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I try not to trade the kind of breakout I used to trade, which was essentially entering immediately after a break of a large and obvious congestion area. They rarely worked. Most of the breaks I trade are really just pauses after quick and strong impulse moves out of congestion. Sometimes if price is making higher lows or vice versa, and it's apparent they want to take her a good ways, I will jump on board when the volatility picks up on the resumption. I am counting on momentum to carry price at least 10 ticks and sometimes more. I almost never take the break blindly.
In any case, the ones I am picking are not producing at a rate much greater than 50% so I need to somehow apply better filters to get the best of the best.
Your suggestion is a good one. I will try to post more trades. If you see anything that looks suspect please let me know.
Makes sense. Most of what I know has been learned from watching others. I have learned a lot from folks here on FIO and other places, so I like to keep my eyes and ears open for ideas that speak to me. As you say, my recipe involves a lot of ingredients taken from other places.
The problem arises when I see people supposedly making money like they're picking up dollars dropping from the sky. This is when the temptation arises to adapt the method of the moment. But I know I would have the same problems with their method as I am now, so I have to take what might help and leave the rest.
Of course, these are just averages so they have to be taken with a grain of salt. Sometimes it's 55 ticks and sometimes it's 1 tick. It's just a cursory look at how well I am picking the proper direction. Right now it's about even. It's been worse!
They're just averages so they only give a cursory view of how well I am picking the proper direction. It could be made up of 5 trades that only go 1 tick and one trade that goes 72 ticks, so it's not something that I can base a stop off of.
A better stat might be to look at a distribution over a series of trades to find where 70% of trades would be safe. However, then you would have to compare how price moved in favor on those trades to see if it traveled far enough to warrant the bigger stop. Bigger stops require either more wins or bigger wins.
Another method or significant change in the basics of your method.
There are plenty of examples here on FIO.
The point I'm trying to make is, if you've done everything you could in optimizing/fine-tuning your method and it's still not profitable (enough) then you should consider another method (what I called a game changer).
Experimenting 1 month with another method might bring you more than 1 more month with a tweak on your current method.
You mentioned: "But I know I would have the same problems with their method as I am now, so I have to take what might help and leave the rest."
How do you know? Did you try it? Or do you assume it? Why not just try it out and -who knows- surprise yourself?
I'm not saying you should jump from one method to another each month, but it seems like you're stuck for a while now.
You should do something different than you're doing now.
I'm trying to help, not trying to be a d***.
Just my 2 cts.
This issue has been one of my biggest focuses lately. I think that as a trader in order to be successful you have to gain a confidence in your ability to anticipate outcomes in a statistically advantageous way. Period. No numbers games, no r/r tweaking. Pure and simple, am I right enough often enough to make this work?
So in order to strip away all of the bs that was possibly standing in the way of me gaining that confidence, I stopped placing orders for a while and am just recording the ideas and watching the charts to see if these ideas might have been profitable IF they were traded correctly.
Not recommending for everyone as different things work for different people. But for me the hope is that by taking things down to the basics of "I believe it is more likely that price will go here next" and not confusing things by always measuring and reflecting every decision in relation to entries / exits placed in a uncertain mindset, perhaps then confidence and certainty and clarity can build from there.
And "method" can come back to a clean slate and written again around all the accumulated skills which one hopefully has developed after watching markets day after day.
