I had to totally shift my focus over the last 24 hours to that of conducting an information gathering exercise.
(That’s an awful lot of trades executed by me to only show a buck’s worth of profit!!!)
For throughout 2016 and 2017 my approach to trading was to reap profits of approximately 5 pips at a time, executing trades that typically had a 1:2 reward-to-risk ratio.
I was able to get away with this “sin” because my daily success rate tended to be 90% to 100%.
However, I am now interested in seeing each micro trade averaging around $2.00 rather than three to five dozen pennies in the hopes that my daily return on a $100 trading account will be a minimum of $5.00 per each round of sessions (which I believe to be well within the realm of possibility)
and because I’m doing other stuff while I’m trading now and can’t be entering and exiting trades all the time.
But it would appear that because of all the “funny business” going on and whatever “shenanigans” the market makers are prone to engage in, I was stopped out of several of my trades last night and this morning, even though
every single one of the assets I traded ultimately went on to hit my take-profit targets.
Consequently, I’m planning to see what happens if I make it standard practice to set my stops and targets 30 pips above and below the indicative price to ensure that the instruments have enough breathing room for market makers to manipulate rates in whatever way they like
without stopping me out of my positions before my take-profit targets are finally reached. (I will also be entering at key levels rather than waiting to rejoin dominant trends following temporary pullbacks so that I will be better positioned to avoid stop losses while at the same time maximizing the ease with which I might reap 20 to 30 pip gains.)
If my forecasts are as reliable as I believe them to be, perhaps I can eventually get away with a 2:3 reward-to-risk ratio, which seems plausible to me if I have an 80% success rate or better—even though this goes squarely against the conventional wisdom that demands professional traders accept nothing less than a minimum 1:1 reward-to-risk ratio.
(Doing so would allow for enough “play room” to avoid being repeatedly stopped out of my otherwise winning trades, but make it much more likely that virtually all of my targets would be hit within a single 24-hour market cycle.)
After writing all that, I really do think it’s going to be easier and much more reliable if I can go back to micro managing 5-pip guerilla trades for immediate returns that might begin to add up even faster now, thanks to some enhancements I added to my lower time frame charts today.
