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I'll bite! Here is my "Holy Grail"...I mean, not at all a Holy Grail in the sense that you can easily follow it!
1.) You aren't perfect, so take HALF of your money and lock it up into an insured fixed income product. ex: 6-mo CD
Presto! You've "made" 50% return on your money! (not really...) Then what I do later on is force myself to build up a small account as a "challenge" and then if things are hot, I'll eventually get access to my own funding in due time, which means scaling up the strategy during the winning period.
2.) Learn how to read your own emotions. Cultivate discipline. Listen to your gut/develop intuition. Stop while you are ahead for the day. Do not trade more than 4 hours. Do not trade in the Evening. Grab a set amount of ticks and then stop trading! Trade smaller in volatility. Trade smaller at immediate open if you must.
3.) Use a volatility based stop while scalping. Enter the scalp if price is hanging near the stop price, that way you have some wiggle room and potential quick profit and a very small stop which could be a soft stop. There are lagging indicators for this, key word is lagging. So don't base all of your trades off of it. It can help find entries though.
4.) After I make money for the day, I switch over to trade an ETF or stock. IF I see a setup, I'll take the setup with maybe only 10 to 15 shares. Everything is so discounted that I'm fine with sinking the cash into it for the long term.
If I make money, even a small amount each day/week/month will slowly add up to boost my income and returns.
Bonus income adds up over time. $15 to $50 extra each day can add up quick. I prefer to be liquid but I do need to invest too, at these levels. Thus far I haven't gotten "stuck" in the desirable stocks/ETFs that I don't mind keeping.
5.) Prior day levels - some of my best trades are based on inside trading days where price is at a prior day low or high and that is ripe with opportunity. Buy Low, Sell High. Most children can instinctively trade well based on that simple criteria alone. Find the opening range for each day and draw it out, the high and low of the open...
6.) If you hit 2+ losing trades in a row, consider stopping for the day. Consider trading one of the smaller accounts (sub-divide money to place with different brokerages). I do not use hard stops or hard take profits. I do close half and let half run in the event I see a trend.
7.) Wait for "setups". If you are using trendlines, those change constantly on the smaller timeframes. Continue to wait and let the market create a "rhythm" that you can actually see. Higher high, higher low, lower high, lower low. Read price action. Drill down into tick charts if you scalp.
Literally everyday is a NEW day. Conditions will vary from day to day and remember not to be too mechanical, but do what works for you. There are days will you will get runners and days where it just won't go far in either direction.
There is a time to scalp and there are periods where you'll latch onto runners. Bottom line, make money!!!!! And do what works for YOU. Here's the thing... if you don't trade "by the book" but you make money, who's going to know? Nobody else matters except that you are in competition with your own worst enemy, thy self!
I am only trading Algos. Now this was tuf for years but today it is no brainer. I only use strategies that have the same perfromance on atleast 3 other instruments and i trade them on those not the one i made it on.
In terms of HOLY GRAIL,
do you mean that the HG works all the time? Or
that the HG generates profit all the time or
most of the time?
Yes, I do have a HG that generates
profit for me most of the time.
It does not work all the time,
just most of the normal time.
Would I part with it for
some enormous amount of
money?
The answer is, absolutely no.
It is not so much the money, but
is more of on the side of satisfaction derived
from being able to pick, when and where
you wish to enter your trade and
when and where the trade would
turn around when it almost hits
the resistance or support.
But that utopia does not exist
all the time either, but just most
of the time. It is a HG for me.
But for most traders, particularly
teaching educators, it surely does not
sound like a HG.... LOL
I posted this many yrs ago on a similar thread. Still true today, if not more so.
"No one discloses the secret location to their hidden treasure".
So if one really. really believes this to be true,(most believe it to be true, but desperately want it not to be) then one also can recognize the real question that is actually being asked. Which is: Is there any one out there that actually makes money trading, and will they tell me exactly how they do it?
Or another way of saying it: What do you know, that I don't? And will there ever be a time that I can get it out of you?
What's the "Hidden Treasure"? The "Edge". An actual buy/sell signal and target that is profitable and repeatable.
I usually come at this from a different perspective.
I think a lot of traders make the mistake of looking for *more* knowledge vs developing skill through focused practice.
If you dig through the journals here and elsewhere, most of the struggles are about inconsistent application and straying from risk rules they already "know" about. I'm certainly guilty of that. It's a case of behavior, not really "knowledge".
And generally, I'd propose that many of us would be far better off approaching trading as a skill game to play deeply with focus vs an academic subject to study broadly.
So the "Holy Grail" in my head is a behavior-based journal that improves your actions day-to-day, month-to-month, etc.
Yeah, I looked at this, and I figured out how he's calculating those bars. I forgot now, but basically, it starts a new bar when it passes a prior level/swing and Closes past it. His bars aren't really doing anything except encoding a basic pattern/entry-method into the bars, but IMO it's very lame. The bars are dumb because of those ridiculous wicks. He never talks about those wicks in his videos, what a mook. He says the 5min chart is BS but then he STILL uses it to do his trendlines LOLOL LAME.
I say... just use a P&F chart if you want something that consolidates the data well.
Obviously everyone has their own holy grail -- it's the best they can figure out. But, when you think about it, there's not THAT many ways you can analyze graph data. It's just data plotted on a graph. All data is basically the same thing, so you'd approach the markets the same way you'd approach a graph of temperature (weather) data. There's randomness (moreso than temperature data), so noone can predict what the majority of volume is doing all the time, or what the price will do... but there's the NON-randomness of the rules/laws by which the markets work... namely buy low & sell high, and that the participants are working on different scales (or time frames). But regardless of those laws, the data itself is actually SHOWING everyone what's really going on, but it's so sneaky/hidden because the stuff really going on happens on different scales and timeframes, so it's hard for people to come up with an analysis technique that DECODES the data well. But, I guess there probably is some way(s) that are better than what we all know now. So, I think there IS a holy grail -- it's whatever the best analysis technique(s) are -- whatever works the best. So, I think there is a mathematical analysis method or combination of methods that would technically outperform everything else. I'm not sure what that is exactly, but it seems to me that it's probably simpler and less flashy/amazing as everyone might think because afterall... it's just a data stream of ticks plotted as a graph. It's a game of checkers, even though most people think it's chess.
One thing I know for sure... the standard indicators included in all software, are garbage lol. I truly believe that, I actually understand the math behind them, I actually wrote code to improve on a few of them (like bollinger etc) so I put alot of thought into it, but hey, if someone uses it successfully, good for them, but those indicators are NOT what's actually making anyone successful IMO. Sure, you can say it's doing something, but what it's really doing is much less than you think it is. So you're better off looking at swing highs & lows (and what scale those are) instead of most indicators. Except for possibly EMA's/moving averages, and maybe bollinger or keltner if one knows how to use them correctly... although I don't even like bollinger/keltner because they're based on the average deviation concept, which is just a statistical estimation, instead of actually telling you something direct about the data.
I did alot of research, and I only found 4 or 5 analysis techniques that actually are logically sound and work. The rest are just nonsensical confusion that makes simple things more complicated.
