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I personally don't believe much of anything from someone I read online. That's not to say I don't look @ other people's ideas myself, because I do. Not trying to be accusatory or anything, it's just the realization I had come to a while back.
But with regards to who does what, and who is who, psssssh. The trading community is full of cliches, blind leading the blind etc.
Real-time trading talk, never happens. Anyone can mark up a dead chart.
There was a huuuuuge thread a while back over on TL, called "Trading in Real-Time," where a guy literally posted hundreds of trades on the right edge, prior to the trade being triggered, and discussed why and what he was seeing. That was something refreshing to see for once in the online trading community.
With pleasure. With this question, you've summed up the crux of what I'm saying. You think I'm having a go at ATR stop losses, as maybe being too simple or something. Far from it. I think ATR based stoplosses are an excellent type of stop loss, along with prior candles, fixed risk, support/resistance, price action etc. But they are always part of the overall system.
But that is not the point at all. The point is why you think increasing your stop loss to 1.7atr from 1.5atr will improve your profitability, based on observing a few trades that it would work on. I'll tell you what it will do. It will arbitrarily increase your percentage win. It will arbitrarily increase your average loss. It may increase or decrease your profitability. In all likelihood it will change a loss making strategy into another loss making strategy.
Now, if you'd said you had tested your overall already promising strategy over hundreds of trades and were fine tuning the stop loss, and had plotted a graph of average profit per trade against stop, and 1.7atr was surrounded by other data points like 1.5atr 1.6atr and 1.8atr, which were all promising, but 1.7 looked the best. And then you'd calculated your max drawdown, put it into a risk formula, calculated your necessary capital requirement, and were happy with that amount. I'd have said you were well on the path to being profitable.
Do you see the difference? You don't have to be a automated backtester, but you do have to have some idea how to evaluate and test your strategies over and above trying a few trades and seeing what could have worked better.
I also think you are far too emotional and excited about this. You actually said something like imagine being able to just create money for yourself anywhere in the world. I'm afraid that is just the attitude that people are talking about on this thread. I don't mean this in an unkind way, but it sounds like greed or gambling. If you really want to listen to the top traders, do so, and they'll mostly all tell you you'll fail with that attitude. You need hard work, rational learning, calm emotion, and to stop trying to buy or borrow someone else's system.
Your analogies are wrong. There is pretty much a textbook way to fly a plane. If you're sitting on a plane, you don't need to know it, and if you're learning, of course it makes sense to listen to people who have done it. (However, there are psychologists who can't fly who have plenty of important advice to give to pilots. You wouldn't be listening to them though...)
Trading profitably is not a textbook persuit. I hope it's obvious why.
You know, I think a lot of people on this thread genuinely would like to see you work this out. You're kind of symbolic on this site now.
Create a public journal on futures.io (formerly BMT) and post to it at least daily. At the end of each week, go back and read the prior two weeks of journal entries and ask yourself if you are moving forward, or if you are going in circles.
Spend the next few months creating and testing your own methodology.
The method is created by you. You come up with it. Others can influence you, but you do not copy others.
After you have a hundred or more trades taken in sim and have analyzed the data every way you know how, and it has positive expectancy, then you can go back to cash.
When ready to go back cash, open a mini or micro forex account and trade at maximum $1/pip size until you have another 100 trades to analyze in cash mode.
Analyze those, and compare them to your sim trades.
Identify differences and come up with detailed plans to account for and minimize the differences going forward.
If your 100 trades at $1/pip were net profitable, you can increase to $2/pip for the next 100 trades.
Nice post, THANK YOU!, Yea, I know; I've become kinda the symbol of the struggling trader(like a poster child...LOL)
I am in harmony with most of what your saying, only thing I can not wrap myself around is the statement " there are psychologists who can't fly who have plenty of important advice to give to pilots"
YES, JUST DON"T GIVE THE PILOT ADVICE ON FLYING!!!
But overall, very sound, healthy advice. I appreciate the NUGGETS of wisdom Xeno.
Haha... I disagree. I do believe in surrounding yourself with those you choose to emulate. I think that is why traders reach out wishing to be a part of a community etc..
We had this discussion with a few others. I don't want to re-hash it all again, and I think when you take examples to the extreme then it isn't a valid argument.
My brain perks up when I know someone is profitable and when EF HUTTON talks, I listen. When jo blow trader talks, I don't listen. My own fault... I am to blame for that.
Slowly I am starting to come around, hey I might even take the leap of faith someday and get on a plane knowing FULL well that the pilot has only SIM time under his belt, would you care to join me?
There's no reason why they would, because flying is a textbook discipline. Trading isn't.
Trading is initiating the buys and sells. Anyone can do that and most lose. The wider topic known as trading may include maths, stats, psychology, business skills, analysis etc.
If you want help with calculating a sharpe ratio, better ask a finance professor who has never traded than a trader who has never done it. But what you really mean, is you want advice about actual successful trading itself, which is the thing everyone is telling you to forget about.