Please, as your bestfriend, get out now before I pop a vein looking at your daily losses again. Egad.
Quote from chewbacca:
Here's how I determine how much I can afford to lose:
I'll take the past 20 days of data and:
win % * ave win per day + loss % * X = 0
X is the amount I can afford to lose and still break even.
Quote from illiquid:
Those numbers don't mean sh*t, beyond the fact that you are losing money.
I'm sure this isn't the case, but what if the reason you are losing money is the fact that your stops are way too tight, and the only reason you make money on profitable days is that you allowed yourself a wider stop and more time for trades to work out? Yet with the above, you would be coming to the exact opposite conclusion by limiting yourself to $20(!) max loss a day. Forget the statistics or averages, they won't help you diagnose anything.
Quote from chewbacca:
I suppose I can research, backtest, ect. - but I'm not good at math, programming, computers/software, etc. Nor am I interested in that stuff. The brightest minds have tried and currently are trying to beat the market right now. I think gambling/trading is the #1 reason we've seen many of the advances in math, probability, statistics, etc. So I don't think I can find a workable strategy thru endless research - there is no holy grail out there.
I don't want to enter or exit a trade just because my 'system' tells me so. If I want to trade like that then might as well build a robot to trade for me like a lot of funds out there.
I want to enter and exit trades based on pattern recognition, backed up by sound money/risk management plan (still working on that).
Quote from PetaDollar:
You are equating research with mechanical systems. Silly. If you are entering a breakout, buying support, selling resistance, whatever, you need to know how it is supposed to behave after you enter. You have to collect statistics in order to estimate the risk. If you don't, you don't know what the risk is and you don't know how much you are supposed to make. If you don't know these things, you can't bet properly. If you don't bet properly, you are doomed.