Corallus, short of knowing what your method is, could your result possibly have been caused by the type of market we have been having during the past year or so ?
Freealways
Freealways
I'm the most consistent trader in the world
- Thread starter Corallus
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Quote from cheeks:
How wide are your stops on ORBs? I have been trying to develop a strategy on the first 30 min bar, but I can not seem to figure out whether to use a very tight stop or an extremely wide one.
Any insights would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Cheeks
Hey Cheeks,
db has discussed at length his means of trading an ORB on the Keeping It Simple thread in the Futures forum.
Also, if you search for snosur4's posts in The Importance of Simplicity thread under Strategy Trading, you will also see how he does it. db's thread is based on snosur4's method.
Hope this helps!
I just try to be concrete; So as to go on, if you have made statistics about your trades then you are on a good track to look at what's happening and you should go on with this procedure. Perhaprs just take only trade that you are sure and paper trades others then look if statistics improve. When it wil be the case you will be confident enough to trade again for real without cutting too soon because it will be on RATIONAL BASIS and not on PURE FAITH. Faith is great but is not enough except for believers in godness . paper trading is important although it doesn't have the emotional part, it makes you repeat the process and REPETITION is necessary to acquire excellency. Pilotes do training not only during competitions but mostly out of competitions. It is the same for trading: you can train out of the madness of the crowd.
. paper trading is important although it doesn't have the emotional part, it makes you repeat the process and REPETITION is necessary to acquire excellency. Pilotes do training not only during competitions but mostly out of competitions. It is the same for trading: you can train out of the madness of the crowd.Quote from Corallus:
Your statement makes a lot of sense. I spent some time last night reviewing my trading records covering the past year and I found that there was a correlation between # of trades per day and my daily P&L. The higher the number of trades, the more money I lost, I discovered. I had already expected to find this result, but my statistics confirmed it. It turns out my optimum number of trades per day IS in fact around 2 each day. Actually, compiled from my winning days in 2002, it worked out to 2.3 trades per day when averaged out. My biggest losing days, on the other hand, were days when I traded 7 or more times. Plus you are right about not trading every day. For a leg trader, it is not even worth dabbling in the choppy consolidation days. Of course, sometimes it takes a stop-out before you find out that the day is a chopper.
I may add the Toni Turner choppy day rule to my trading regime. Basically it is this: Take the day off, or call it a day, when the TICK keeps bouncing back and forth between positive and negative and when TRIN flat-lines in the 0.90 to 1.10 area without showing any indication of trend.
Quote from cheeks:
How wide are your stops on ORBs? I have been trying to develop a strategy on the first 30 min bar, but I can not seem to figure out whether to use a very tight stop or an extremely wide one.
Any insights would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Cheeks
For the NQ, 5. I've been through the tight stop mill and it was a money-losing proposition. In order to make it work, you've got to nail the move dead on. For the same reason, I gave up trying to enter retracements and turned to breakouts instead.
I'll grant you it's discouraging to start the day with a 5pt loss, but in the vast majority of cases over the past four months, tightening the stop in some way has "locked in" an unnecessary loss that, if the stop had been left as is, would not have occurred. An even wider stop might be called for, up to 8 points, but that's a lot for many people (but really not more than 3 ES points), and the five points is a good compromise. Even so, the extent of a pullback which is not a reversal tends to be up to seven points though, again, five points is nearly always enough if there's any energy behind the move at all.
If you're going to have wide stops, though, you have to trust your strategy, and this is where paper trading comes in. It's also important to be able to recognize the difference between a retracement and a reversal, and this isn't always easy to do when the market is as lethargic as it has been these past weeks.
--Db
I have to say that an irony is that you may have been brain-washed and get yourself into a cycle to lose money consistently. Think freely. You had 50/50 odd originally minus commissions. What did you do to chop of the 50/50 towards the consistent losing side? How do the manipulators make you buy high and sell low?
...doing non directional trades or are you strictly an equities trader? I like trading options because 2 out of the 3 things that affect pricing can be controlled more or less.
1)Stock price. Not much you can do there unless you can foretell the future and it sounds like you want to...
2)Volatility. Good idea to know where VIX stands re your trades, as well as options vol, HV vs. IV
3)Theta (time value). No brainer, as it always works against you if long, and for you if short. Every option goes to zero at expiration. Some twists and curves along the way because of first two factors.
Might try mixing some of this in with your directionals.
Jerry
1)Stock price. Not much you can do there unless you can foretell the future and it sounds like you want to...
2)Volatility. Good idea to know where VIX stands re your trades, as well as options vol, HV vs. IV
3)Theta (time value). No brainer, as it always works against you if long, and for you if short. Every option goes to zero at expiration. Some twists and curves along the way because of first two factors.
Might try mixing some of this in with your directionals.
Jerry
The OP's last post was 2008 so probably not gonna hear from him
Even if he took the opposite side of all his trades, he could still end up losing. I suspect that most of his entries & stops could be in the slaughter zone.