blotter post should be expected in this type of exercise.
Otherwise, draw your own conclusions.
The OP has a lot of experience and seems to have followed the motto sometimes you win and sometimes you learn. He seems to understand his losses are psychologically based and this is a great experiment for him to successfully build a new mindset and adapt incrementally to the emotional responses to gains and losses flashing quite quickly on electronically traded contracts.
Many have heard the expression you all have plan until punched in the mouth. Well in trading some of us have had a strategy until getting blitzed on 1500 on a multiple lot contract right off the starting block. It's so crucial to be able to emotionally absorb those losses and maintain discipline as a discretionary trader. I think the OP is trying to make himself bullet proof against such cases.
Many have heard the expression you all have plan until punched in the mouth. Well in trading some of us have had a strategy until getting blitzed on 1500 on a multiple lot contract right off the starting block. It's so crucial to be able to emotionally absorb those losses and maintain discipline as a discretionary trader. I think the OP is trying to make himself bullet proof against such cases.
I believe that to be a fool, “psychological biases”, is the major difficulty to overcome in order to be a great trader.
Great question, thanks. I have been thinking about this. My original plan was to go to one E-mini at the $5k mark. But since I started this journal, I have reflected on the CME Micro contest last July:
I stayed in the top 11 out of about 1400 registrants for most of the week-long contest but ultimately ended in the 13th position. (I think the final number of registrants who actually traded was about 800.) It was an exhilarating ride!
Day 1. #1 right out the gate with 4 trades.
Day 1. #10 after 41 trades
Day 2. #11 after 62 trades
Day 3. #3 after 76 trades
Day 4. #6 after 178 trades
Day 5. Final #13 after 282 trades.
What happened to me during this contest was that I got adept at trading on all 4 charts of (MES, MNQ, MYM, and M2k) at the same time. Why? Because we could trade a maximum of 10 contracts of each instrument and it was a simple race to the finish line. So the winner was obligated to trade all four if he/she wanted to have any hope of winning the $2500 prize.
Risk management was a distant second in this contest and I violated lots of good trading principles in reaching a 13th place win. And I actually told the CME in their requested review by participants that the contest forced us to adopt some bad trading behaviors and they should instead adopt a "risk-adjusted return" approach next time. Unfortunately, they ignored my comments on their next contest.
Bottom line is that I started to like the 4 - chart layout, and I think I will continue with that. This means that I am more likely to spread out my current 6 micros across 2 to 3 charts instead of going all-in on just one chart. 4 charts at once is a bit stressful.
I am trading all-in/all out. This means that I will probably get up to 5 to 7 micros per position on 3 charts before I go to a full E-Mini. So despite the double commission, it will probably be 20 total micros or $10,000 balance before I go to the larger contract.
I think it will be too risky to try to go back and forth from full to micro, so I am not considering trading 1 E-mini plus 3 micros (for example) once I get to 13 micros (at $6,500 balance). I will do a simple transfer over from trading the micros to the minis. And if/when I drop back below $7,500 then I will start using the micros again.
An inherent problem with this approach as that as an all-in all-out trader as sstheo has mentioned he is, fills on 20-30 micros may not work out as well as 2-3 minis for the same market exposure. Heck, even NT7, as much as I bash it for it's journaling problems, approximates that problem in the sim engine as best it can. It is an eye-opener.
And that is an irony, as I was "born" into a bullish environment, and these ATH followed by corrections have my panties in a bunch so I am having trouble swinging long.
There is something else to remember when you post a chart like that above...You are posting what looks like a relatively smooth ride north during those dry periods of volatility, but that chart masks the intraday or intraweek noise of the ups and downs from close-period to close-period. It does not show the daily NQ moves of, say, open RTH at point X, drop 100 points during RTH, but recover to +10 points by end of RTH.
Not to mention all the crazy of ETH that can go on, which a chart like that will not represent.
All-in, all-out... hmmm
OP is placing multiple simultaneous trades, let's call it diversifying his trades, up to whatever his maximum number of micro contracts allowed by his metric of account size. In this manner OP says he is an all-in all-out trader... Each trade is either on or it is off.
This diversification, or as the OP posted a page back as "combinations", is counter-productive to his "goal" of trading 1 mini... All-in, all-out in relation to the goal should be max allowable (as determined by OPs measurements/metrics) micros. The combinations are not doing him any favor: with 7 micros he should be capturing 70% of his "if it was a mini" mindset/goal. Plus it is training for the increased numbers, drawdowns, losses, and profits associated with mini. The current process does match the goal.