Flat out 2006

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This is odd imho
One day it's 68 trades and another day is nothing?
Care to comment without revealing the material information?

TIA
 
My trading is split into two pieces. The first decides what day to trade based on the likelihood of a directional day . So far only one day this month has passed the scan. The 68 r/t's on that day are a function of the money management and risk sizing. On that day there were only two trades (volatility breakout down and up). The other two strategies (reversal and continuation) did not trade that day.

43yotrader
 
how did you do in 2005?

Quote from 40yotrader:

I'm done for the year so I'm setting up my journal to track my goal for 2006. My goal is simple. Start with 325k and grow it to at least 825k in 2006 (after comm. but before taxes). Most of it will come from compounding. I have enough saved to cover the taxes for the year. My reason for going all out is simple. My edge is dying and I think this may be the last year it'll work. I daytrade ES using volatility breakouts. It'll work as long as the average daily range on ES is 7 pts. or better. For all of 2005 the average range for ES was 12 pts. I think it's going to contract some more in 2006 and if the NYSE extends the trading day it probably will reduce the daily range further. I'm a mecha trader so I don't have any profound analysis for anyone to read. I've split the trading into two parts to speed up processing in Tradestation. The first tells me if I have a trade for the next day. If I have a trades, I update 3 models and tell them to look for trades that day. They run on 1 min. data and use stop orders to get in and out of trades.

I'm think of opening another account to trade options so I'm going to post my paper trades on options here to keep track of the results.

Futures

No trades tomorrow

Options

Short Jan 1255 call 12.00
Short Jan 1250 put 10.00

Good luck to everyone in 2006.

43yotrader
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I netted $318,000 on a base of $300,000 with a smaller risk per-trade than this year. Would've done better but I lost money in December and screwed around alot during the year (mostly from boredom). Hopefully I'll stay on the straight and narrow with this journal used as a discipline tool.

43yotrader
 
very nice. i just scanned your last journal. looks like you cut it off pretty quickly. would you mind describing what you're doing?
 
Quote from jerryz:

very nice. i just scanned your last journal. looks like you cut it off pretty quickly. would you mind describing what you're doing?
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I stopped posting in the first journal just before going live because posting and reading the posts stressed me out. There was so much negativity and pm's calling me punk, loser, etc.
I came back after a couple weeks of live trading and found the journal closed. I figured who needs this and did my own thing for awhile.

I'm still doing about the same thing I did when I started. Looking for places where the market has a directional move. To take advantage of them, I use volatility breakouts (see Mark Fisher for examples). One of the problems with breakouts is retracements can be 50% or more of the daily range. Many times this causes a loss on one side of a volatility breakout when the reversal is entered during the retracement. Then when the market resumes the trend, you get another losing trade on the re-entry. I use a modified martingale money management approach so that when these reversals hit I increase my size to cover the losses. This is all part of the days trades. If the day doesn't have a direction I lose money. If it does, I make money. Pretty much all there is to it.

My other two strategies just add to the original. The reversal strategy looks for entries during the early period after a volatility breakout is entered. If found the reversal has the effect of locking in a small profit on the volatility breakout and staying flat until the volatility breakout hits going in the opposite direction.

The continuation strategy is a add-on trade to a existing winning volatility breakout trade after it reaches a certain profitability. This way on days with the biggest moves I have the largest position in place.

43yotrader
 
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