Quote from ifue:
Hey Neke,
Contrary to what you and most people on here believe I think you should continue your discretionary trading. At the beginning of last year you were thinking about fully automating your trading, but that went by the wayside as your discretionary trades started doing better. At another point in time you were considering cutting out options from your trading because they had been consistently losing you money. Shortly after that they were the only type of trade making you money.
I think you have a lot of different strategies and trading methods: your ability to switch toward the successful strategy of the moment has resulted in a lot of gains for you. Automated trading though, has never been a big part of your strategy. I do think you have used your efforts to automate to help inform your discretionary trading but it has not been one of your main investment vehicles. I believe the reason for this is how aggressive your investment strategy has been. In my opinion that aggressiveness is the reason you have been so successful and why you see a lot of jealous posts on here.
I think the question of whether to continue is the same as it has always been. Do you have an edge? If you believe so then continue discretionary trading. You can expect an outlier event over a long period of time and at your risk level I'm not even sure if this qualifies. Possibly the reason you are considering significantly reducing your risk level is outside factors are affecting your investment decisions. In the beginning you started out with nothing to lose. Nothing has really changed, you've already made money even if you lose your current account. Of course there is a lot more money at stake now. The question is, are you willing to risk it all as you were in previous years? If not then you have to completely reevaluate your investment goals. If it is then you have to convince yourself it is play money and focus on strategy not results.
Quote from neke:
Nice observation. It is frustrating when you make / repeat so many dumb action that negatively impacts your account balance. At such times, it naturally comes to my mind to go fully/solely automated. So far, the automated strategies, when put in practice, have only had mediocre results. There are so many aspects of my trading decision that I just cannot automate: price/volume data is just one variable that goes into determining a discretionary trade. There is no way I could have automated the shorting of EXEL on Thursday: it is driven on interpretation of news, and is not what a computer could do for me. What I have started doing is get alerted on possible automateable set-ups during market hours and making a decision to place the trades or not. I believe with so many of such trades to occupy my attention, I would not be unduly fixated on one discretionary trade that I want to be profitable to make my day/week. I really want my discretionary trades to come to me, and not me looking for them: there is always that subconscious desire that the next trade should be a home run, or at least should not be a loss. The result is trying to average down when it goes against me, and even if it eventually goes my way, I am only too pleased to get out at break-even. So the size of the losers outstrip the size of the gainers. I want to have so many automated prompts that I take with smaller size, and take the discretionary when the right set-up appears, instead of trying to force a discretionary trade.