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Well the worst you should do in this situation - take a loser and step away. What you should not do is to keep doing the same expecting different result. Unfortunately this is what I had done yesterday. But lesson is learned. Having "free" play money made me unaccountable and feeling no rules need to be followed.
BTW, combine is officially completed and submitted for a review.
We are seeing very unusual markets now. Both DAX and Crude are going perhaps through the trend change phase and there is a big fight for every tick between bulls and bears. Ladder is very heavy and tape is next to impossible to read. Icebergs everywhere and get busted all the time. Pretty much any trading now like a trading during news release in slow motion.
I have made a lot of losers today again in DAX and Crude. I try to make sense of this market and take setups according to the rules, make pauses but keep losing. Most of my trades make profit but it's just too little before it reverses on its head and makes a trade setup for opposite direction. Only thing I can say glad not to be trading live this market.
I will log them, but there is nothing to take from it for the playbook. However I will also put a black book, where I will collect warning signs of market conditions when not to trade. I have few video recordings on market during recent trades, with weird ladder and tape so by looking through it from time to time I will make sure if I recognize a similar market I will just take a day off.
Ok, here is the executive decision I am taking here and now: I will remove break even from my ATM and have just first target at 10 and second at 30 ticks. I will opt to slightly adjust both right after I place the trade, not as trade progresses and leave to its own devices. In case of second target 30 ticks or more I will trail it with stop loss after each confirmed swing low or high on my trade chart. This is it.
Shit market continues. I have been thinking about should I trade this market at all, since my job is to collect stats trading in a realistic manner on sim, what good these stats are if I have strings of losers I would hardly be taking live? This is what I have came up with:
1. I cannot control the market, I can only hope to have a decent timing but have no control over it, so I should not try to get a "perfect" set of trades, it's not up to me
2. What I can control though is my quality of execution, following the rules and self-dicipline, I should make sure I don't rush trades, I don't over-trade, and I don't screw up with the trades. I should focus on placing good trades, leave them alone until stopped out or first target is hit and then manage the runner in a sensible manner according to market structure and momentum. This is what I can control and this is how I should evaluate my trading ultimately, not by P/L within any arbitrary time period.
3. The end result of this exercise will be stats that won't be used to predict how soon I become next George Soros, but to see how realistic not to become broke with my trading. I should only evaluate my downside risks, and if I can weather through that bad (for my style) markets, I will survive and eventually trive.
To make this all happen I will now not only video-tape the trade, but will also include short reasoning of the trade and current market condition overview before I pull the trigger. Even short 30 second one will do, because mind plays funny games once you are in a trade or after the trade, you see things through completely different glasses. Having this live reasoning should help a lot. And again, my focus will be on execution, not over-trading and not micro-managing the trade. If I did trades and did not break my rules - I have done well no matter what is my P/L.
I also think so, @iqgod. However, it will require a slightly different approach to trade timing, I can't trade this way with momentum entries, since they can easily collapse and having no any sort of absorption zone behind my entry will easily stop the trade out.
I have looked through some of my logged trades, some videos. I can see that my entry timing drifts from time to time and also I am not very consistent in applying level and momentum requirement. Also, during this last 10 days I have added some new rules like time limiting rule which make older trades irrelevant.
I think that I need to rethink my rules, consolidate and simplify them, allow for more flexibility in stop and targets to suit price action structure, and require all setups to be entered at better price, i.e. not at the break out price but on the pullback to level + absorption.
I will start my log from scratch and will focus instead of filling the excel log on saving trading screen shots and video recording trades, and do a summary of all trades taken during the day.
I will maintain my trade log in Ninja journal and will export it to Excel instead of manually filling it.
So my focus now is on uniformity and repeatability, not overtrading and not overmanaging trades.
It's been a while since I posted here last time. I took a pause from incubation of my strategy, as I started to drift more and more from tried and proven setups into some bizarre trade taking. Markets are not good for my method and there is no point of keep doing the same without any positive result.
I have done trade and log reviewing, thinking and analyzing. I have put down detailed description of my setups on paper, put down a preparation technique, market analysis, and trade construction methodology.
I still got a bit too much of variation and possible conflicting setups when I might get setups in two directions almost simultaneously. So, I have decided to focus on what works best for me, and this is trading with high momentum in a direction of a break out beyond daily range. So I've got left with two similar setups only.
My aim is to build a playbook of my setups, fill it with screen shots and video recording of my A+ setups, not only taken properly but also managed and exited by the rules. This will start a foundation of my reliable trading framework.
On the other hand, I am still waiting on LTP to start, some delays from TST. However, I have used my time to download Sierra Charts and learn how to use it. It may look like a thing from 90-ties running on Windows 3.11 but boy how powerful it is, how robust and lightweight it is. Loads fast, don't clog PC, has tons of functionality. And it has a really nice DOM, full blown ATM strategies at least on par with Ninja. The only thing I really lack there is GomMP inie, and Jigsaw trading tools. Sierra has tape and DOM is very informative, but still Jigsaw gives me a little bit extra, namely absorption is much better seen there.
Thus said, for doing LTP and trading TST account live Sierra is a superior choice.