I have been trading for several years but not until now I have founded an strategy that works in a consistent manner. The strategy I made is a simple one, but in order to sound more interesting I will call it "elegantly simple". I created this strategy about 7 months ago and I have backtested (5 years) and paper traded it (4 months), the last 4 months I have live-traded it with only $10,000. Bottomline, I have proven the strategy is a good consistent way to trade stocks. Don't misunderstand me, I am not going to break the bank, but it gives some decent returns in most scenarios. As any strategy it has good days and bad days. Needless to say with $10k the bad days don't seem so bad... but here is where the problem is...
I had planed to increase the portfolio size to $100k (most of my trading capital) as the strategy has proven to be satisfactory. What I did not take into account is that I would chicken-out (for lack of better words) at the posibility that I might not have the stomach to weather the bad days. My strategy has a daily max drawdown of 5% so it is different to lose $500 vs $5,000 even though in terms of % is the same.
Being honest I am dissapointed in my self as I had always criticized traders that lack the guts to pull the trigger... but karma is a b#tch... I am doing the same think I have always condemned.
The situation is this, I am convinced the strategy is sound, I am convinced that it will give decent returns even though there might be some bad days, but even though my brain says GO, my gut is stressing out at the (certainty) posibility (?) that there will be bad days...
BOTTOMLINE: I need to grow a pair... any advice?
PS: More info on the strategy... US stocks, I open positions (long or short) at the close and rebalance the next day's close.