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  #781 (permalink)
 
Inletcap's Avatar
 Inletcap 
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bobwest View Post
Scaling

I don't currently do anything but "all in all out," so my grasp of scaling strategies is entirely theoretical.

But if your longer-term read of the market is right, and stays right (), then adding on dips while keeping your initial position will win every time, and win bigger because your average price is better.... that is, you will win every time when you are right, and when you stay right long enough.

If you are wrong, you are just making sure you lose more by adding to a loser. So you had better be right, or be very quick on your feet when you find out you are wrong.

I think that's the whole issue of scaling.

Adding to winners as price advances is more problematic, because you are pyramiding, adding at higher and higher prices, so your average is higher (assuming a long, of course), but again, when you are right and stay right, you will do well.

Scaling out is taking a partial profit but letting something run, after you have been proven to be right, but don't want to keep pushing it. Again, if you are right.... etc.

So, the question is, is there a big move in progress, for which any smaller fluctuations are small pullbacks that you should take advantage of? There has to be, for scaling of any kind to work out. Otherwise the basic requirement of being right, and staying right for long enough, is not met and you will have to scramble.

I don't know how to do this, but that is what @Inletcap and Co. are doing all the time in the spoos thread. Making a consistent bet on being right on a rather long-term direction, and getting more into it on any adverse move, even if they hold for a loss for a while. When wrong, trying to get out with as little damage as possible, selling (again, thinking of longs) on any uptick, and relying on their lower average price to make the move against them hurt less.

So, to my mind, the issue is just, are you in for a bigger move or a smaller one? Because the big, sustained move essentially in one direction is what makes all those gyrations possible. Otherwise, you have to have your stops real tight, take your profits in a hurry, and hold for a minimum time before the trend changes.

If you are into the big move idea, you do well in trending days, less well or poorly in tightly-ranging days, and so-so in days with fairly wide ranges. If you are into the small move idea, you will do better in tight ranges, less well in trends; you will have to scalp, and be very right. In fact, you have to be very right under both scenarios -- it's really mostly or entirely a matter of your timeframe, and whether the market is going to accommodate your preference or not. In other words, in your chosen timeframe, are you right?

I think it all has to do with what you think the market is doing. If you have confidence in the big trend, that inclines you to one strategy. If you have no confidence in the trend, that inclines you to another.

That's my cent and a half on the topic, as someone who watches but doesn't do it. (So far.)

Bob.

Spot on Bob- One thing to add. When you find a style that fits, you have to recognize when it doesn't work and you must abandon that style immediately when those conditions are present. I will get absolutely beat up when the market "goes nowhere" and I am very aware of this. Probably why RVOL is so critical to my days success or failure... If my thesis fails I kind of have to accept the other side to make things better- if the adverse move does not give enough schwag, I stand to be wrong twice in a single day and that can cut pretty deep if I've built two full positions. A "great" trader could recognize the operating conditions and change their "style" to accommodate immediately; Unfortunately, more often than not (for me), there is simply not enough time to process the information when in a painful situation so I've found it best to accept that my style cannot always work and when its not working, abstinence is best.

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  #782 (permalink)
 
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 Tap In 
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Inletcap View Post
@Tap In

I have not had a chance to read the past couple of pages of responses but the last I read was your reply regarding scaling and why you see the importance of using 1R as a measure. I didn't reply immediately when I read this yesterday as I wanted to think about what you were saying and here is the thought that struck me...

We see the markets differently. I see the markets as a price discovery mechanism and from this perspective, I understand where you don't see what I see. Your comments about scaling and 1R show that you are not looking at the broader operation at hand- let me attempt to explain this statement:

Scaling- We are trading within a single days timeframe. We have no idea what the market is going to do. A day-traders primary responsibility is to assess the current condition and make a decision as to what type of day we are going to have (range, trend, reversal, etc.) and repeat this all day long. So why would one scale? Because we are not sure what the day will ultimately end up looking like and it affords one the opportunity to play two (or more) ideas at the same time.

Example- Its 10est, the markets been open for an hour and has traded above the open in a spike fashion and smacked into a naked POC from two days ago- You got long off the open with 3 contracts. Will the range continue to expand or will the market reverse and continue its downtrend? Nobody knows- but if you scale, you can lock in profits on your first idea and keep your options open to see if its a big reversal day that will attract volume and run into the close with a runner and you don't have to spend your day trying to find another entry which could potentially blow up in your face and rip the profits you already made out of your hands. I think that's pretty clear so I will say no more unless you have questions. this makes sense

1R- Again- we are trading within a single days timeframe. I have to ask you some questions in order to get my point across here but I'm not trying to be illusive with my response. Keeping with the days timeframe:
- Are markets static or dynamic?
- Are all price "locations" within the day equal?

If you agree that markets are dynamic and not all trade locations are equal, how can 1R make any sense? In a static world, yes, but in the real world there are other factors. Not every trade comes with the same set of variables as the book authors want us to believe.

Example- Its 11est and the market has spiked up off the open for the first hour and is slowly grinding higher with relative volume near +35% for the day. It has not traded below +1SD all morning and is currently pulled back 20t to +1SD. This is a trend up day- taking a trade at 1SD is low risk as the market should continue up but do you just blindly take it? Hell no- I didn't tell you how far the market has already run- If we were 60% of the Avg Daily Range I say take it as fast as you can but if we've already moved 180% of the ADR, I don't feel there is enough room left to get on board today... Now, lets say we are at 180% of ADR- does this mean a reversal is coming? Probably not but maybe so, who knows- would a countertrend short make sense- Hell No!!!-- Its a trend up day. I use this example to show that not all trades are created equal and assigning a static risk/reward scenario cannot make sense.great example

OK- you ask for help regarding your trades- basically you've ask to look at your trades and tell you the good and bad. Taking your Friday trade- Your execution was good as you sold what you perceived to be overhead resistance and you bailed when the trade went against you- I get that! Why did that trade fail? You failed to focus on what the market was trying to do- it was trying to see if price could be accepted higher on a counter trend day. Why was it so choppy? Because it was a counter trend day- buying was being met with late sellers finding value in the retracement. Who was winning- Buyers were.. How could one know this? Price broke out of the OR and sustained trade above- It took out the ONH and tested value (VWAP) 4 times- each time it returned to value, buyers were standing there gobbling it up- eventually enough sellers gave up selling for the day and price was able to move past the resistance as expected since buyers were not in any way, shape, or form allowing it to go lower so why not let price discover higher prices to see what happens up there.

One last thing- sellers were finding value all day at the HOD- market was bracketing between VWAP and HOD- you took and entry against trend in the middle of the bracket.. If looking for a reversal, the logical trade location was at the top of the resistance band or just above it(if rally attempt failed) as it afforded a "lower risk" entry with the crowd of sellers standing behind you for back up.

I am not doing enough of this kind of analysis. I am too much in the moment of what price action is doing NOW

This response took time. Thank you!

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  #783 (permalink)
 
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grausch View Post
Sorry for the late reply, but I live in a different time zone and usually switch off everything at 18h00 my time. I see several replies came in, and I also know you are trying to get funded by TST, which means your trading approach and goals will necessarily be quite different from mine.

In any case, that is one hell of an excellent question. I would say it depends on both the market and the trader on any given day, the only caveat being that both these approaches have different risk profiles as the trade progresses.

Regarding why I believe using multiple contracts is so crucial, I can only relay my personal experience. When I was still backtesting a ton, I very quickly came to a similar conclusion as you did with your post "Why do I make such a big deal out of 1R" ( ). Getting a win % of 50% with your average win being double your average loser is pretty damn difficult. I spent some time testing most common indicators (and several combinations) of those, and could not come up with a robust and reliable way to increase my win %. What I also found was that the backtests that did best always seemed to be the ones that shot for the largest wins.

The answer to maximise gains seemed quite simple - just hold them longer for larger gains. Unfortunately as you also noted, the longer you hold, the more likely the market is to give back significant portions of that profit, or even stop you out for a loss. My first order of business, was to devise ways to move my stop to breakeven. This cured the closed-equity risk problem, but it still left me with an open-equity risk problem. By taking profits at certain points, I can reduce the open-equity risk, but it comes at the trade-off of potentially lowering gains on massive movers. I chose to do this, because not all trades are big winners and I needed some way to pay for the churn on the account.

As noted above, scaling out smooths out the equity curve, but I was not happy with the fact that losing trades needed big winners to offset them. This is purely because losing trades were taken on a "full" position and winning trades were always scaled back. Each time you scale back a winning trades needs more ticks to achieve another multiple of R. My solution to this problem was to pyramid in as a trade moves in my favour, while simultaneously moving my stop up to keep risk constant. If the 1st contract had a stop of 20 ticks, then I would move the stop to 10 ticks away from my average price. As @bobwest noted, this leads to a higher price and also a higher stop increasing the chance of being stopped out. Again, this is another trade-off I choose to make, because it makes me feel more comfortable with the risk I am taking.

The above describes a way where I can potentially get 4 1R losers a week, 1 5R winner a week, and perhaps a 10R or even a 25R winner a month. It is not perfect by any means and quite often I sit with a losing day or week, when @Inletcap has been pocketing decent money. This is merely my way of maximising the size of my winners while trying to not lose too much of my account waiting for those winners to come along.

My trade management method is merely one way to skin the cat and my approach was developed with the assumption that I can't get a 50% win % with a reward to risk ratio of 2:1. By trading this way, I am also not always bound to a screen merely due to the fact that once I have booked a decent gain, I can just let trades play out. Sometimes they work well, other times a 25R gain turns into a 10R gain, which is exactly what happened yesterday.

Edit: While typing up this post, I forgot to add the following - I notice you quite often refer to the fact that trading 1 contract should yield similar results and in my second paragraph I gave a quick "answer". It is a damn excellent question, and there is no real easy answer. Based on the rest of my post, I think it is obvious that I consider my position to be a "trade" and my goal is to manage a position. When you look at trading in terms of single contracts, you always get stuck in a linear relationship, i.e. if you had no stop no profit / loss profile would be a straight line. Once you add in a stop, your profit and loss profile changes to that of a call / put option. Limited risk / unlimited upside, but the upside movement will always be linear. By pyramiding I am attempting to change the linear profit curve into an exponential curve. Scaling out of course reduces the exponential effect, but at least it gives an initial kick to the return profile.

Now, all of that being said is the way I approach things. Several traders here ( ) do things quite differently and some of them do much better than I do. I tried copying things the successful guys there do, and ultimately lost money doing so. Perhaps there is a skill in trading semi-random movements - if there is, I suck at it. I find it is easier to just try and hit home runs - I don't get them that often, but when I do, they tend to travel quite far out of the park.

I think I understand your general philosophy on how you make gains. I like how you have recognized and come to grips with the various compromises inherent in choosing any style. Thank you for taking the time to share!

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  #784 (permalink)
 grausch 
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Tap In View Post
I think I understand your general philosophy on how you make gains. I like how you have recognized and come to grips with the various compromises inherent in choosing any style. Thank you for taking the time to share!

You're welcome. As you can see there were several reasons why I ultimately ended up using an approach that relies heavily on both pyramiding into and scaling out of trades and explaining it this way, was the only way in which I could explain why I think multiple contracts are so crucial to the way I do things. On another note, I have yet to hear of others shooting for 10R or 25R gains, yet I have seen moves of even larger magnitude in terms of R when I pyramid in this way.

Today I managed to bag 4R in gains by scaling out and exiting when I saw my gains evaporate too quickly. Usually I would have held through that, but for some reason I was just skittish today. The position would have been stopped out for 2R later, so even though I abandoned the position too quickly I have some ammunition for the rest of the week.

Regarding your day, I would suggest taking some time off, pondering over all the information you have been given and then just sieve through it all to decide what may work for you. My head would swim if I had gotten all of the different opinions you had and it would take me some time to sort through it all and then test the ideas I felt have merit.

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  #785 (permalink)
 
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 Inletcap 
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Tap In View Post
I am not doing enough of this kind of analysis. I am too much in the moment of what price action is doing NOW

This response took time. Thank you!

Not to be a dick, but this is exactly what I hoped you would draw from this. I felt that if I just said it to you, it would have no impact and I'd sound harsh- finding that conclusion on your own is powerful!

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  #786 (permalink)
 
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 MWG86 
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Tap In View Post
thank you for your examples. I still have to ask the question, if you analyzed each scale-in as separate trade over a large sampling of trades, shouldn't they be profitable on their own? If they are not, why do them? My point is that you should be able to make money on a single contract. You may not make a lot of money, but you should be profitable. Scaling in or scaling out might make you more profitable because you reduce basis or catch runners, but that first scale in and that first scale out should also be profitable on its own. Otherwise it is a drain on your account and serves no purpose other than as a psychological comfort.

I believe that @grausch said it best that he treats his trades as a position rather than multiple individual trades (paraphrasing here, so please correct me if this is not what you meant), and his job is to manage the position. This is how I think of it as well, when I do my daily review I'm judging each scale-in and scale-out in the context of the broader position and am not as concerned with each of them being profitable on their own. My goal is to walk away from the day in the green, if I have to have a few losing trades to make this happen then I'm fine with that.

Scaling is just one way to trade though and like everything else in this business there's not a one size fits all solution. I believe that @Silvester17's contributions to this conversation have illustrated that. There are times that AIAO will be more profitable on an absolute basis and there are other times that scaling-in and -out will work better, I think it's the trader's job to figure out which way (or a hybrid of the both) works best for them as an individual.

I recently adopted scaling-in and -out because I found that my directional bias on the day was more often than not correct, but my timing wasn't always perfect. I've wanted to be an AIAO scalper and have leaned my studies and effort over the past 2 years towards scalping as a result. What I've found though since I started journaling is that I'm pretty good at figuring which direction the market wants to move, my weakness oftentimes is timing (which I'm still working on). I threw in a golf example below that illustrates my thinking on this. Yes I still want to learn how to scalp successfully, but my overall goal is to be profitable. I can still work on my scalping technique, but if I can be more profitable leaning towards my strengths then I'd be foolish to be doing anything differently.

Take a golfer who wants to hit a driver like DJ and have a short game like Phil. This player spends most of his time on the range hitting driver and working on his flop shot. Then after a couple of months he does a meticulous study of his scorecards. This study finds that from 80-150 yards out he's consistently giving himself a makeable putt but when he's 50-80 out he's getting up and down only 40% of the time. If this golfer can recognize that the point of the game is to get the ball in the hole in the fewest shots then he can adjust his game accordingly to play to his strengths and dial down to a 3-wood off the tee giving himself 120 in rather than pounding driver every time. It's still important to work on his weaknesses but playing to his strengths will score better.


Tap In View Post
Well, like a kid with a new toy, I enthusiastically came into the day eager with possibilities. Naturally, it wasn't the right day to do that. Four straight losses in a row and now I am done for the day because of the daily loss limit.

...

I am bummed but not gutted. I need to take a step back tomorrow and regroup and really decide what it is I am trying to do.

Swing changes take time, the important thing is that you're working at it.

Good luck moving forward!

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  #787 (permalink)
 
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 Popsicle 
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@Tap In, I just want to say big thank you for a really awesome journal. The way you share both your struggles and tribulations are really inspiring and have definitely taught me a lot about both trading and trading psychology.

A big thank you to everyone who has replied and contributed their knowledge so freely too. I am not sure that you guys always realize just how much you contribute to making successful traders.

I know I could have just clicked the "Thanks" button about a thousand times, but it does not seem nearly enough for everything I have learned from this journal.

Popsicle

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  #788 (permalink)
 bmtrading9 
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Thanks @bobwest for directing to this excellent journal.

I haven't gone thru all the posts here but this what my understanding for few posts

1. First, I felt like I am reading my mind in this journal or maybe all struggling traders goes thru same stuff

2. 30K combine is the main culprit of the issues here, it is very very difficult to follow the rules and own method.

3. Seems like Tap is also suffering from the same issue like me (I may be wrong here) i.e waiting for the trend reverse then somehow miss the entry then debate if trend has gone too far to enter and wait for that reverse again...this cycle continues

This will definitely help (very easy to say but difficult to follow)

1. Do analysis etc. (seems like Tap is doing excellent job in that)

2. Put a limit order

3. Add one more contract at puke point (Thanks to @Inletcap) based on new conditions

but

definitely CL will be tough for 30K combine, we will be feeding constant money to TST while trying to get over that.

May be with QM (Mini Crude) we can scale up to 3 contracts....I did the same today

1. Got into one contract overnight thinking Europe will pop it but they didn't

2. Added one more but added it too late ( I was travelling to work)

3. Closed it for small profit

4. If I would have added it at my original add point I woulda made money...

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  #789 (permalink)
 
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MWG86 View Post
I believe that @grausch said it best that he treats his trades as a position rather than multiple individual trades (paraphrasing here, so please correct me if this is not what you meant), and his job is to manage the position. This is how I think of it as well, when I do my daily review I'm judging each scale-in and scale-out in the context of the broader position and am not as concerned with each of them being profitable on their own. My goal is to walk away from the day in the green, if I have to have a few losing trades to make this happen then I'm fine with that.

Scaling is just one way to trade though and like everything else in this business there's not a one size fits all solution. I believe that @Silvester17's contributions to this conversation have illustrated that. There are times that AIAO will be more profitable on an absolute basis and there are other times that scaling-in and -out will work better, I think it's the trader's job to figure out which way (or a hybrid of the both) works best for them as an individual.

I recently adopted scaling-in and -out because I found that my directional bias on the day was more often than not correct, but my timing wasn't always perfect. I've wanted to be an AIAO scalper and have leaned my studies and effort over the past 2 years towards scalping as a result. What I've found though since I started journaling is that I'm pretty good at figuring which direction the market wants to move, my weakness oftentimes is timing (which I'm still working on). I threw in a golf example below that illustrates my thinking on this. Yes I still want to learn how to scalp successfully, but my overall goal is to be profitable. I can still work on my scalping technique, but if I can be more profitable leaning towards my strengths then I'd be foolish to be doing anything differently.

Take a golfer who wants to hit a driver like DJ and have a short game like Phil. This player spends most of his time on the range hitting driver and working on his flop shot. Then after a couple of months he does a meticulous study of his scorecards. This study finds that from 80-150 yards out he's consistently giving himself a makeable putt but when he's 50-80 out he's getting up and down only 40% of the time. If this golfer can recognize that the point of the game is to get the ball in the hole in the fewest shots then he can adjust his game accordingly to play to his strengths and dial down to a 3-wood off the tee giving himself 120 in rather than pounding driver every time. It's still important to work on his weaknesses but playing to his strengths will score better.



Swing changes take time, the important thing is that you're working at it.

Good luck moving forward!

I like the golf analogy! Makes sense. Thanks!

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 Tap In 
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Popsicle View Post
@Tap In, I just want to say big thank you for a really awesome journal. The way you share both your struggles and tribulations are really inspiring and have definitely taught me a lot about both trading and trading psychology.

A big thank you to everyone who has replied and contributed their knowledge so freely too. I am not sure that you guys always realize just how much you contribute to making successful traders.

I know I could have just clicked the "Thanks" button about a thousand times, but it does not seem nearly enough for everything I have learned from this journal.

Popsicle

I am glad you are getting something out of it. I am too. I'll let the others do the heavy lifting on how to actually trade until I get there.

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