Welcome to NexusFi: the best trading community on the planet, with over 150,000 members Sign Up Now for Free
Genuine reviews from real traders, not fake reviews from stealth vendors
Quality education from leading professional traders
We are a friendly, helpful, and positive community
We do not tolerate rude behavior, trolling, or vendors advertising in posts
We are here to help, just let us know what you need
You'll need to register in order to view the content of the threads and start contributing to our community. It's free for basic access, or support us by becoming an Elite Member -- see if you qualify for a discount below.
-- Big Mike, Site Administrator
(If you already have an account, login at the top of the page)
Looking back to a tremendous 6 year data collection we can get some helpful insights.
As you know as follower of my journal here I had at the beginning just one trade per day. Optimizing
this to trade less but more efficient I dropped Tuesday's and Thursday's that were not giving too much points here. Of course this was only for full weeks. Holiday weeks were treated differently.
Now the big question is: Which WEEK is better and which one is to omit?
So I came back to install all data per year on a weekly condensed table. I added those 6 years to see which
week gave what result. Summary here:
As we can see there are some interesting weeks like week 1 or week 8.
Then I just scratched all weeks that gave not at least 33 points (means min. 200 points for 6 years).
So one nice table came out that gives me a hint WHEN to trade:
As a result I could omit all those weeks with either too little result or even a negative one over time.
With that I could augment the investment ratio to a higher level. As there is a higher probability of
gain versus loss. Of course the system will not be altered nor the stops.
Taking the gains in points of over 1000 in the years 2012 and 2013 - we had over 1600 points in 2017.
But the return in % of investment is still lower. Why is this?
In 2012 the initial margin for one Dax future was around 5500 and 5000 per following contract.
Today a Dax future has a initial margin of 15271 and every following one of 12217...
ALL data is taken from Interactive Brokers platform where I trade.
This means one can trade less contracts with given money and has today much larger gaps from initial, normal
margin and overnight margin.
With other words: higher index numbers result in more difficult margin situations and less return on the
investment (ROI).
Even more difficult are the margins on the futures of bitcoin et al with 50% margin or more per contract.
Hint: the more leverage and more volatility a future has, the more margins are climbing over proportional.
Well - this might seem a bit picky - as the banks still are not giving anything back for real money sleeping there...
But the more and more expensive platforms for futures are the more those need to be scanned for a future trading.
At least for me.
After explaining how to trade only the best weeks (see posts above) I would show the
example of this year 2017:
Very economic!
Just trading the best 12 weeks - and getting a quite reasonable result. Here ~1000 points.
Only one negative week with -2 points.
The rest of 40 weeks are free for other projects!
This is called "cherry picking"
Or the words of an economist.