Deciding when to take profits (I let most of my winners turn into losers)

[osorico]

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).

1) What does your "methodology" produce when the YM daily range is 50 pts or less? ahhhh, smell that summertime Jasmine.

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. 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.

2) No-one, no-one, knows with 100% certainty if "this one" is a winner or loser, big or small, until after both sides of the trade have been executed and filled. However, we do know what triggered the signal, the win probability of such signal, and an average expectancy of such signal. Include day and time of day analysis of such signal and numerous other personal and market-condition variables. You have not done any of this. You are playing a video game.

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.

3) 10:1 risk management, with a 1:10 W/L ratio. Your methodology is performing perfectly! Getting nowhere fast, with the illusion of forward movement. Therein is the "cool" algorithm you seek.

BTW; your example... which is it, the textual 3/28, or your math, 2/28? The difference is success vs fail based solely on math.


Good trading

 

[Mike21]

Quote from IronFist:

The only indicator I'm using is a 60EMA. Go long when the price goes above it, go short when the price goes below it.


[

IronFist,

You always hear: keep it simple (KISS), less is more, etc, etc.... but I think you may have overdone that.

I don't think any exit strategy is going to make your system profitable.

Experiment with some additional indicators or price acton and also try entering the trade with a predetermined stop and limit.

~Mike

 

[mtwokay]

Use multiple time frames. Since you have 1 min charts for entry, use 4/16 or 5/25 min charts to define trend. Use the same indicators on all charts and only trade in the direction/momentum of the higher time frames. Stay in till you have a failure.

 

[Eddiefl]

Since most of your trades eventually go your way. Go for targets and sell when you hit them. Much better than letting them go your way then come back against you.

Find out what your Maximum positive gains are per trade and then shoot for a profit target near that number.

Once you do this consistently for a couple months, then add size/larger position.

Keep it simple. and you may need to find a better exit then the one you are using now.


EF

 

[ssbc19]

Quote from IronFist:

Forgive my ignorance but what chart am I looking at on the top half of your attachment?

It's the NYSE tick. It's showing buying and selling.

You can see in the morning the tick couldn't get below 600 which shows there wasn't much selling interest.

Here are some links. It's a really tool for intra-day trading

http://www.researchlabtrading.com/public/434.cfm?sd=2

And the traderfeed blog has a lot of post on how to use it

http://traderfeed.blogspot.com/2008/02/nyse-tick-using-sentiment-to-trade.html

 

[magicz]

Quote from mtwokay:

Use multiple time frames. Since you have 1 min charts for entry, use 4/16 or 5/25 min charts to define trend. Use the same indicators on all charts and only trade in the direction/momentum of the higher time frames. Stay in till you have a failure.

i was going to say use longer time frame to smooth out you entry and exit but MT beat me too it..

 

[IronFist]

Quote from Corey:

Inflection point, perhaps?

Is that what you meant by inversion point?

 

[IronFist]

Quote from ssbc19:

It's the NYSE tick. It's showing buying and selling.

You can see in the morning the tick couldn't get below 600 which shows there wasn't much selling interest.

That looks awesome.

But how do I get it? I found it on yahoo finance under C:TICK, but there's no chart (plus yahoo is delayed anyway so it doesn't help).

I have a Scottrade account and tried to open $TICK and C:TICK, but it couldn't find either one (so consequently they didn't load in QuoteTracker, either). I searched in Scottrade and found this:

However it won't load either of those, either.

Assuming I'm able to find a $TICK chart somewhere, can I use it for YM and NQ? I'm kind of curious cuz from the name NYSE TICK I'm assuming it would only apply to NYSE stocks...

 

[IronFist]

Oh speaking of tick charts, I can get them on OEC's platform but then I lose my ability to scroll to the left and see historic data. So for example right now I'm looking at tick charts with 300 ticks per candle (arbitrary number I just picked) and my chart is starting around 7:57am and I can't scroll to the left anymore than that.

So I can't really visually backtest with tick charts. That's lame.

Any (free) charting software I should download that is compatible with OEC's demo feed that doesn't have this limitation?

 

[ssbc19]

Quote from IronFist:

That looks awesome.

But how do I get it? I found it on yahoo finance under C:TICK, but there's no chart (plus yahoo is delayed anyway so it doesn't help).

I have a Scottrade account and tried to open $TICK and C:TICK, but it couldn't find either one (so consequently they didn't load in QuoteTracker, either). I searched in Scottrade and found this:


However it won't load either of those, either.

Assuming I'm able to find a $TICK chart somewhere, can I use it for YM and NQ? I'm kind of curious cuz from the name NYSE TICK I'm assuming it would only apply to NYSE stocks...

Here you go
https://trading.scottrade.com/TouchToneGuide/Available_Indicators.htm

nyse tick is "ntick", nasdaq tick is "qtick"

Those are good measure of market sentiment. For the most part ntick should work well for YM and qtick for NQ.

There is also TIKI. That is the up/down tick ratio of the Dow 30, which comprise YM.

You can see on both the tick and the tiki that around 12am EST there was a less selling.

TIKI lows went from around 25 to between 15 and 20. And for almost an hour TICK couldn't even go into the negative. And in that both had higher highs and there was a huge rally.