What's the catch?
- Thread starter jboydston
- Start date
Well, first of all, the real money to be made in futures is for people who can hold contracts for longer than an hour and ride a trend. Imagine how nicely you would have done if you bought 10 contracts on Tuesday morning and just held until Tuesday afternoon, and then did the same yesterday.
The problem is, a lot of people will cash in on their profits too quickly.
It has been said before, but I think it is worth repeating. Drop an "excellent" trader into a position, and they will still be able to make money by knowing the proper exit points.
Anyone can enter, it is the exits that seperate the men from the boys.
aphie
The problem is, a lot of people will cash in on their profits too quickly.
It has been said before, but I think it is worth repeating. Drop an "excellent" trader into a position, and they will still be able to make money by knowing the proper exit points.
Anyone can enter, it is the exits that seperate the men from the boys.
aphie
I fully agree.
You can make it when you know when to hold and when to fold.
This is so key. It's one of the way to find the 'holy grail', the real one, the one inside.
When you lose (and even later when you finally make money) analyze ALL your trades.
Find when you should have hold and when you should have quit. Study this long enough (very long maybe). If you find a pattern, trade against this pattern (trade against yourself : hold when you would not, quit when you would hold).
After a while you will get your edge that way. that's why the holy grail is inside and not in books or seminars. that's why it's personal to each trader too.
if you don't see a pattern, there can be 2 reasons :
- you don't see patterns in life : you should not be trading ! forget about it.. sorry. Not all jobs are for everyone.
- you see patterns, but there are none to find in your trading : you don't use a proper method. find one (on this board, several are described, go to a seminar at a prop firm, find one in a book), stick to it, just ONE. then go through the analyzing I mentioned above.
entry is what concerns most when they start. it was my case too of course. truth is, entry level is not so important (direction of entry is more important actually).
But the real deal is the exit.
2 traders in front of each other. they both enter at the same time, but they must choose their exits.
you will soon find out who is the junior and who is the senior. (only exception is when traders don't usually trade the same time frame, then forcing someone in another timeframe than his holy grail time frame may confuse him).
On purpose I used holy grail several times in this post. Holy grail does NOT exist as such, as it is looked for by many. Several coaches now do say it exist inside the trade. it's an internal quest, not external. And I wanted to give a shot at explaining what that means.
Don't confuse this with when others (and myself) do say there is no holy grail. then we refer to external holy grail (something another trader can tell you, or you can buy, or a secret which would make everything clear and trading easy and very profitable).
tntneo
I don't agree with this at all. Anything with parameters is curve fitting, which isn't particularly bad. You can't expect a curve fit system to run on multiple time frames, markets, etc. A better test would be can you curve fit the system to the other markets, time frames. I mean seriously, each market moves different. Different symbols have different tick values, etc. You can't expect one fits all systems. Liquidtox, if you have developed such systems, please pardon my criticism because you are a genius. You should be patting yourself on the back.
Re:zooming. If you don't use a short time frame how do you expect to get in on the fast, quick moves. On the NQ I commonly see moves of 10-15 points in just a few minutes. Anything greater than tick and 1min bars are going to miss those moves. Yes, it is more noisy with the small time frames. However, there are a few other benefits as well. The extra data points means curve fitting will produce more robust systems. Quicker entry, exit on the fast moves. More data means more possibilities. Want to swing, want to scalp, whatever you want tick and 1min can probably handle it. Try scalping on 5-15min bars. That is a contradiction in terms, actually.
Agreed. There could be many reasons why this is happening, e.g., somehow your rules are extracting something that happens on ten minute bars.
However, I would not just let this pass without further analisys, i.e., perhaps the INSIGHT that your system works on 10 minute bars is what is important, not the system itself. This unlikely, but the point is not to let anything get passed you.
I have seen this sort of thing countless of times...
nitro