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I recently moved up from trading 10-25 cars now at 30-50 lots per trade. I only day trade and mainly during RTH. I am a scalper usually taking 75-90% of my ticks before 12-15 ticks then i let the rest run. Typical stop is 12-15 ticks.
What I ran into today I have had happen. I made 20 trade today. 8 of them got stopped out to the tick or my profit taking level was stopped short by a tick. These were all 40-50 car lots.
Am I just having confirmation bias? Am I getting picked off by an algo? Need to break up the trade?
For those who day trade larger lots, how do you handle position sizing, profit taking, etc?
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
Played around some more the last few days. It definitely an issue. I’ve messed around with various sizes positions. It seems once I get over 30-35 contracts depending on market volatility, it becomes an Issue.
Really big issue today in the chop. Normally I can pick off 1-3 points all day long in chop. Today didn’t happen.
I’m probably going to switch to a bigger R:R and cut down on trades and position size.
Watching the T&S of ES closely 30-50 contracts per trade shouldn't be a problem to be honest. Of course when market is liquid during RTH.
There are many trades per day above 100 contracts. But in choppy market it could be possible to hit the ceiling with that ... could be possible...
Another way to think about it:
Do you really consider this a problem of "orders are too visible in the market and because of that you get played"?
Or could it possibly be that this contract size is little out of your individual risk management and you get caught up in bad thinking / getting emotional?
Hear what you’re saying but no. Trading smaller size was never an issue in terms of win rate and profitable system. I’ve gone pretty quickly from a 75-80% win rate to 50-55% pretty quick with the only thing changing is position sizing. My system is fairly mechanical so it’s easy to just “size up” without changing much of what I’m doing.
I’m adaptable so I may try trading smaller during chop and then sizing up during the open or times of higher volatility/liquidity.
Ya that’s what I’m experimenting with right now. I signed up for a prop account and used a trade copier and it did not go well. Check out photo. So I’m either going to do iceberg style or, more likely, change up my trading a bit. I’ve been thinking about doing this anyway to cut back on commissions.
There was a post from a guy during the start of the pandemic who was using icebergs to break up 50-60 lots without success and was under the same impression you are, namely that he was getting picked off by HFT after a nibble of his order trying to sort out whether he was a retail trader iceberging size. Not saying this will be the case for you but icebergs can only do so much to disguise what you're doing.
I would probably be simultaneously trading across multiple accounts and vary lot sizes by like 20% in either direction of your baseline sizing.
Do you have a link to the forum/website? I would be interested to see what people had to say.
I’ve switched back to my smaller, say under 30ish lot size and things seem ok. I’m changing my trading style a bit to take 12-15 ticks on my first profit taking level. Seems to be working so far and I definitely don’t feel the same as trading 50+ lots
