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The PandaWarrior Chronicles

  #1051 (permalink)
 
PandaWarrior's Avatar
 PandaWarrior 
In the heat
 
Experience: None
Posts: 3,165 since Mar 2010
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monpere View Post
The lesson may be a bad one. The market has a way of rewarding bad behavior just to lure you in, and then put the smack down on you hard next time. I haven't been following your thread so I don't know how this fits in with your normal trading, but this seems to be arbitrary, I may be wrong. I use to do this out of frustration after losing several trades, but your motive might be different, you should examine that just in case. Unless this is part of an experiment in determining if your method can support larger risk/reward, I would not advise just going with it without backtesting it.

I agree....I have been thinking about it and looking at average ticks from my typical entry I might expect. Been trading 1.5-2.0 RR for a while and I like it. But once in a while would be nice to grab a bigger one....

Food for thought is all it is at this point.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, Leonardo da Vinci


Most people chose unhappiness over uncertainty, Tim Ferris
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  #1052 (permalink)
 
Mercury's Avatar
 Mercury 
PU , India
 
Experience: Intermediate
Platform: Ninja Trader
Trading: Nifty Futures
Posts: 51 since Aug 2010
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PW,

I have been following ur journal, its very helpful to understand my own trading issues.
Thanks for being consistent.
why r u not posting charts with ur trade/posts ? That will be good to see.

  #1053 (permalink)
 
PandaWarrior's Avatar
 PandaWarrior 
In the heat
 
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Posts: 3,165 since Mar 2010
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Mercury View Post
PW,

I have been following ur journal, its very helpful to understand my own trading issues.
Thanks for being consistent.
why r u not posting charts with ur trade/posts ? That will be good to see.

I'm glad you are enjoying the thread.

I dont post charts that often anymore for several reasons.

1. the chart posts were for me to keep a record of developing an edge and what the various stages of that looked like.

2. Early on, I wanted feed back about how to read a chart so I actively looked for that type of information from the futures.io (formerly BMT) community.

3. I used the charts as a way to look at my trades in hindsight and see how I was doing once the pressure of live trading was off.

Gradually over time the need for these three things has diminished and I know longer feel the need to document as closely the things I did. Trading is almost never about mechanicals. Those can be learned in a few hours or days at most. Its the time spent with learning your instrument, time spent knowing how to manage risk effectively, and most importantly, time spent knowing yourself.

Of late, the thread has turned more toward the mental side of the game and I expect that to continue.

Lastly, I'm not real sure how valuable it is for beginners to see to many different chart types. I know I spent way to much time changing things. You can't really develop any type of consistency by changing all the time. So rather than post charts with entries and exits, I choose to focus for the most part on the mental and emotional side of things.

Hope that answers your question.

Cheers....

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, Leonardo da Vinci


Most people chose unhappiness over uncertainty, Tim Ferris
Started this thread
  #1054 (permalink)
 
PandaWarrior's Avatar
 PandaWarrior 
In the heat
 
Experience: None
Posts: 3,165 since Mar 2010
Thanks Given: 6,329
Thanks Received: 13,404

All the BSD's I've ever read about have a point at which they go all in....that trade makes their day/week/month/year/ career.

There seems to be a moment every day when it seems prudent to put on more size or hold for more ticks than normal. Where are those points? How do you decide that the risk you normally use can be doubled or tripled?

Is there such a point each day? I think so. If a position trader can load up if they see a long term opportunity setting up, why can't I? If I do, how much is to much?

Instead of trading the same size or dollar risk each trade, why not have an "A" set up for which you are willing to go balls to the wall? Maybe double up on size....or look to add aggressively if the trade is progressing your way quickly?

If you get a winner on the "A" trade, is it time to walk away for while? All day? Or just keep going?

Random thoughts.....I am sure there are random answers.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, Leonardo da Vinci


Most people chose unhappiness over uncertainty, Tim Ferris
Started this thread
  #1055 (permalink)
 
Adamus's Avatar
 Adamus 
London, UK
 
Experience: Beginner
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PandaWarrior View Post
All the BSD's I've ever read about have a point at which they go all in....that trade makes their day/week/month/year/ career.

There seems to be a moment every day when it seems prudent to put on more size or hold for more ticks than normal. Where are those points? How do you decide that the risk you normally use can be doubled or tripled?

Is there such a point each day? I think so. If a position trader can load up if they see a long term opportunity setting up, why can't I? If I do, how much is to much?

Instead of trading the same size or dollar risk each trade, why not have an "A" set up for which you are willing to go balls to the wall? Maybe double up on size....or look to add aggressively if the trade is progressing your way quickly?

If you get a winner on the "A" trade, is it time to walk away for while? All day? Or just keep going?

Random thoughts.....I am sure there are random answers.


Oogway: [walking towards Po] Ah! I see that you have found the Sacred Peach Tree of Heavenly Wisdom!

Po: [Po turns around with a lot of peaches stuffed in his mouth] Oh! Is that what this is? I'm so sorry! I just thought it was a regular peach tree!


- not sure it's so relevant now I read it again but it made me laugh

You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
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  #1056 (permalink)
 
PandaWarrior's Avatar
 PandaWarrior 
In the heat
 
Experience: None
Posts: 3,165 since Mar 2010
Thanks Given: 6,329
Thanks Received: 13,404


Adamus View Post
Oogway: [walking towards Po] Ah! I see that you have found the Sacred Peach Tree of Heavenly Wisdom!

Po: [Po turns around with a lot of peaches stuffed in his mouth] Oh! Is that what this is? I'm so sorry! I just thought it was a regular peach tree!


- not sure it's so relevant now I read it again but it made me laugh



Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, Leonardo da Vinci


Most people chose unhappiness over uncertainty, Tim Ferris
Started this thread
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  #1057 (permalink)
 
GaryD's Avatar
 GaryD 
Orlando, Florida
 
Experience: None
Platform: shoes
Trading: happy
Posts: 6,462 since May 2011


PandaWarrior View Post
All the BSD's I've ever read about have a point at which they go all in....that trade makes their day/week/month/year/ career.

There seems to be a moment every day when it seems prudent to put on more size or hold for more ticks than normal. Where are those points? How do you decide that the risk you normally use can be doubled or tripled?

Is there such a point each day? I think so. If a position trader can load up if they see a long term opportunity setting up, why can't I? If I do, how much is to much?

Instead of trading the same size or dollar risk each trade, why not have an "A" set up for which you are willing to go balls to the wall? Maybe double up on size....or look to add aggressively if the trade is progressing your way quickly?

If you get a winner on the "A" trade, is it time to walk away for while? All day? Or just keep going?

Random thoughts.....I am sure there are random answers.



When you know, then it is time.

  #1058 (permalink)
 
PandaWarrior's Avatar
 PandaWarrior 
In the heat
 
Experience: None
Posts: 3,165 since Mar 2010
Thanks Given: 6,329
Thanks Received: 13,404

Saturday I was sitting in an easy chair reading a book when all of a sudden, out of the clear blue sky came a way to increase size once in a while.

But first some back story.

I spent the first 6 months of my trading journey trying to figure out multiple time frames. Intellectually I understood it but it never clicked for me. So I quite trying to understand and went on the path to find a simple one time frame trading method I could rely on.

Eventually I found an edge, have stuck with it and now I am trading some what satisfactorily. I struggle to hold a trade long enough sometimes and that is the major reason I am not very nicely profitable. My win rate is better than I thought I could get it even with the holding issue and overall, feel like I am on the right path.

But there has been that whole thing about having a great "A" set up. One where you could make a larger bet and have some reasonable chance of it winning.

In my previous post, I wrote about this idea. Since writing it, I just put it out of my mind thinking someday down the road I'd figure it out. Well on Saturday, at least for me, I figured out when I could do this. And it had to do with multiple time frame confluence.

Trouble was, I'd never been able to make that work for me. Visually I did not get it. I know this sounds elementary especially after at this stage in my career, but honestly, the whole idea how the fractals worked never really dawned on me.......But an idea of how to make it work came to me sitting there reading a murder mystery. I jumped up, rushed over to the computer and sure enough, found enough evidence right away to justify spending the weekend pouring over charts.

The deal here was that in the time frames I was looking at, the most number of trades I saw in the last month was 3 in a single day. This significantly reduced the number of trades I might look at on any given day. Keep in mind I only reviewed the first 120 minutes of the trading day. I wanted to know if there was sufficient resources based on this idea to be done in 2 hours each day. What was the win rate, how much risk on average, average ticks per trade was reasonable to expect, etc....all the normal stuff.

Then I marked all the trades, went back over them with my risk criteria, entry rules and target rules and asked myself this one question, if I had doubled my normal risk right here, what was the return and what was the worst case scenario?

The answers were completely satisfactory. No need to go into those details here since my answers would be different from everyone else's, but suffice to say, I liked what I saw.

The beautiful thing was this, I did not have to change anything about how I was already trading in terms of what the set up looked like, just wait until that set up appeared simultaneously on all three time frames. If I missed a trade was already in progress when I got to the computer in the morning, just look for normal re-entry trades and size normally.

Then of course, the million dollar question. Could I see and execute real time? This morning, I saw and I executed. I was done in the first 45 minutes of trading with about 2.5X my normal profit for the day. This came as a result of three trades. A loser with normal size, then two winners. One with double my normal size and one with normal size. Of course today was an easy day to make money assuming you were short, but on days like this I would normally get only a small part of the trend. Today I got a larger portion than I would have otherwise but still missed more than half the available ticks. No worries about that though as my back test did not include holding for very large runs like today.

So what am I saying here. I had an aha moment about multiple time frames and about risk management. The risk portion I am carefully studying in a walk forward experiment but the actual entry and exit of the trade I expect to be able to see it clearly from now on......

On a side note, I finally got my skype to show me as online after nearly two weeks of messing with it. Until yesterday, it always showed me as offline or away in addition to not letting me text message at random times . Well I guess I should say, skype is finally working properly but I have no idea what the issue was so to say I fixed it is a misstatement.

So to my skype friends in the UK, India and Canada that thought I was ignoring you, I should be free tomorrow around 7:30AM my time.

Well here's to an interesting week ahead. I am looking forward to this week like I haven't looked forward to a work week in a long time.

Cheers.........

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, Leonardo da Vinci


Most people chose unhappiness over uncertainty, Tim Ferris
Started this thread
  #1059 (permalink)
 
PandaWarrior's Avatar
 PandaWarrior 
In the heat
 
Experience: None
Posts: 3,165 since Mar 2010
Thanks Given: 6,329
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today is four days looking at MTF in a new light. I should mention this is on sim. No sense trying something new with real money. The real trial is increasing size at certain key moments. No way I'm doing that live until I've done it in sim for a few days. Even when I go back live, I'll increase size in smaller increments than I am now to start with. I have a max size I can work with anyway and so will never go above that.

Four days in and I'm up substantially more than I would be otherwise. Size is the difference. But so is waiting for the key inflection points when all three time frames line up. These trades also seem to last longer in terms of distance traveled. I've done two 50 tick trades this week. A first for me.

Tuesday was a full stop out day. Took all signals for 2 hours, ended up down my full daily stop. Did the same thing Monday, today and yesterday. Monday offset Tuesday and yesterday and today are very nicely profitable. More than any previous 4 days worth of trading sim or otherwise.

The chart is my entry chart. I have two higher time frames than this. The largest one is a 15M chart.

One thing I am noticing is this, I am trading MUCH less than before. Monday I did one trade. Tuesday was the loser and there were 5 trades. One trade yesterday and 4 today. Two of which were break evens. I could have quit after the first one and been perfectly happy with the day's results. I only took the third and fourth trades because the risk on them was small enough that I could take a full stop out and still be almost double my daily goal. So it was a no risk proposition in terms of overall objectives.

As to the chart, all three time frames look identical to this one. I also have a totally naked one just to make sure I didn't miss something on the others in terms of levels. Sometimes the indicators obscure levels just a bit.



Cheers......

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, Leonardo da Vinci


Most people chose unhappiness over uncertainty, Tim Ferris
Started this thread
  #1060 (permalink)
 
PandaWarrior's Avatar
 PandaWarrior 
In the heat
 
Experience: None
Posts: 3,165 since Mar 2010
Thanks Given: 6,329
Thanks Received: 13,404


One trade today. Perfect alignment on all three charts, all three charts even had the same entry criteria on them. So doubled normal size, held to target and exited with 2.5X normal daily goal.

Thankfully target only took about 3 minutes to reach but thats NOT normal.

Back to observation mode til 7:30. then its time to be Dad. Kiddo is out of school today so I get to spend the day with her....she's turning into a bit of a laugh riot lately.

Cheers.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, Leonardo da Vinci


Most people chose unhappiness over uncertainty, Tim Ferris
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Last Updated on May 14, 2014


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