New challenge starts on page 13, click on banner below:
I've been a part of the forum for a while and have never done a daily journal here. The goal of this journal is allow for some thoughtful down-time after each trading day. Discussions with traders who have similar ideas would also help me improve performance over time.
Strategy/Platform/Broker/Trade Metrics
I will be using a strategy I have been tweaking for about a year now. The strategy is a scale-in/all-out strategy that uses a maximum stop-loss for each trade setup attempt, as well as a "trailing stop" profit target. Only single contracts of NQ will be traded.
My platform is MotiveWave. I like the ability to customize indicators and mix time-based and volume-based indicators on the same chart. The platform is very fast compared to some others I've tried, and I generally like the clean look of the bars and indicators.
At this point I am at Step 2 in a TopStep Trader combine. I wanted to try using my strategy in a combine and working to steadily build a large account once funded. The combine rules are very strict and do not allow much drawdown at all. I am using the $100k account size and only trading single contracts to avoid hitting any drawdown limits.
For each trade setup I would like to see approximately 1:8 risk to reward at first entry, and at worst 1:2 total risk to reward. Because I am scaling into the trade setup I expect that anywhere from 1 to 4 of the contracts filled while building my position will be stopped out. The maximum risk on the trade does not change once additional contracts are added. The total profit from each setup should be in the range of $250-$750 depending on how the price moves. There will be no holding positions with this strategy.