Ok this is driving me nuts.
I have a methodology that I've been working with on the YM and NQ. It produces large winners, especially in the first and last hours of trading each day, but then in between, or even sometimes during those "good" hours," I get chopped to hell and I end up negative for the day (OEC demo account).
The problem is I don't know when one of my signals is going to pan out and be a big winner, or when it's just BS.
Say in a given day I get 30 signals. Three might be winners (+$300 each) and 28 might be losers (-$30 each). So that's $600 - $840 = fail. I try to cut my losers early but even with my winners there's always some chop before they take off.
So my big winners are big (for me, trading 1 lot at a time), but sometimes they'll get to +$80 or +$150 or so and then reverse. I don't sell until I get my sell signal. Sometimes they pick back up and end up +$200 or +$300, but sometimes they go back down and my sell signal triggers around +$5 or $10. Then I get pissed at myself when at one point I was up $100 and I sold for $10 profit.
So does anyone have any cool algorithms for solving this problem?
...or for reducing the frequency of my losers? I've tried stop and reverse orders (so buy 1 contract, and then sell 2 (which puts me short 1), and then buy 2 (which puts me long 1), etc)., but then I end up getting a bunch of $+20 trades that turn into losers. If I had scalped all those $20 trades I'd be positive at the end of the day, but I'm always waiting for them to turn into that one huge trade so I hold it and it turns into a loss, I reverse it, +10 or 20, then it turns into a loser where I reverse again, +10 or so, then it turns into a loser, etc.
My first day on this demo I was +$800 on 3 trades at 1 contract each (two on YM and one on NQ) after the first two hours of trading. I thought "awesome, this is easy". And almost every day since then, employing the same methodology, I've ended up negative.
Here hang on, I will attach some charts of what I'm talking about.
I have a methodology that I've been working with on the YM and NQ. It produces large winners, especially in the first and last hours of trading each day, but then in between, or even sometimes during those "good" hours," I get chopped to hell and I end up negative for the day (OEC demo account).
The problem is I don't know when one of my signals is going to pan out and be a big winner, or when it's just BS.
Say in a given day I get 30 signals. Three might be winners (+$300 each) and 28 might be losers (-$30 each). So that's $600 - $840 = fail. I try to cut my losers early but even with my winners there's always some chop before they take off.
So my big winners are big (for me, trading 1 lot at a time), but sometimes they'll get to +$80 or +$150 or so and then reverse. I don't sell until I get my sell signal. Sometimes they pick back up and end up +$200 or +$300, but sometimes they go back down and my sell signal triggers around +$5 or $10. Then I get pissed at myself when at one point I was up $100 and I sold for $10 profit.
So does anyone have any cool algorithms for solving this problem?
...or for reducing the frequency of my losers? I've tried stop and reverse orders (so buy 1 contract, and then sell 2 (which puts me short 1), and then buy 2 (which puts me long 1), etc)., but then I end up getting a bunch of $+20 trades that turn into losers. If I had scalped all those $20 trades I'd be positive at the end of the day, but I'm always waiting for them to turn into that one huge trade so I hold it and it turns into a loss, I reverse it, +10 or 20, then it turns into a loser where I reverse again, +10 or so, then it turns into a loser, etc.
My first day on this demo I was +$800 on 3 trades at 1 contract each (two on YM and one on NQ) after the first two hours of trading. I thought "awesome, this is easy". And almost every day since then, employing the same methodology, I've ended up negative.
Here hang on, I will attach some charts of what I'm talking about.
