We make trading much harder than it needs to be. It's not about how long we spend in front of our workstations but how much money we make. Every time I open a trade, I take on risk. I don't want risk. I want profits.
Markets move when they are out of balance. That happens at specific times of day and also after surprise news. That's when I want to trade. I want that quick gratification - I want to be paid for taking on that risk and I want to be exposed to that risk for as short a time as possible. I can do that as a Hybrid trader or as a discretionary trader. I can us this tactic in fully auto trading as well by identifying the window(s) in my trading day when my Flobot makes money. Both Bloodhound and MultiCharts allow mw to restrict my trading to specific times of day after I have backtested the when. Adding context is more difficult for auto trading but I find that by choosing the "when" correctly, I also hot the right context as my trading pictures do the rest.
Like today.
I chose the periodicity of the bar chart to specifically identify the timing for the VA entry trade.
Hello EL
ReplyDeleteWhats your strategy regarding daily monetary target ? do you quit after a certain amount ?
I used to do that before but – I could make +50 ticks a day and quit although conditions were so favorable I could have easily made +150 throughout the session, and then the following day was a very choppy session and I could lose the same 50 ticks I made the day before.
Whats your view on this ?
Thanks
CD
Nowadays I have a target for the day as I also autotrade and I have a lot of option strategies I run. Unless the market is really, really quiet, it's not too hard to make a daily target most days. The assumption is that the trader has enough capital to trade sufficient size to make that daily target in just a couple of trades. If not, then grinding it out may be the only way to go.
ReplyDeleteThe thing is, if a bad trading day is ,let’s say -50 ticks per contract, what « should » be a daily monetary target in such a case ?
ReplyDeleteI mean, making +25 ticks a day can be « easy » in normal conditions , but what about the days so choppies that you must endure draws of -50 ticks BEFORE making these +25 ticks ?
I daytrade CL and I must confess that I did not get yet a satisfactory answer to this , as I can make 100 ticks in less than an hour, and getting killed on days like november 8th (false breakouts all over the place).
Thanks
CD
CD, Trading for a daily target means trading until you hit that target. If your backtesting shows that you have large losing days then you need to find a daily loss limit too. Having said that, a good trading plan with a high win rate should make red days very manageable. The maths of a trading plan have to work or you will not be profitable enough to warrant the time and risk. Testing is the answer.
DeleteCollecting your stats is key. Use a spreadsheet or MSA (http://www.adaptrade.com/MSA/) to analyse the results.
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