Yes, if you started with $40,001 and your ruin point was $40,000, your chance of ruin would probably be near 100%. The more equity cushion you initially have, the more likely you are to survive.
This is a super important lesson, especially for newbies who try to trade with a small account:
Take ANY* profitable trading system, and if you start with too small of an account, your chances of hitting your ruin point can almost be guaranteed.
* Obviously, a trading system that never loses, and has no intra-trade drawdown, is the exception. Think of interest on a bank account. That kind of "system" will never experience ruin, unless of course the government decides to take it. But that could never happen, right?
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Results at the bottom as of Day 2 of my Combine...
The most interesting thing today was in me "chasing" a signal. I'm sure it happens to all of us...
For my overnight system, every 105 minutes I'll get notified if I have to place an order. Usually, I am close by the computer, but tonight I got there a little late (a sick child caused today's delay). Anyhow, when I finally saw the signal, the strategy order was already filled, and had run about 2-3 ticks. (this is why I like automated systems, rather than manual.)
Of course, the right thing to do would have been to immediately enter at market in T4 platform, thus establishing the position in the Combine.
Instead, since I was a bit mad and frustrated that I was late on the signal, I decided to get some of my missed profit back by placing a limit order to get a better price.
(If you've been trading a while, you probably know where this story is going...)
In the end, I finally got filled in the Combine acct 6 full ticks from my strategy entry point. So, I lost 4 ticks in my attempt to save 1 or 2 ticks. In the grand scheme of things, it isn't a big deal, but to a disciplined trader, it should be a big deal. These mistakes can add up!
The mistakes I made here:
1. Acting late on a signal. Eventually, there will be a big trade that gets missed because of this. If you have a system that requires your presence at certain times, you have to be there!
2. Chasing the market to get a better entry. I should have just entered at market.
Anyhow, I am close to even on the combine...
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During your TST webinar you stated that due to the time constraints of starting your combine, you were not able to incubate your strategies. You mentioned that you used an alternative method to analyze your strategies in place of the incubation phase. Could you explain the alternative method you used. Thanks.
Normally, if I am doing my typical evaluation with walkforward testing, I will do it up to the present day. If the results look good, it goes into "incubation," where I look at the strategy every month or so going forward for 3 to 6 months. If results during incubation look "similar" to walkforward results, I may then decide to trade it.
For the combine, I started a brand new development effort on March 1, and began trading on March 19, leaving no time for incubation.
So I cheated a bit.
Instead of running walkforward until March 1, I ran it to Dec 31, 2012. The period from Jan - Mar 2013 then became a pseudo incubation period.
You can see the results below. I'm not real thrilled with the incubation performance. Had time not been an issue, I would choose to incubate this a bit longer, expecting new equity highs. This is, in fact, what I am doing before I commit my own funds to it.
Why is this "pseudo" incubation bad?
1. If the results of incubation would have been bad, I would have simply developed another system that gave better results. That sounds like a form of optimizing to me...
2. The Jan - Mar data was not truly "out of sample" as it should be, since deep in my brain, I generally know how the Euro has behaved these past few months. Maybe that knowledge crept into my thinking during rule creation. If so, it would be a case of unintentional hindsight bias.
I hope this explains it!
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Not very interesting today. One trade last night, profitable. That was with Strategy #1, which is intended to be a high winning percentage strategy. Almost had an entry with Strategy #2 (price came within 1 tick of my limit entry) that would have been a 35-40 tick winner. Oh well.
Following the trading plan 100% so far. We'll see where it leads!
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