I will take a look at that as a performance metric. Still a little hard to define for me. Like asking a baseball player what his goal is for reaching base. Wouldn't the answer be every time. The metric, on base percentage would include a couple different items, but I'd say that a player whose goal is less than 100% is not worth his salt as a pro. Now there is a difference between goal and performance metric as both trading and baseball are not "games of perfection" Either way, I do not have a specific goal in ticks or dollars or % of range.

I want to trade well. To trade well is to make lots of money. So each day I review each trade for it's specific result and against what opportunity was there at the time. Sometimes a 50 tick trade is a failure and sometimes a 7 tick loser was a great trade. My goal is to trade well, the rest takes care of itself.

When you hosted that author Denise she mentioned something that I sort of did, but since I absolutely do. That is to focus on the bottom 20% of trades and look to improve or eliminate. It is a freaking beautiful thing when the bottom 20% of a period's trades includes winning trades. I believe that if my focus is there, on trading well that is a better metric, goal, outcome than hitting a percentage of a daily range. Does than make sense? Thanks for the interesting poll question and debate. Dan

I think it also depends how you trade, what kind of a trader you are.

here're some extreme examples:

- the market shoots up 50 points, one big move, one swing. but it doesn't offer me a good opportunity to enter on a pullback. so the adr is 50 points and I don't get anything.

- now the market goes up 10 points, then down 10 points and up 10 points etc. it does that 10 times. so 10 x 10 point swings. the adr is still 10 points. but I might be able to catch 5 points out of every swing, leaving me with 50 points at the end of the day.

like I said those are extreme and not very likely examples, but you get the idea. so to compare your trade results to a naked adr number doesn't make much sense to me.

I am definitely a daytrader if opportunities arise, however, I don't like to scalp, my goal for the day as a daytrader is to pull out 1/4 or 1/2 of the total range the day trades. So if the ES was 20 pts wide today, if I was successful I was able to take out 5-10 pts out of my daytrading efforts. I usually am able to do this if successful in 1-3 trades maximum. That being said, I have no problem swing trading positions, and those typically last 1 day to 4 weeks. I do utilize options in some of my longer timed trades along with futures.

Matt

I think now you're getting to the heart of the question. The distinction between a goal and a metric is what could be confusing. Perhaps what is helpful is to know what % of daily ATR are you capturing on average. Secondly what % of ATR do you seek to achieve in your trading. Some would suggest the second question should always be at least 100% but perhaps frame it in terms of next steps.

i am not able to vote because i expect to be a net loser on the day, this is no joke and probably a more realistic outcome than any of the other choices. i never would lower myself to look at performance on a daily basis yet i do expect i will out perform any expected profitability on a yearly basis. ~m

It does not need to be taken so literal. You could easily expand it to a weekly or monthly basis.

Mike

the range of the day does not take into account all the movement in a day. a market may open and go directly up to close 20 points higher on the day. the next day may open and trade 5 points up and down every hour and close where it opened - that day to me had a 30+ point range.

based on this premise i would expect in a years time that i would capture well over 4500% of the cumulative daily ranges as described in the poll. however on a daily basis i always expect to be negative, with respect.

mark brown

Yes I know the market moves up and down.

Please look at post #21, and give a real world example including win rate, R and number of trades per day, so I can better understand. Please remember this is based on 1-lot per, size has nothing to do with it.

Mike

So how would you measure your efficiency in terms of market movement?

I have something I track called "benchmark" which is basically where I list the absolute best case scenario for my trade setup in terms of total possible ticks. This is not to be confused with in-trade MFE. This is a hypothetical best case scenario, saying I captured 100% of the move based on my methodology.

I use that to measure my actual performance for an individual trade against the benchmark performance.

But I still find it useful to look at my overall daily performance and compare it to the overall daily volatility.

Mike