My Wyckoff journal

dbphoenix said:
The simplest and not particularly difficult solution to overtrading is preparation, including planning. Once you are able to locate the range, your choices are automatically limited: sell a break below the range, buy a break above the range, do nothing if price remains within the range (unless the range is wide enough to trade reversals). And that's it.

In this case, you had an opening range of 4308 to 4312/13 that was within a wider range of 4298 to 4328. If price were to drop below 4308, short. If price were to rise above 4312-13, buy. As it turned out, price fell. That's a short, even though it took place before the open. If not taken, then there is NOTHING to do until price reaches the opposite extreme of 4328, at which point one trades the reversal. That is a half hour of doing nothing. One then follows price to the other extreme. This takes 12 minutes. The trip back to the upper extreme takes an hour. But there are no trades from one end to the other after one has traded the reversal.

That is a total of three trades if one did not take the pre-market short and reversal.

The point of locating these ranges is to plan one's trades in advance. If instead one trades by "feelings", he's going to be making a lot of trades, most of them losers. If you can't write down, in advance, what you're going to do and where, then you should observe that day and postpone your trading until you can prepare properly.
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An addendum to my prior update above....

Just went through @gears journal again - I remember I 'liked' this post at the time, and it made a real impact on me, so too with @fortydraws post on the same page about primary and secondary Ranges.

At any rate - this is what I was referring to above when I mentioned my trading plan for the day.

I now have a plan for the day - not some fuzzy thoughts in my head about going long here or there...

After my pre market analysis, I've noted the levels I'll be taking trades at. I've written down a plan for trading them, i.e. reversals, retracements.

I think for me the key is in that last paragraph. Until I started planning the day with enough granularity for my own personal needs I would tend towards taking too many trades. Not overtrading and going 'on tilt', but taking trades in the middle of ranges too often.

There isn't a struggle for discipline when I've planned the trades already.

I've only been forward testing this stuff for a few days, but it has made a big difference thus far. For instance, I am no longer looking for trades in areas I haven't already outlined. Already - the number of trades per session has dropped, my win/loss has improved....

I'm only about 5 or so trading sessions into the exercise so far, so will see how the rest goes.....

I'll be posting the results. Unfortunately I'm not as good at the stat analysis as @lajax is, but I'll give it a go!

edit: added a link to @fortydraws post and @dbphoenix post
 
Had a look and my last post was April 11th...

Quick Update:

I've gone through 2 iterations of a trade plan, and am 2/3rds the way through my final sim / walk forward pass.

Lots of reading of Mark Douglas as well...

The results are very encouraging, and the funny thing is, all of this backtesting has left me with a surprisingly simple trade plan that is far, far from what I was originally expecting. After the first pass I stripped away everything that was distracting me and really just zeroed in on the basics.

I'll write up the stats etc once I am done, then I will more than likely start posting my PreMKT analysis, daily trade plans and demo/live trades.

The majority of what I've been doing has been focussed on the psychological aspects of trading. That then influenced the second iteration of my trade plan. I think I had the technical /mechanical aspects down pat pretty quickly, so the real work was psych and focussing on probabilities etc.
 
On a personal note, it's been too long without an update....

But to be perfectly honest I am getting more done alone without stepping into the hornets nest that ET has degraded into recently.

I might start posting more in a bit, but with the crap that anyone who is even halfway involved with Wyckoff / @dbphoenix seems to attract, I might not....

There really is no point in creating personal journals within an atmosphere where @dbphoenix 's amazon purchases are trolled simply to throw more mud. I respect @lajax for continuing to post, but seriously.....

My lack of faith in humanity is constantly reinforced by crap like this.

@dbphoenix and @fortydraws - I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you both sincerely for the knowledge that you have passed on so graciously over the last few years.

Regardless of what the trolls post here, I have been able to take your knowledge and furnish a backtested, tailored trade plan that I have 100% faith in.

That was the whole reason I started posting here on ET, with the goal to end up with precisely what I have ended up with.

I have done the backtesting, forward testing and research required to satisfy MYSELF that what you have put forward not only has merit, but more importantly provides me with a workable framework with which to view and approach the markets with.

A sincere thankyou.

Fin.
 
dbphoenix said:
Remember that there are other venues . . .
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True. That's a good option.

I've also considered starting a blog to post to as well. I like the thought of posting my trades, analysis etc for the sake of personal accountability. You can't run away from not sticking to a trade plan when you've posted it.... Another aid to personal discipline.
 
Let me know one way or another what you plan to do: PM, TL, whatever.

Now that I have practically everybody on Ignore, it's almost like a private website ;)
 
100 posts - yay for me ;)

How’s this for synchronicity? My 100th post documents my first 100 Trades. Small things, small minds I guess.

At any rate. Here goes…..

I’ll post the results first and then talk a bit about the process, and how I'm interpreting the results….. Boring stuff I know, but hey, it might help someone with their journey.

I wouldn’t say I have a complete Trade Plan yet. This is only one setup and I'll add to the plan over time. The results below refer to 1 trade setup executed 100 times. I’m reviewing the trades taken and will hopefully finish that soon. I'll then conduct a second pass of another 100 Trades with the experience gained from the review.

I've been demo trading this setup as well for the last week or so and the results thus far are pretty much in line with these below.

Trades 100
Winners 67
Losers 33

Profit Factor 3.36

MAX Consec. Win 7
MAX Consec. Loss 3
MAX Drawdown ($) (360)
MAX Run UP ($) 1200
MAX Win ($) 200
MAX Loss ($) (200)
AVG. Win 155.56
AVG. Loss (78.92)

hold time (ht) 0:03:57
ht winners 0:04:59
ht losers 0:02:20

Parameters:

Entry type Reversals

2 Contracts

Emergency Stop 5pts
Take Profit 5pts

Discretionary Take Profit based on price behaviour - for example - if it became clear the trade wasn’t going to go to target. Thus the average win is below 200.

Discretionary exits at Wyckoff Danger Points or as mentioned above, based on price behaviour. 2 trades were max stops.

Entries taken at levels identified in Pre Market, and specific intraday market structure levels (i.e Intraday High /Low etc). I’d identified these levels as providing good trading opportunities during my 100 Range exercise.
 
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Close but no cigar ;)

Calculations are skewed as comms are taken out of gross, not each trade. This means that BE trades are included as wins. I haven't munged the data to take comms out of each trade yet as this run was proof of concept. That means the averages will be a bit off.

As Multicharts doesn't have the capability to sim trade whilst in mkt replay, I had to program a sim trading script and output Multicharts metrics to csv to analyse it.

Gross profit 9,800.00
Gross Loss (2,920.00)
 
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