A profitable journal with all entries/exits posted in advance

through technical analysis you aren't predicting anything you just observe the balance of power in the market at that moment in time. You never know where it's going to lead you. I am always in the market from 7 CET till 17:00 CET. In my intraday trading it might even mean a loss of 1 or 2 pips in the end. It's totally impossible to show this through a journal with live calls though as it takes focus and I am allready in a chatroom with a few other people. Trust me, it can be done ... it just took me an immens amount of time ... much longer than most are willing to spend at this game ... I must have spend like 20000 hours looking at charts before I got it ... and that's only after I started totally from scratch again saying to myself: everything you ever heard about trading is wrong ... and in fact it turned out most of it was ...
 
Quote from 1a2b3cppp:

No, as I stated above, I meant predict.

"Following" doesn't work because the trend that everyone likes to follow can reverse at any point. Let's assume you have defined some conditions that allow you to label a trend the moment it begins. You can now say "we previously were not in a trend but now we are in a trend."

That would require a condition of: "because we have just entered into a trend (defined by some parameters), price is now more likely to continue in this current direction rather than reversing." Put more simply, it requires being able to say, "because price did x, it is now more likely to do y than to do z."
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Not necessarily. The logic of trend following isn't so much "price is more likely to go up than down at this point" as it is, "if I'm right about the direction here, I will make more than I would lose if I'm wrong."

With proper position sizing and trade management, a trend follower can make money if only a third of the trades are profitable. The trick is having discipline to hold out for outsized winners.
 
Quote from worldwary:

Not necessarily. The logic of trend following isn't so much "price is more likely to go up than down at this point" as it is, "if I'm right about the direction here, I will make more than I would lose if I'm wrong."

With proper position sizing and trade management, a trend follower can make money if only a third of the trades are profitable. The trick is having discipline to hold out for outsized winners.
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That requires having a target profit that is further away than the target stop, which is just another way of saying "because x happened, price is more likely to do y than to do z."

In other words, it's predicting.

But cheers to anyone who can make it work for them :)
 
Good trading is never done with targets imo ... you just sit in untill the market shows you it's time to get out ... (and reverse in my case) ... that might be 53 pips further or -2 pips to give my most extreme examples of friday ...
I always have an emergency stop 9 pips from my entry just in case I might have missed something ...
 
Quote from 1a2b3cppp:

That requires having a target profit that is further away than the target stop, which is just another way of saying "because x happened, price is more likely to do y than to do z."

In other words, it's predicting.

But cheers to anyone who can make it work for them :)
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Your approach involves "predicting" too, does it not? Predicting that once price declines, it will rise again? Also in effect, predicting that price is more likely to decline substantially than it is to rise substantially from any given point (else why not use a large position size from the beginning)?

Anyway, I don't believe that most trend-followers use profit targets. They instead use trailing stops. The theory is that trends develop some percentage of the time, even if it cannot be predicted which instruments will trend at which times, and that those trends that do develop can go on longer and farther than could be predicted in advance. The approach in a nutshell is to put in a large number of trades across a large number of instruments, use appropriate position sizing and small stops, then trail the stop on the winners.

This approach certainly isn't for everyone. However, I don't think it involves any more "predicting" than any other trading theory. Every trade is a bet. Some will win and some will lose.
 
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QLD: $806

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