Starting account value: $13,168
Ending account value: $13,112
P&L:
-56
17 trades, 13 winning, 4 losing.
- 8.5
- -254
- 96
- 71
- -141.5
- 96
- 58.5
- 8.5
- 8.5
- 21
- 21
- -79
- 33.5
- 46
- 8.5
- -66.5
- 8.5
Looking at your most recent stats, its pretty obvious what is happening. You're risking far too much for too little gain.
Take just this day, and do this. Make a spreadsheet to follow each trade and see what would happen with different risk to reward ratios. For example, pretend that you had a stop at 4 ticks, and a profit at 4 ticks, which one hits first? Then do the same thing with a stop at 8 ticks, or profit at 8 ticks. Make sure for the profit targets that price actually trades through the level so you don't have issues with getting filled. Try one also with a 12 tick profit, and 8 tick stop, or whatever combination you can think of.
Basically, what you want to see is, would keeping some sort of consistent stop and target lead to you being profitable today. I know there are a whole bunch of people who will say that you should be letting the market tell you when to get out and stuff like that, but at this stage, you're not ready for this type of precise market reading, and you will probably be more wrong than right anyway.
I have done this very same thing in the past, and here is a sample of the results.
Keep in mind that there aren't stats for a certain type of setup, and they aren't even categorized in terms of type of day. This is simply an analysis to figure out if micro managing trades is leading to better outcomes over a series of trades or not. You see, looking at your many trades, I would bet that applying a consistent stop and target will more than likely increase your profits for a certain combination.
You can see in my own stats that using an 8 tick stop and 12 tick profit leads profitable results, whereas many of the other combinations do not. This is a spreadsheet that I setup wihich calculated all columns with simple formulas, and I just enter a "1" for each combination of risk and reward for that trade. At the bottom, you even see a row that for those trades that hit at least +8, if I moved the stop to 0, and let it either hit +12 ticks or stop out at 0, this would have even increased the profits, and this was for the most profitable combination of -8/+12.
I think the only way to get out of the rut is with stats, to prove to yourself that it can be done. You may actually already have very good entries. Maybe you're even better than some traders here with where you place your trades, but your trade management could be what is holding you back. On some levels, this trading business is just a stats game, so you gotta gets stats working for you, not against you. Making a one tick profit, when you're risking much more, based on your losses, is not stats working for you. I do wonder how many of those trades where you took one tick profit ended up hitting a 2 or 3 point target before hitting perhaps a 2 point stop.
As you also do this, you see how many losers you can hit in a row, but at the same time, look at how none of this matters to the bottom line if you're consistent. Doing this was a real eye opener for me, and if you'd like to do this and share, I'd love to see your results.
I understand how you don't want to stop trading, and I understand how SIM trading just doesn't feel the same, but at the very least, you need to figure out where the problem is, and doing some stats like this will I think bring this to light.
but may act confident and comfortable, even cocky, in a sim account.
