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I've decided to start another journal here at futures.io (formerly BMT). I haven't journaled in quite a while here at futures.io (formerly BMT) but instead have kept a blog going elsewhere for sometime.
I enjoy writing the blog however, I am on hiatus there just because I haven't felt much like keeping it up lately. I'll resume at some point writing there but for now its on hold.
That being said, I am about to embark on a new project that is going to change my trading schedule pretty dramatically. I will basically have about 60 minutes in the early morning to day trade and perhaps a couple hours on the weekends to review, assess and plan the following week.
As it happens, I've been wanting to try swing trading futures. I have of course done this on forex and I quite like it but never on futures and so with my new schedule, it seems like the perfect time to give futures swing trading a shot.
For the month of October I will be both day trading (probably scalping) CL futures in the early morning as well as looking for longer term entries on daily and 4 hour charts. Hold time on the swing trades needs to be at least one day to count as a swing trade....more likely looking for 3 days or more. In addition I will be looking to add to the swing trades up to my max size count if the trade goes in my favor enough to warrant taking on additional risk.
For the day trading, I will be looking at primarily scalping for 20-30 ticks per day or one hour, which ever comes first. The goal is to have a higher winning DAY percentage over the course of the month than strictly a high trade win rate. In other words, win three out of five days, try to scratch one day, and lose the other day.....I am not looking for huge wins nor am I looking to win every single day. I will probably have time for one or two trades a day max before I have to switch gears and move on to the new project.
This will be a solid test of which method is best over time....although I suspect the swing trading will win.
ALL trades will be SIM until I have proven the edge in both trading styles. I have an edge in the day trading arena and could trade that live but due to the new time constraints, I want to make sure I get the new routine down before I risk live money.
All of this coincides nicely with the journal contest coming up next month so I decided to use the month of October to run the journal. I had planned on just doing this in my Moleskin journal but it seemed like a good idea to make it public as I am sure others might like to see the results of these two methods.
I will post every day although some posts might not happen until much later in the day or even late at night as I will have some travel coming up but not sure which days and for how long.
Due to the travel, all trading will be done on my 15 inch laptop. And I will be using primarily one screen for each trading type.
As a month isn't much time to prove an edge on swing trading, I may have only one or two trades during the entire month. I will post updates on those as situation warrants.
Again the primary purpose is to prove I can handle the new routine, trade while traveling if needed, find and hold longer term trades and see if its really possible to scalp consistently over time with tight time constraints.
I will also be adding to my initial entry size on the scalp trades if and when the account balance increases by the amount of the delta I have decided to use.
And for the purposes of this journal, I'll be using $150,000 as the starting balance since that is the combine TST is giving away. I know they don't allow swing trading but that's not the point of this exercise. Just to limit my max size to 15 lots.
Some things I will not be going into detail here. Exact entry and exit criteria, I may mention those but its not the issue here. Style and method along with money management and position sizing are the ideas I am journaling here.
While I welcome positive input, I am not looking for long winded advice columns here....it is sim and it's just testing two different methods and time constraints along with money management and position sizing. All goes well, I will implement either or both in the future.
First post here will be in October.
Should be fun.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, Leonardo da Vinci
Most people chose unhappiness over uncertainty, Tim Ferris
A word about risk and money management. I plan on using 1% of the account or $1500 as my per day initial risk for scalping and up to 2% for swing trading.
For day trading I'll size based on the stop size and since I'd like at least two shots at it each day, I'll cut the size in half so if I have a full stop out, I don't have a full daily stop out on the first trade. This means I'll probably get 2-3 shots each day for the scalping portion of the experiment.
For swing trading, even though I can use up to 2% of the account size for initial sizing, more than likely I'll use much smaller size to initiate the trades and quickly add to it up to max exposure if the trade gets going in my favor.
At no time will I have more than 3% exposure between scalping and swing trading.
This means I will probably need to make sure any position adds result in a so called "risk free" trade.
Based on initial thoughts, I suspect most swing trades will target somewhere around 3-5X initial risk. More if possible but thats what it looks like right now.
Delta for scalping is initially $500-750 per contract before a new contract can be added.I haven't decided on this yet but I will by October 1st. I'ill decrease size at around $250 per contract loss. Size up slow and size down fast.
Delta for swing trading is going to be more like $2000 per contract since I can take more initial risk, I think I need to increase slower. This will be determined on closed trades....at no time will open trades be used to determine new initial position size. And I'll size down at around $1000 per contract loss. Not sure how this will work in practice as I've never swing traded before.
The intent is to trade small enough to accurately place stops but yet large enough to increase account size in a measurable and significant manner.
Lastly, I have placed an 8% max draw down on the account for the month. This means I can have 4 swing trade losers in a row right from the beginning of the process or 8 losers in row scalping beginning day one. OR a combination of the two.
What this does is prevent account blow out. While its only a month long sim experiment, the idea is that the following month, I'd have 92% of the original balance to trade with. I'd begin November with a max 6% draw down limit and assuming that maxed out, I'd continue this reducing pattern until I had a winning month at which point I could increase the drawn down by 2%. In doing this, I could lose the max amount 6 months in a row and still have 75% of the original capital left.
Hopefully that wouldn't happen but since capital preservation is the key to this game, having strict monthly draw down limits is key to making sure you stay in the game. And while this experiment is only 30 days long, no sense in being silly about it with unrealistic risk parameters.
Thats it for now....might be more later.....
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, Leonardo da Vinci
Most people chose unhappiness over uncertainty, Tim Ferris