Thank you I sent you a private message. With my email address.
I feel more comfortable replying in the thread, John ... it's much better for
you, as well, because it makes for a more open conversation in which others can offer opinions/views/heckling, and disagreement (and reasons for it), with anything I might say that they don't like (and that way I can learn something from it, too, so it's better all round, that way).
On the subject of exits, in general, I can only give my own experience/results, from my own backtesting and live trading, and of course can't promise that they're going to be the same as anyone else's findings (but I do more or less believe in the fractal nature of financial instrument charts, so I suppose there might be some overlap ... for what it's worth, my observations are based on intraday trades with their entries based
only on price-action parameters).
Things to think about could include ...
(i) Trailing a stop-loss
manually just above/below the most recently formed swing-high/low (probably my best method, overall, but understandably hardest to back-test in bulk because of the near-impossibility of automation)
(ii) Trailing a stop-loss manually just above/below the level of the position of a Donchian channel midline three or four bars/candles/periods before the current bar/candle/period (probably my next-best) - you can draw this more easily as a "line for closing the trade when the price closes on the wrong side if it" simply by displacing a Donchian channel 3-4 periods to the right on your chart, and displaying only the midline (I used to use 20 periods for the setting parameter)
(iii) Closing trades on the occurrence of certain bar-patterns ("crescendo", "diminuendo", "congestion", "exhaustion", etc.) (I still do all of these, in conjunction with (i) above)
(iv) Trailing a stop-loss manually at the level of an "
x"-period Hull moving average of the typical price [(H+L+C)/3] right-displaced by "
y" periods (different variables for different instruments)
(v) using an ATR multiple as a stop-loss (this tends to work significantly better than SD-based stop-losses, overall, in my opinion, and at least its volatility-related)
All "just my own experience" and "your mileage may vary", but
automated trailing-stops of a set number of ticks/pips/points are honestly kind of "nowhere" on my list, because I've never done any serious testing of anything, over many years, in which they've actually performed well, by comparison, attractive though they sound!
Be aware that whatever method you choose, there will always be times (and maybe many times) when it will turn out that "something different would have been better". That doesn't matter. What matters is what performs best, overall, over 500 or 1,000 trades, not what performs well for any individual trade.
You need to decide what to test, admittedly, but you have to be
able to test, in order to be able to "do more of what works and less of what doesn't work so well", and developing your trading style/system/method is
all about that.
Otherwise you're just
guessing.
And one
definitely can't afford to do that, in a field with such very low success-rates.
