So, I have decided to start journaling my trades on here as opposed to journalitix, mainly because here I may get the additional benefit of getting some useful feedback, and if I don't get any feedback at all, no harm done, it won't be different from recording things the way I do now. :D
I have not yet decided whether I will do daily summary posts or weekly ones, I will see how I go.
The journey so far:
I started looking at futures in April 2019 and played around on and off with sim trading for a few months. I moved to live trading the MES in August 2019 with $3,000 to start with (thank god for the micros :D ).
Unfortunately, due to the way I traded, although the majority of days I had positive returns with relatively high win percentages, I managed, in time, to deplete my account all the way down to ~$40.
The reason, as I see it, is that I made all the newbie mistakes traders make: averaging down (multiple times), moving/removing stop losses, trading on my expectations of what the market would do rather than what the market was doing, refusing to take a loss, revenge trading and so on.
I generally traded 1 contract (at least to start with), no stop losses and no profit targets.
I have attached screen captures of my live account results from Aug'19 to Jan'20 plus an excel file of the raw trade data in case anyone wants to have a look.
So, at the end of Jan 2020, with my account almost totally depleted, I decided to go back to the drawing board and to Sim trading to see if I could come up with some sort of strategy that would work for me in order to weed out these bad habits.
FEB 2020, the way forward:
Armed with the above resolution I have imposed the following few rules onto myself:
- 4 contract trading block size (may increase if strategy works)
- $500 daily goal (if market conditions allow)
- 6 tick stop loss (with the idea to reduce it down to 4-5 ticks), but will close before if i feel the market will go against me
- 4 tick take profit goal (up to 8 if the market is trending strongly), but will generally take 1-2 tick profits
- after stop loss is hit twice in a day, reduce size down to 1 or 2 contracts or stop trading altogether (still working on this one)
- maybe establish a daily loss limit (still working on this one)
- break the rules, and I am not allowed to move on to the next "level" for one additional week; break the rules twice in a week or two weeks in a row and I will have to spend a week back in the "tier" below (e.g. if I am trading ES I will have to spend a week in MES)
I have no fancy system or setup as far as I can tell, it basically consists of a chart with VWAP, RSI and relative volume to give me an idea of any levels to trade off of but only if they get "confirmed" by market order flow, so basically pretty much all entries are based on order flow "behaviour" on the DOM. I may post a picture of my setup if required.
I have been trading this new "strategy" on a sim account with $10,000 in seed capital since the beginning of FEB 2020, lets see where this path leads me to....