Demoralized. Is 14 losses in a row normal?

So I've been on an upward equity curve for the past 2 months or so, over about 200 trades.

My general ratio is this. About 22% 2.7R winners, 20%partial winners(.5R), and 58% 1R losers. R=$460.

This should leave me with about 6k profit per month on a 29k account. I achieved this on my smaller account of 5k before.

And I have now just lost 14 trades in a row over the past 3 days. Right after scraping together 29k for an Interactive Brokers account. Just fell below PDT cutoff.

I did not do anything differently. Nothing worked out. I've had one winner in the last 15 trades.

This feels horrible, and I can't imagine winning a trade again.But something tells me that a 14 trade losing streak, while very unlucky, is completely possible using my winrate percentages. Am I just experiencing a drawdown that I have to get past?

Ps: (Only genuine advice please, I don't need cynicism or mean spirited comments right now.)

Ps 2: (If your system take profit at 2R, don't compare our win rates)

All strategies work until they don't. Yours seems to have stopped working. 14 losing trades in a row is too many. It's time to use a different strategy. Sorry, that's how it works.
 
All strategies work until they don't. Yours seems to have stopped working. 14 losing trades in a row is too many. It's time to use a different strategy. Sorry, that's how it works.
You know nothing about the skew of the strategy returns and the magnitude of the losses, so you can't claim that 14 losses in a row is "too many".
 
All strategies work until they don't. Yours seems to have stopped working. 14 losing trades in a row is too many. It's time to use a different strategy. Sorry, that's how it works.


No Sir. For Financial markets the exact same strategy that has worked since biblical times and the dawn of the universe, continues to work juicy well today. Buy when there is blood in the street, sell when ET is euphorically Long. Ditto for all moving average crosses, trend lines, channels etc., these fail in the bend in the trend but patience is the best tool in the bend/bear
 
I am re-optimizing my system at the moment. It's going to take me about 2 months to draw concrete conclusions... what I noticed though:

  • widening out stops by 180% (almost double stop distance)
  • Cut trading size in half
  • production returns/results are almost the same
  • Half commission

essentially giving the trade more room to work with less size equates to the same results.

My basis, I know my entrances and target exits are statistically significant...it's just a sizing and risk management optimization adjustment I am testing out. So time consuming though.
 
essentially giving the trade more room to work with less size equates to the same results.

Sounds like a good move. Smaller size equals less stress. The one thing you can count on trading is that eventually you will make a series of dumb mistakes or you will encounter some sort of air shaft drop. Trading small means the difference in a bad day and getting blown out when that happens.
 
and for the original poster. I listened to an ernest chan interview recently, some notes from a quant:

Ernest Chan:

· Be prepared for failure

· Success is an outlier

· Failure is to be expected

· Don't quit your day job

· 2 years of success before you consider full time

· Do not be overly excited about a 1 year positive return
 
I found one of my main problems. I was trading the 5 minute moves at pullback, without taking the end of the 15 minute waves into account, which meant many of my entries were too early. I've seen people talk about using higher time frames, now I see why.
It looks like you are new to trading, take some time to verify your strategy and to improve on your stats using a smaller trade size .

Use some kind of filter to reduce the number of losing trades.
Confirmation using a higher time frame is good but the time of the day can also be a good filter.

Take care
 
I am surprised that no one asked him to list his winning traders and compare them his losing trades.
How could you develop a whole discussion over something random such as "14 trades"?
Also, during what period were the winning trades versus losing trades? These small factors would reveal his strengths and weaknesses.
 
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