I suppose I’m
just about in that group, but you’re going to get other/better/different responses from people with much more experience and success under their belts than I have, and you should read my replies knowing that.
Generally not. Largely because my trading is mostly trend-following, and it goes against the grain (for me, anyway) to trade with fixed targets (at least for the whole position, it does), when you’re following a trend.
So it depends on what kind of trading you do, surely?
Again, generally not. Mostly because I like my stop-losses and targets (if any) to be as closely volatility-related as possible.
That’s my experience, with fast trading, too. I completely agree.
I don’t use timed charts.
I use constant-volume bars and adjust the chart-speed to the volatility, in accordance with my risk management parameters.
I work everything out "backwards" (some people would say) from risk management parameters. I look first at what I can afford to lose and how often, given what I'm doing and my degree of risk-aversion, before thinking about stop-losses, targets and position-sizes.
In my opinion (though I might ruffle some feathers, saying this),
almost everyone using tick charts is actually using them (knowingly or unknowingly) as a kind of "approximation" of constant-volume charts, anyway, so why not just use those instead? (Is how I look at it.)
It depends what I’m doing, but I don’t like the initial stop-loss (which in my case is often the “fixed stop-loss” too, for at least part of the position-size) to be less than twice the
ATR and I’m more comfortable with 2.5 times the ATR.
I strongly disagree with the advice (widely expressed in trading forums, though a little less widely here than elsewhere) that you shouldn’t trade with a reward-to-risk ratio of less than 2.0.
I even strongly disagree with the advice (even more widely expressed in trading forums, though also a little less widely here than elsewhere) that you shouldn’t trade with a reward-to-risk ratio of less than 1.0.
I think it depends what you’re doing.
I sometimes see people saying (in Journals, or wherever) that their stop-loss is twice the distance of their target, and inevitably there’ll be one or two responses saying things along the lines of “Are you sure that shouldn’t be the other way round?” and even “You’ll be better off
reversing that”. I think these responses are very often mistaken.
My point is no more complicated than that a high “R” goes with a low win-rate, and that can be very difficult for inexperienced traders to
handle. Sometimes (maybe “often”) so much so that that alone prevents their progress, in practice.
You have to learn all this stuff, in its relevance to your own trading, by testing it
on your own trading.
There’s no “one size fits all”.
There are too many variables.
I don’t know.
It depends on exactly what you’re doing, and it’s really difficult to advise people without knowing that, and in detail.
