I couldn't help playing with it one more time before a break. I added a pair of {} and it works .. Hurrah! Now I will zozozo well tonight and not having price labels "flying everywhere" in my dream .. smile ..
Beth
Can you help answer these questions from other members on futures io?
That's something worth testing, but having traded gaps and breakouts trying to enter during an adverse excursion is nice when it works but you also miss out on the ones that take off and don't look back, so you just have to do some cost/benefit analysis of that. Also, requiring a breakout to be a close outside of a range instead of using a stop order can help/hurt. Same for stops, require a close below your stop, helps prevent head fakes and market makers running stops, but leaves you open to larger losses when they aren't head fakes.
I did a little research on trades during lunch time in NYC. This time of day usually has low volume. The research was from 5/21 through 6/17 CL 7-10 contract.
20 trading days
8 days no signals (that is "three set up" signals)
3 losing trades
9 winning trades
55% of the time there is nothing happening or you are losing.....the other 45% of the time you winning......
So, it's a toss up. I think that I would like the odds a little more in my favor.
The following 5 users say Thank You to Jeff Castille for this post:
On the trade in question........the entry bar low was equal to the previous bar low......it did NOT move "outside" the previous bar low therefore I would NOT call it an "outside" bar.
I thought you still took those. It can be seen as a double bottom instead of an outside bar. I'll have to test that.
I'm doing some testing now. Since I'm posting a message I'll post my current results.
This is inside bar only, past 5 months (I don't have tick data further than 6 months and I'm using tick bars to get more precise results). Trading from 9-noon. I found the optimal target is 17 ticks which is in agreement with Jeff's 16 ticks so I'm using 16.
I next tested the breakeven stop. This is just one contract. I ran optimizer for breakeven stop and the results tell me it's better to put it between 7-16 ticks with 15 being the optimal for highest profit and 10 being optimal for max profit factor. This is very close to Jeff's 8 ticks.
So far Jeff's values hold up statistically over the past 5 months.
Now I want to test putting breakeven stop at -8 ticks to see if that helps.
Remember this does NOT take into account news just for simplicity. The drawdown could be caused by trading around news events. I'm just doing some stats on the trade management.
The following 7 users say Thank You to cunparis for this post: