Losing Trades Archive

Handle123 · Apr 30, 2015

Autodidact said:
What does always work? Nothing

Losing always works and lose often if one doesn't have a good Trading Plan, or education or want to lose. Right? Maybe what all of us should do is not manually trade at all and if one can't program method means it wasn't back tested.

Maverick1 said:
Handle,

I mean this only in the best of ways: I find your charts really hard to decipher and I'm guessing I'm not the onlyone. I realize you don't owe anyone anything on ET, but if you ever are up to it, would you consider annotating your entry/entries and exit/s? Maybe a green arrow or line for entries and red for exits. If you just don't have time, never mind. Just thought I'd ask because if you're taking the time to post charts, then you don't mind people reading them.

Well, I put the arrow right on top of the hash mark for entry, I just don't know how much clearly I can put it. As far as exits, I try to get two points in ES and risk is 2.25 points, the other markets are left up to those who care to take the time to back test it.
Am sorry, I should have not posted winning trade as this was for losing trades journal.
What is funny, is traders want where I get in/out, PM me for stats, bitch about meager drawdowns. Am not going to take it wrong way, just tired. Going to back off from posting charts. I find it amusing that no one asks why I would take trades, just arrows and stats.....

Autodidact · Apr 30, 2015

Handle123 said:
Losing always works and lose often if one doesn't have a good Trading Plan, or education or want to lose.

I mean in terms of setups and strategies, no infallible setup.

i960 · Apr 30, 2015

VPhantom said:
I'm back to experimenting with historical replays right now so the feel's not quite the same, but just to throw in a different kind of flavor, here's one on a setup I'm working on. My initial stop-loss is where I consider the reason for the trade to be invalidated and I never move it against me. Because I like potential turning points, the losers thus tend to be fairly quick.

BTW VP, you can use the Daily OHLC study in SC to do the yesterday's open/low/high/close, etc. stuff automatically. I just set the sub-graphs to include the name label and give each sub-graph names like 'PDC', 'PDH', 'LOD', 'HOD', etc.

VPhantom · May 1, 2015

(Apologies to @Maverick1 for going off-topic momentarily.)

i960 said:
BTW VP, you can use the Daily OHLC study in SC to do the yesterday's open/low/high/close, etc. stuff automatically. I just set the sub-graphs to include the name label and give each sub-graph names like 'PDC', 'PDH', 'LOD', 'HOD', etc.

Thanks! I'll keep that in mind. Right now though, laugh if you want but I enjoy "interacting" with the chart as I set up my day. Helps me take notice of not only where the interesting levels are but also how they were formed.

One thing which I really liked discovering this week though, is SC's rudimentary calculation studies. By adding a few of those, hiding this or that, I managed to add to my "tool values window" lines which tell me a bar's "high + 1/2 ATR" and "low - 1/2 ATR" which my plan uses on swing point bars for trying to hide behind others' orders. I kept doing those by hand at every setup until this week! No more calculator during the day now.

You know what? A picture is worth a thousand words:

(For sake of completeness: it's actually 4 lines, as I use the largest of 2 ATRs. SC doesn't have a "min()" or "max()" study, so I still choose between the two by eye. Easy though. Also since that screenshot was taken, I actually made the 2 high lines and the 2 low lines different colors, so they stand out as pairs visually. SC's really quirky but hugely capable when we dig deep enough!)

Maverick1 · May 1, 2015

Hey Phantom, no apologies needed. Glad you're making Sierra work, I tried a while back... prefer Ensign.

VPhantom · May 2, 2015

Maverick1 said:
Hey Phantom, no apologies needed. Glad you're making Sierra work, I tried a while back... prefer Ensign.

Thanks. I gave Ensign a look before settling on SC, but quirky-for-quirky the lower entry-level pricing won me over. For $27/month I can sim trade on all the historical data I want, with good playback speed control. Oh, that and the promise of working under WINE so I wouldn't need a Windows virtual machine at all (although this proved to be a bit rough around the edges, and I'm now running SC in a WinXP VM anyway).

...and now that I got it under control and working the way I want, I'm starting to think it'll become my live trading interface as well. (Though I might still use IB's TWS for order management, and not link the two for chart trading. I don't like how I have to specify a stop size instead of price in SC's bracket UI.)

i960 · May 2, 2015

As far as stop size vs price goes I simply just use a basic 1:3 stop:target placeholder setting and move things to their intended places right after the entry is put on. You do use chartdom/trading right?

VPhantom · May 3, 2015

i960 said:
I simply just use a basic 1:3 stop:target placeholder setting and move things to their intended places right after the entry is put on.

Interesting approach; I hadn't thought of that. I guess in simulation that's fine, although in live trading that would involve two order modifications right off the bat and I'm trying to keep those to a minimum.

i960 said:
You do use chartdom/trading right?

The DOM's safely closed (not my cup of tea, I make just 0-4 trades/day), but I do display my positions on the chart, yes. I'm equally at ease dragging those on the chart or updating absolute values in, say, TWS "classic" (where I come from) but it's nice for my daily slideshow archives to see the bracket orders clearly illustrated.

i960 · May 3, 2015

VPhantom said:
Interesting approach; I hadn't thought of that. I guess in simulation that's fine, although in live trading that would involve two order modifications right off the bat and I'm trying to keep those to a minimum.

Assuming you're not trading an exchange with cancellations (which might not actually apply here as only attached child orders are being modified [assuming you're not being filled on the parent immediately]) it shouldn't matter too much.

I had actually made a request to Sierra to support an alternate order entry for bracket orders but I of course was ignored/shot down by their "all-knowing" team of "that's too hard" programmers:

https://www.sierrachart.com/SupportBoard.php?PostID=56193#P56193

VPhantom · May 4, 2015

i960 said:
I had actually made a request to Sierra to support an alternate order entry for bracket orders but I of course was ignored/shot down by their "all-knowing" team of "that's too hard" programmers:

Oh I remember that thread! That's when I decided it would be acceptable to enter distances instead of prices, because the risk-reward tool can display both together so I don't have to make any calculations during live trading. It's annoying, (as is having to flip through 2 tabs constantly in the order window) but it's part of why SC is so lean on system resources and most importantly, priced so low.