The holy grail

D

drasfs

Ive been trading for a couple of month, and been losing approximately 20% of my portfolio every month.

But if I just do the opposite to what I think the price will move to, I assume I would get a 20% increase instead, or if I always go long when I think it will decrease and vice versa. And hold when I think I will lose money , and sell when I predict that I will make money money.

So who is the biggest loser here? Plz sell email me your signals :P

Having a system that consistently generate loser trades can be very profitable if you reverse it.

I wonder if someone would respect a trader who is profitable because of bad decisions.
 
Quote from uninvited_guest:

My guess is that your stops are getting hit. Try a 100 pip trailing stop or more.
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why not reverse, and change my SL to my stop limit?
 
Quote from drasfs:

... if I just do the opposite to what I think the price will move to,
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Hate to tell you this, but I don't think that is going to work. Others will be along shortly to tell you the same thing. You're probably wondering why.

I assume you are daytrading, and that the majority of your trades go against you right away. This means you are probably not trading with a viable edge. Stops may a be a problem, but if that is true, it goes under the heading of 'no edge', in my opinion. However, that doesn't mean that trading the same system will give you a viable edge if you simply reverse positions. Again, others will be here soon to tell you why.

I know you probably don't want to hear this, but there is at least a 50/50 chance that the problems you are having are mainly in your head, as opposed to being execution-related.

There is a HUGE difference between the idea of selling when your system gives a buy and vice versa, and

"holding when I think I will lose money, and selling when I predict that I will make money".

I am not sure if you saw these as being the same, but they definitely aren't.

EDIT: This discussion has been carried out here at ET, but I can't find the relevant threads.
 
Quote from traderNik:



I am not sure if you saw these as being the same, but they definitely aren't.
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Good point. The no reversed thing to hold. either you hold or you dont, so we leave that from the table. Including it would be that you only buy when you think that you should buy.


If you think you will make money going long at 1, and hold it until it reaches 1.01

The reversed would be going short and have the stop loss as your limit order.
 
Quote from drasfs:



The reversed would be going short and have the stop loss as your limit order.
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You could try it as an experiment. If you have been losing 20% per month then it obviously won't hurt. However, if you spend a weekend searching the threads here at ET, you will find a bunch of different examples of new traders who have posted to say that they are losing and asking what can be done about it., The veteran traders here almost always say the same thing - stop trading, take a break, examine all of your trades, and then examine your strategy to see why you are getting in at the wrong time. Is it your strategy or is it a problem with stops that are too tight? There is a newcomer here who wants to trade 20 contracts of the ES with a 1 point stop loss on a $30K account. . obviously a bad idea, but he doesn't think so. He says his risk/reward ratio is 100:1 or something like that. So you can see that people can have bad ideas that could hamstring their trading - he may not be the type who would necessarily be a bad trader, he's just misguided in terms of approach. If he could magically get the opinions of the top ten ES traders in the world, and he saw that 9 of them said this is an absolutely terrible idea, he might be able to change before losing a lot of money. This is the kind of opportunity you have here at ET, in a way.

I just can't see how you could trade this 'I am going to go opposite to my own signals' strategy, psychologically speaking. No matter what you do, you are still going to see your buy signal as a buy signal. If you sell instead and the price starts to rise, where will you be psychologically? If you sell and the price starts to fall then immediately starts to level out, what will you think? In the back of your mind will be the fact that this is actually a buy signal!!

The best thing that you can do, by far the best thing, is to post 5 of your losing trades here and ask for an analysis. Start a new thread called 'help with analysis' or something like that. You will be asked for your reasons for entering the trades. You have to be brutally honest - if the answer is 'Because I felt like buying' or 'It felt like the market should go up from here' or 'I just went with my gut', then say that. You will get some noise, some useless posturing, but you may also get some really really good free advice and analysis.

I assume you keep a detailed log of all your trades.... right?
 
Quote from drasfs:

Having a system that consistently generate loser trades can be very profitable if you reverse it.
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A possibility would be if yours is a fully mechanical system and its hit rate has been 100% losing, with reasonable stoploss and takeprofit setups, after performing a fairly large number of trades, that could be a holy grail, potentially. Please PM your price soonest. :cool:
 
Quote from OddTrader:

A possibility would be if yours is fully mechanical system and its hit rate has been 100% losing with reasonable stoploss and takeprofit after performing a fairly large number of trades, that could be a holy grail, potentially. Please PM your price. :cool:
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Sounds like you have been hanging around too much with them "Predicting Randomness" guys.
:D
 
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