Growing funds at 20% monthly in FX using ATS

I am back after neglecting my journal for a few days, no I havent blown up yet but I havent been able to make money either. The reason I havent been posting is that I am only getting stopped out intermittenly in this flat line pulse of a market with no direction. Summer doldrums; what are you gonna do. Hopefully one of these weeks we may see run up to get shorties out followed by an aggressive selloff as the EURUSD is still in overbought RSI territory on the monthly charts.

Now for my trades, since last week, i think i have had 3 stop outs for 30 pips each (one was an accident but whatever), one 60 pip winner yesterday and one stop out last night. My account is somewhere around 2850 to 2900 and I should be long right now if my program didnt get screwy on me.
 
Ok last Fri I ended with 2881 for a -190 loss for last week

Week 6: -6.1%

I crippled myself on Friday by placing a limit order at 1.5845 and leaving 100 pips on the table which would have made my week. pretty much by know its obvious that everytime I interfere I screw things up lol. Anyway since Friday I placed a couple of trades including shorting the gap up (did you catch that one Sam?). I am basically at about 2950 now. However, I have turned the program off because I have been focusing on the price moves and I think there will be some interesting moves coming which I want to trade on my discretion without being whipped around in ATS. I have already stated that I was bearish EURUSD longer term and I maintain this position. However, I see as we tested and broke highs the very high probability of spikes to 1.63-1.65 and fast moves down before some kindof top is established. I was short last night through the record break but now I am up about 41 pips on 30K. I am looking at reversing to long, as soon as I get home after today's 200 pip selloff.
 
Quote from bhristov1:

Ok last Fri I ended with 2881 for a -190 loss for last week

Week 6: -6.1%

I crippled myself on Friday by placing a limit order at 1.5845 and leaving 100 pips on the table which would have made my week. pretty much by know its obvious that everytime I interfere I screw things up lol. Anyway since Friday I placed a couple of trades including shorting the gap up (did you catch that one Sam?). I am basically at about 2950 now. However, I have turned the program off because I have been focusing on the price moves and I think there will be some interesting moves coming which I want to trade on my discretion without being whipped around in ATS. I have already stated that I was bearish EURUSD longer term and I maintain this position. However, I see as we tested and broke highs the very high probability of spikes to 1.63-1.65 and fast moves down before some kindof top is established. I was short last night through the record break but now I am up about 41 pips on 30K. I am looking at reversing to long, as soon as I get home after today's 200 pip selloff.
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Hey man, good to hear on the gap. I did see the gap later Sunday night but at the time of market open, I was hung over and vomiting on a plane back from Vegas. I assure you, I would have much rather been making money on the gap but schedules... :P

Glad to hear you caught that quick turn around sell-off and I'm also comforted to hear you'll be getting ready for a long...I believe this thing will be headed higher as well.

I'll be waiting for a good deal to come about, not sure where the support is and I don't trade the E/U often so not exactly comfortable...but I was thinking 1.56 and/or stagger in some longs from a bit above and be prepared to hold on for a bit. Keep S/L close in case we do have a larger sell off, as you mentioned.

Anyway, thanks for the update, glad to hear you're hanging in there! I’ll be reading.

**There were also gaps on the G/U &...the U/J, I think? Did you see/play those?
 
LOL, sounds like Vegas was fun, I need to go check it out, never been there.

Yeah I missed the other gaps since I keep only the EURUSD chart in my face, but my account is so small that I dont really have much buying power for more.

Basically I reversed my short for a 15 pip profit the other day and bought 20K at 1.59065. I had a stop to buy more at 1.5950 but it didnt trigger. After the harsh selloff yesterday I doubled up at 1.5851 using another buy stop last night. Right now I have 40K long at an avg price of 1.5878 or so. I am looking for a goal somewhere north of 1.6.

The plan is to make some gains in my account while I can see directionality and clarity in the market before turning on the ATS again. I actually need to have it updated since IB has updated TWS and now the prog cant communicate with it.

On a side not, I am happy that financials popped up a bit since my longs on UYG and XLF options in my long term accounts were starting make me feel uncomfortable. Although I am not yet positive on those holdings, (one more similar rally should do it) I think they will yield well in my 1 year time frame.
 
Quote from bhristov1:

respect for posting all your trades and thoughts on your system. But risking for sounding like an overly critical guy I still dare to say it: You seem to have consistantly lost money so far which does not point to any edge your system seems to have. The markets have been trending a lot even on your specific time frames that you mentioned. A very simply MA crossover system has grossed me quite a lot in USDJPY over the past few weeks, even a momentum strategy worked that puts on longs/shorts on MA slope changes. But looking at your performances it looks to me at first sight as if a) your system flags entries too late when the move has already ocured by 50%, b) at times when there is actually no statistical edge and the currency pair could go up or down with equal probability and c) you got wipsawed way too often with. c) is the most dismissable flaw because its a property of all trendfollowing system that there will be a number of stop outs in non trending periods. But your losses are way too large relative to your profit targets. My system enters into position on price/MA crossovers and stops out at levels as a function of the ATR or other statistical measure of realized volatility, so is my tradesize. Just one thing to consider. Others use oversold/overbought indicators to get out of positions that have moved into their favor. (but never putting on a new trade b/c of oversold/overbought levels). Just trying to get couple more ideas out the door that consistantly work for me.

Fx markets are one of the toughest markets to trade let nobody tell you otherwise. You may also experiment trading stocks based on your momentum strategy. A good system works on ANY asset, if your fails then there is surely something wrong, such as over optimization or fitting to past data.

Just my 2 cents.

Good luck!!!
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You should focus on money management and also risk management. It seems you are placing bets all over the place without much thought to risk vs reward, and bet sizing.

Also, you keep mentioning turning on and off the ATS. I really don't think it is an ATS if you have to keep manually intervening. I would just turn it on and forget it, or program it to do it automatically. You have to really look at your edge, and see if it is actually an edge by examining the hit rate, profitability per trade, and risk analysis. Then if there is an edge, you can design a money management system around it to maximize your profits.
 
The system itself does have an edge, my account was at 2881 when I stopped trading ATS, after I lost 800 shorting the yen. Thats -320 or so and about 10% of the account. Therefore there was about +500 generated by the prog.

Now the fact that I am constantly interfering, short on patience and gambling profits is a whole other matter lol. Personally at this point I would change the title of the thread. I am interested in ways to weed out signals using other indicators but I havent really seen anything jump out at me, I am going to systematically review some of the suggestions you guys gave me to see if I can create a slightly better filter for my trades. I wanna thank you for all recommendations.

As for my discretionary trades I cant really describe them other than to just say there is a method to my madness. I would often hold onto positions hundreds of pips against me and trade in and out so that I can start a long position at like 1.5900 and end up closing three weeks later at 1.5800 having booked a profit from averaging at different spots. This is what generates big swings. If you paid attention I had held my short -120 pips against me on tues.(i booked only 15 pips profit because I felt I was on the wrong side of the larger trend) and now my current long was -90 pips against me (but as of right now its coming up, I truly think I got the direction right from the price action). I do realize that this is basically the most dangerous way to trade if it can even be called a legit method, but its really the only way I trade discretionally. It lets gives me the opportunity to be dead wrong on direction and still book profit or a relatively small loss.
 
Still long, 40K, dying of boredom. Delivered research report on currencies for my bosses this morning, mentioned Lehman was very bearish on the EURUSD, but short term I disagreed with them, the head of the office told me to reverse my position LOL.
 
Did you play any of the gaps yesterday?

I got long on the GBP/USD gap and finally pulled a profit out early this morning on four staggered longs. Nice bounce off the previous low and it was all up from there. This is the first gap I traded in my primary "trend" trading account and it was nice to see the gains, a little shy of 1% of the account value. I was a little worried though as the gap took a good while to close and even then, it didn't completely close. I had placed my T/P pretty conservatively though, which ensured the profit.

Same thing happened last week on that large AUD/USD gap...it almost filled for 40-50 pips but then turn and ran within 10-12 pips of the close price. I think a trailing S/L once you're in profit and/or have a definite bounce in price will be helpful and I'll use it in the future...with such a wide S/L (I'm generally going with your 2:1 risk/reward recommendation), a stopout at the original S/L location will hurt and needs to be kept to a minimum to be profitable over time.

Anyhow, here's the gap I'm looking at. You can see that price did not quite close the gap but was close enough for me. My profits ranged 15-35 pips on (4) separate long positions.

gapcopy.jpg
 
Good job man, like I said B4 I have a 40k position on EURUSD and I dont have much buying power left for the way I am trading (I hit -90 pips but I am positive now: avg 1.5778 or so), esp since that gap was in the same direction as my long, so I am basically only increasing my leverage in the same general direction.

I am glad you noted that the gap did not completely close, thus the gap fill is not complete and GBPUSD will make a new push towards a complete gap fill. If I were you I would try going long again, its a good setup. It may have already filled by the time I post tho, since I see it going up right now. Its sad that these trades only happen once a week. In my opinion its free money. I have NEVER lost money on a gap. However, the proper way to trade them with stops is to have your stops equal to 1.5 times the size of the gaps. They will fill about 90% of the time. So you get risk of 1.5 * .10 and reward of 1 * .9 or .15/.90 or 1 to 6 easily one of the easiest and most profitable strategies I can think of.

Notice that your stop is bigger than your reward, novice traders often think that all you gotta is put your limit 3X > than yours stop and bam you get the magical, 1:3 ratio of profitability. Not so, factor in 75% chance of stopout due to the tighter range on the way down and now you got a negative R/R LOL.

This really is priceless info, and I suspect one of the reasons people fail more than they should. However, this is not an original idea of mine, it came from a futures blog I read by a talented trader. Prob most profitable traders know this, but I am sure it will be news to someone. GL all :)
 
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