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One of the important things for any trader to understand about his/her trading is a strategy's expectancy. In my own trading, my expectancy has varied through different periods as my performance ebbed and flowed. When I was seeing the market well and executing well, my win % was about 62%. When I was executing terribly and trading poorly, my win % was 27%.
My point is that I know what my numbers are because I have to know them if I want a chance at being consistent and profitable (and S5 does an amazing job providing trader analytics!). Saying "more times than not" makes me think of two things that I experienced throughout my own career.
1) I'd say something similar when I had absolutely zero idea of what my expectancy or win rate was.
2) I'd say something similar when I had a string of losers and then one big winner. The big winner would erase my memory of the losses and make me think that I was a genius.
I now know that a trader has to be intimately familiar with his/her strategy and all aspects related to the strategy. If you're still figuring out your strategy, that's great! I still am and I'm sure that many others here are as well. Planning and executing are a huge part of trading, and it is good that you are executing your plan instead of trading your P&L.
My advice would be to dig into your strategy a little bit. In which market conditions does it work well? Which poorly? What's the expectancy? What's the win rate over 200+ trades? Keep working hard and I'm sure that you'll get there.
I'd say if the $1000 really means nothing to you, then just go and trade with it. The lessons you learn trading live will be well worth it, since you'll either make your daily goal, or you will find out a lot about yourself and your method as you lose the $1000.
I would have followed this same path way back when, but brokers did not offer "day trading rates" back in the day. So, instead of $1K accounts, I had to blow out $5K accounts to learn some lessons!
The problem with small accounts and a relatively large account size is simply the math. If you lose 50% of your small size account, you have to gain a 100% to only break-even using an even smaller account size.
You might consider finding a market that would allow you to risk a more appropriate amount of capital, perhaps one of the micro currencies. You'll have an opportunity to stay in the game much longer while learning. Live to trade another day.
I think most would assume live means with real money not the data feed. Since you have mentioned the account wasn't funded, it's presumed to be a sim account or even paper traded by hand written notes.
Anyway, as someone else already mentioned, commissions and fees should be accounted for every trade in the math of your expectancy before using real money.
I don't think it's impossible to grow the 1,000 dollar account but all the possible issues mentioned by others posted are still a variable.
Not sure how successful you were in the forex account but if you were, why not invest the same amount in the futures account? You can effectively make risk per trade less than 2% by doing so and give it some breathing room. Given that the method was sim tested for at least 300 trades of course.
There are a lot of excellent responses in this thread, which is about a topic that comes up quite a lot. I hope that you can profit from them.
I had a few thoughts to add....
@Opstar already responded to this, but I wanted to emphasize that a "live" account means the money is live, not just the data. The delights (and terrors) of risking real money give a person a view of things that simulated money (paper trading) never can.
If this means that you traded 3k in real money, then that's good. Now you really should do the same in a non-sim futures account. If you weren't using real money, now would be a good time.
This is the only way you will know how you really can perform, and what you really need to do next, whatever that may be.
I imagine that all of us have done calculations and/or spreadsheets using what we thought were realistic assumptions, and were able to determine when we would reach whatever our goals were. I don't think these plans have generally worked out , but doing it for real is how to find out. If it doesn't, you get very valuable data from the real world, worth more than any theoretical assumptions and calculations.
So, in my opinion this is exactly what to do next. No amount of paper/sim trading will substitute for it.
Also, in my opinion, you will, of course, either lose the money or lose enough to go below your broker's minimum, or lose enough to go below your own minimum. This will be a good experience and you will not have to pay that much for it.
I am not being discouraging, and I hope you are not discouraged by what I said. There is just no way to know if something will work out if you don't at least get into it in a real way. If it doesn't work, well, now you have something to help you recalibrate and try again. Progress may be slow, but this is how it usually happens.
I could be wrong too, which would be terrific, and also would be something good to know.
You should not be surprised that we get pretty much this question, with a some variations, a lot here. Usually the answers are about the same, and often (but not always) we don't hear from the poster any more. Maybe we scare them off?
Setting up a trade journal here, as @GFIs1 suggested, may also be useful to you, as a way to increase your objectivity. There's something about public accountability that is sometimes helpful. You will have to decide if it might also be too much -- that's your call. But many have benefited from it. You may also want to consider springing for the one-time Elite membership fee (not an advertisement -- I don't care either way). It would give you access to at least twice the posting activity, but it has a cost. Also your choice.
Good luck. I hope you do succeed, whether the slow or the fast way.
Simply put, a rotation refers to up and down price movement. Have you used renko bars before? They offer a pretty easy way to describe it. You might have 5 bars up, 2 bars down, 4 bars up, 1 bar down, and so on. These are rotations in the market, as price explores higher prices, finds sellers, pushes lower, and finds buyers to drive it back up.
It is important to understand the rotations in your market in your time frame. If you trade intraday, knowing the statistically significant rotation in CL can help you determine reasonable targets and stops. Regardless of indicators or pivot points, if you've entered at $60.00, should you exit at 05? 10? Similarly, where should your stop go? 99? 80?
Imagine entering the market with a 1 tick stop and target. In this case, you're not really trading, but rather flipping a coin and seeing whether a buyer or seller will hit into you first. Now imagine entering the market with a stop aligned with the market's rotation, and a target slightly higher than 1 rotation. If you're wrong, then crude will have to move against you by a statistically significant amount to stop you out. If you're right, and the market is trending, then you'll capture a statistically significant move in crude.
FT71 has a bunch of great webinars on this site that cover this more in depth. If you're on Ninjatrader, there are some swing high/low indicators on this site that can help you collect data on rotations in your time frame.
I've never used renko bars before (never heard of them) and I use TOS as my main platform, so I'll give them a call and see if I can install the bars.
All I see available on TOS are monkey bars!
So when you say "Crude loves to move in 8 tick rotations, the ES in 5 tick rotations, and the treasuries in 4 tick rotations" - you mean that one should set the "brick" value at 8 points for crude, so that another one doesn't get drawn until there's 8 ticks worth of movement?
How did you come up with the rotations figure for each commodity?
Before you go looking into Renko bars, I'd suggest sticking to whatever method you have set up right now. Market rotations aren't intrinsically bound to chart type or bar length or anything like that. Feel free to read up on em, but just know that they aren't the holy grail. The holy grail is a matter of understanding the auction process in your market and your personality in response to risk in said market.
As far as rotations go, don't worry about setting a chart to XYZ or something like that. What time frame do you trade in? 30 seconds? 4 hours? A handful of ticks or volume bars? Stick to that time frame and look at what crude does in that frame.
There should be a zigzag indicator for TOS floating around here somewhere. I did my rotation study the old fashioned way I loaded up my time frame and measured the high/low distance of any given move, as well as the distance of a retracement against the move.
It took me way too long, but I quickly got a feeling for the way the market breathes and moves when it trends versus when it auctions back and forth. I made a big spreadsheet of the movements--typing them in by hand--and then looked at stats for the data set.
I looked at 1 minute, 5 minute, and hour data. Obviously the market is going to have different characteristic rotations in each different time frame, and punching the numbers gives you a great idea of what to expect from your given product.
Feel free to let me know if you have any other questions!