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It's great psychological/emotional capital to finish the week positive. So, how many contracts are you trading? What is the size of you initial stop loss?
I originally was using a logical 14 tick stop on a 12 range bar. But after putting in the time to study a ten tick vs the 14 tick showed me that based on the premise of my trade method, about 90% of all 10 tick stops would have ALSO hit my 14 tick stop. That meant for the vast majority of my losers, I could cut my risk by $40 per contract. So I am currently trading with a 10 tick stop.
I have three main patterns I am looking for on the 12 range chart that if I am correct on the trade, it will TEND to go my direction pretty darn quick. They trend trades so in this market, they are working pretty well.
Currently I am trading 2 lots. I take the first lot off at 10 ticks and move the stop to -5 on the second one. This allows me a profit irregardless of what happens on the second position. This is not optimum but again, based on the premise of my method, this will rarely happen and in fact, its only happened twice this week that I can remember.
The targets for the second one are currently 50 ticks or one of my fib targets, depending on what my current mental comfort level is. This again is not optimal but I am shooting for baby steps in terms of confronting my fear of holding trades. Today, my first fib target was hit long....BUT I took the trade off at 50 ticks which just happened to be the top of the swing. It pulled back to my entry and reversed hard to race toward the fib target. No way I could have held through a 50 tick pull back at this point in my career.
If and when I can trade 3 lots, I'll take one off at 30-50 ticks and then just leave the last one alone......but that day is down the road a bit. Maybe not this year even.
Anyway, thanks for the nice words.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, Leonardo da Vinci
Most people chose unhappiness over uncertainty, Tim Ferris
Good job. It looks like you've made real progress this week in terms of letting winners run longer than you previously would have.
The 12 range chart that you use is pretty similar to the 512 tick chart that I use, as the average range of my bars is around 12 ticks. When I look at your charts I see a couple of good runs per day where a trailing stop would work really well. Just keep trailing the stop beyond the H/L of the prior bar and you should be able to catch some moves that are larger than the targets you've been using.
There is an interesting point embedded in the excerpt of your post that I quoted above. If it is indeed true that your tightened stop on the second contract is hit very rarely, then this means that your scaling out approach isn't doing you much good. This would be a useful stat to track over time. Scaling out might be helpful as a psychological tool but I'd urge you to stay objective about it and reexamine the data once you've tracked enough trades.
I will track the odds of that second contract being stopped out. I have a weeks worth of data and will track it next week as well. So far, the average loser on that second contract is only 2.xx ticks. Which seems to suggest that given the full stop outs I took this week on both positions along with the winners and the -5 tick losers that it would be better to let the entire position run. As I am writing this, I realize that of course it makes more sense to let the entire position run....duh! Still from a psychological standpoint, it feels nice to have a few dollars locked in.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, Leonardo da Vinci
Most people chose unhappiness over uncertainty, Tim Ferris
To me, deciding on your 'technique' is almost moot. Because conditions will change, dynamics will change some and your cashflow will change so I do not believe you will ever find the perfect combination. Just 2 cents from my own experience and watching others who have a lot more trading time than myself. It is always adapted to the market in which you are trading and that of course mutates.
I see a lot traders say things like the market varies, mutates, changes, etc. It is now becoming cliche, like all the advice saying work on your psychology and you will magically become a better trader... never mind your terrible trading method . How exactly does the market vary and change? I think the only major aspect of the market that varies is volatility. The market is not an entity in and of itself. The market is a bunch of human beings, and human beings are cut from the same cloth. When the apes rise up and start trading the market, maybe the market will change in such a way that we might need different approaches to trading it. As long there are human beings trading the markets, the markets will be governed by crowd psychology.
Unless you have a major market altering event like decimalization, the standard trading approaches are not gonna stop working overnight. I have been trading the same rigid method for 6 years. We are not going to wake up tomorrow, and suddenly, the market will stop doing double bottoms, or stop giving divergence, or stop bouncing of of resistance. It is people behind the those patterns, it is fear and greed behind those patterns. So, what exactly is going to vary in the market so much that we have to change the way we trade? I think the day the markets will change in such a drastic way is the day when the market becomes just HFT vs HFT.
Volatility or a instrument physical change is always possible. Remember ER2?
Laws change, a huge change in FOREX over the last couple years dealing with margin among others.
Of course basic rules of trading won't change, but the instrument will change how it reacts to those over time. Ask anyone who has traded the ES for 10+ years.
Believe what you want to believe. But in MY OPINION the market volatility is probably your biggest changer. So setting a 10 tick PT or 100 tick PT doesn't matter right now. You decide later on how your trading evolves.
Or you do your way and be happy with it NEVER changing. Either way, I am sure it works.
Just wanted to flesh out the details behind the cliches. We are agreed on volatility as I mentioned in my post. I think the example of the ES falls under volatility. Legal changes in FOREX, falls under my example of decimalization. That was a market changer, tons of bid/ask scalpers lost their livelihood when that change took place. These are the exceptions I mentioned. What else could change in such a way to make us change our trading approaches? There may be some aspects of the issue that I am missing, which I should pay attention to.