What to do when you are ready to lose your mind from trading?

TheDawn said:
You need to go back and do more backtesting and re-examine your trades. How and why do you think your system would pick 80% winners? The reality obviously proved otherwise and showed you something different that you didn't see in your trading system so you need to find out what's the cause of this discrepancy Is it because you didn't backtest enough? How long did you go back to backtest your system? Did you backtest this system in all market scenarios, both positive and negative which is what we are in right now with inflations and this war?

Next, if you believe that your backtesting is adequate then there must be something that you are doing that is not the same as in your backtesting because if you are doing exactly the same as your backtesting, you should get exactly the same trading result as in your backtesting. Why aren't they reflecting your backtesting? You need to re-examine your trades. Is it an issue of your execution? Backtesting has perfect execution of all trades while in real-life trading, you have to deal with lags, market manipulations and etc. Is that the issue? Are you following your system exactly to the T? Maybe that is the reason?

I would be re-examining these issues trying to answer these questions if I were you during this downtime.
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Yes, some of my formulas are correctly 80% winners. Naturally this involves all 23 hours of trading (which obviously I don't). I have several strategies, some of which are simple enough I'd be willing to share with some young gun who knows how to automate trading strategies and in return, I'd teach him some strategies (and this is from someone who's been in the market for almost 30 year - even before the invention of electronic Globex trading).

My problem lately is I have felt cursed for the past month. Whenever I enter a trade it falters more often than not. Then I take a break, sit back and watch the markets to see that it functions properly (which it does) and when I reenter markets it once again falters. Very heart wrenching. I agree, when you manually trade as opposed to automated trading you'll make mistakes - and I do catch that once in a while.
 
easymon1 said:
What timeframe charts are you working this setup with?
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I pretty much use it for all time frames. However I use several strategies for day trading and use 1, 2, 10 and 30 minute charts. Mind you, I have 3 accounts. One for stocks and long term investing, one account at IB for short term stock swing trades and an AMP account for day trading futures when I'm available certain parts of the day.
 
I guess I could really use someone who could automate at least one of my trading strategies and just let it run with one micro contract for a week to verify results in real time.
 
7out said:
I pretty much use it for all time frames. However I use several strategies for day trading and use 1, 2, 10 and 30 minute charts. Mind you, I have 3 accounts. One for stocks and long term investing, one account at IB for short term stock swing trades and an AMP account for day trading futures when I'm available certain parts of the day.
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What time of day are you likely to be trading futures on a fast chart?
Over the weekend maybe go load up a CL chart from the prior week and find how your simplest most clearcut setup/trigger combo works on a small minute chart. You might be able to get a quick idea if there's something there for what you want to do.
 
7out said:
Yes, some of my formulas are correctly 80% winners. Naturally this involves all 23 hours of trading (which obviously I don't). I have several strategies, some of which are simple enough I'd be willing to share with some young gun who knows how to automate trading strategies and in return, I'd teach him some strategies (and this is from someone who's been in the market for almost 30 year - even before the invention of electronic Globex trading).

My problem lately is I have felt cursed for the past month. Whenever I enter a trade it falters more often than not. Then I take a break, sit back and watch the markets to see that it functions properly (which it does) and when I reenter markets it once again falters. Very heart wrenching. I agree, when you manually trade as opposed to automated trading you'll make mistakes - and I do catch that once in a while.
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Ok *IF* your trading system returns winning trades 80% of the time when it's left alone to trade without breaks, without discretionary adjustments in ALL market scenarios and when you trade following the trading system, you are not getting winners 80% of the time, then it's an issue of the trading system not being followed then

But from what you are describing, it looks like the former, an issue in following the trading system. If your trading system's winning percentage is based on automated trading with no discretionary adjustment on the trader's part, you have to do the same in real-life trading otherwise you won't be able to replicate the trading results of your system in backtesting. If the automated trading system knows no emotion and does not take break, sit back and watch the market and then trade, then you can't either. Remember your trading system does not have 100% win rate, only 80% so these times that you feel "cursed" might be that 20% of the time that your trading system is making losses, all concentrated in a short period. The trading system only showed that you can have winners on average of 80% of the time but didn't tell you when exactly you are going to have 80% of the winners and when 20% of the winners will come. Maybe you will make 20% of the losses once a month, once a week, or three days in a row, but never for the next few months, and then all one week in a row, and then never again for another several months and then... and so on. You won't know that. The bottom line it makes a profit 80% of the time overall.

So if you really feel it's able to produce winning trades 80% of the time, you have tested it thoroughly then you should trust it and just trade the system like a machine. If you can't trade like a machine to follow the system, then you design an automated trading program to trade your system.
 
easymon1 said:
What time of day are you likely to be trading futures on a fast chart?
Over the weekend maybe go load up a CL chart from the prior week and find how your simplest most clearcut setup/trigger combo works on a small minute chart. You might be able to get a quick idea if there's something there for what you want to do.
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For the fast charts of 1 and 2 minutes, I'd only trade it during market hours (ie, 9:30am-4pm EST), however when you check back it also functions properly between London open (3am EST and NYC 9:30am open). I noticed most of the bad trades occur between the 4pm NYC close and 10pm EST.
 
7out said:
For the fast charts of 1 and 2 minutes, I'd only trade it during market hours (ie, 9:30am-4pm EST), however when you check back it also functions properly between London open (3am EST and NYC 9:30am open). I noticed most of the bad trades occur between the 4pm NYC close and 10pm EST.
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How's your system work CL from 9:15 to 10:30?
 
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