Trader P/L 2010

[thalestrader 14]

Quick note: I've started almost exclusively using sell or buy stops in the direction of my trade which seems to be helping me stay out some bad trades. It is so nice when you see a good setup, put in a stop order to get you in when price starts moving your way and then price just moves opposite the way your setup was indicating but you never get in the trade because of that stop order.

 

That's the ONLY way I enter my trades.

 

I use stops to enter 90%+ of my trades to enter, 9% straight market orders, and 1% the rare limit order (usually I missed my preferred entry and the market has moved too far for me to use a market)

 

Best Wishes,

 

Thales

Edited February 8, 2010 by thalestrader

[TradeRunner 10]

The only way to mimic this in sim is to have OEC set your sim account size to the same as your real one. I think the default is $50k. If you want to make it realistic, send a support ticket asking to reset it based on what you think you will start with.

 

Hi Dinero / Brownsfan

 

You can do this instantly from your account management web page:

 

 

Sorry if that is what you meant but it sounds like you might be sending an e-mail to support.

[edabreu 10]

Started with a wake up 2am stop out , but got it right. Almost got smacked. I think I will make some coffee, maybe put some trousers on and not trade in my pajamas...

Mr autoentry-bot got me into a couple of good ones, and I got shaken out of the 100 tick long...sigh...

[sappjason 10]

Welp. My day is done and I wiped out my gains on Friday.

I've learned over the past two years that a good risk size for me (with what I'm doing) is a max of .25% of equity. So, being that I'm trading with about $210K, my max risk size (which includes commission and estimated slippage) is $525 per position. Sometimes (unfortunately), my slippage causes me to even loose more than $525, but that's because I estimate slippage before entry.

Anyway, today just happened to be one of those horrific days when almost every one of my system's trades was a looser... I hate starting the week off having to dig myself out of the hole. But that's unfortunately just sometimes the way the old ball bounces for me.....

 

Jason

[Mr_black 10]

p/l so far

[Dinerotrader 10]

SIM

+$212

 

What a crappy day. I was down $1,700 at one point, then got stopped out of long positions before the rally by 2 ticks on the 6E and the Russel. Caught the rally on oil and natural gas. Overall, poor entry selection. The gap up this morning threw a lot of confusion into my analysis. I was playing for strength because of the gap and buying support reversals and they just kept stopping me out.

 

Once I got back to the positive zone I had lost my nerve from fear of going negative again so I had to stop trading.

 

[sappjason 10]

Looks like I pulled some cash back in the front door today. I always hope to have a profitable week, but day to day, it's always up-in-the-air. Along side of my normal blotter, I'm going to also include a screen shot of a piece of monitor software that I wrote. My automated trading system is pretty wired as far as monitoring is concerned. I co-locate the server in a local co-location facility near my home and it sends my phone (via text messages) an update every 20 minutes (throughout the trading day) and also texts me when problems arise. I'm also usually connected to my system via remote desktop, but in case I'm somewhere else, I have a web server running on my box that hosts a nice little monitoring application that I've written as well. This second screen shot is from my remote monitoring application. Sometimes (because of the way Interactive Brokers reports unrealized and realized P&L), my worst case line makes a few weird pops and hickups (as you can see in the attached screen shot). Anyway, I love always having a known worst-case throughout the day. It helps me breathe a little easier knowing that "this is as bad as it can get".......

 

Jason

[thalestrader 14]

SIM

+$212

 

What a crappy day. I was down $1,700 at one point

 

Any day I find myself down by a nearly 2 grand and finish positive is hardly what I would call a "crappy" day. Be a "half full," not a "half empty" kind of guy, dinero.

 

Best Wishes,

 

Thales

[Dinerotrader 10]

Any day I find myself down by a nearly 2 grand and finish positive is hardly what I would call a "crappy" day. Be a "half full," not a "half empty" kind of guy, dinero.

 

Best Wishes,

 

Thales

 

Well, the "crappines" was derived not from the P/L but from my trade executions. Do you ever find yourself getting into trades and sitting there thinking, "what was I thinking entering into this trade?" That happened several times today. I haven't yet had time to nail down why. I would hope I could say I had a good trading day even if my P/L was in the red because of the way I executed my trades.

 

That all being said, being a complaining, "half empty" person is not my goal.

[Kiwi 16]

Today you had a learning day dinero.

 

On a day you made money or didn't but followed your plan/process you would have had a good day.

 

If you fail to learn from it ... then it truly is a crappy day

[thalestrader 14]

That all being said, being a complaining, "half empty" person is not my goal.

 

I know its not ... I was just giving you a reminder. I understand what you mean about deviating from your plan, but you should take heart that you did get back on track, and that once you did get back to plan, your positive results outstripped the damage the earlier mistakes had caused.

 

Best Wishes,

 

Thales

Edited February 10, 2010 by thalestrader
typo

[Dinerotrader 10]

SIM

+$1,075

 

Tried a few new things that worked out. Getting pretty anxious to start trading real money but still have some ironing to do on myself and methods. Its interesting. The first time I tried to trade natural gas I decided the movements were horrible and not for me. Now I practically rely on it for my big moves.

 

Still not sure about trading silver but I like the idea of having some metals in the mix. Gold is too cliche, right. We'll see if I can pull some consistent profits out of it.

 

I always thought the idea of revenge in trading was for the weak minded before I got trading. Well, either I am weak minded or revenge emotions exist for everyone. Just because I had a bad day on the Russel (RLM) yesterday, I find myself almost muttering under my breath when I look at the chart today just waiting to get my money back. LOL:rofl:. I lost again of course.

 

Edited February 10, 2010 by Dinerotrader

[bathrobe 10]

es, ftse...............

[emios 10]

Hey dinero, you might want to start looking at refineries stocks etc considering you're focusing on oil futures.Can help you to maximise profits... Good trading btw!

[Dinerotrader 10]

Hey dinero, you might want to start looking at refineries stocks etc considering you're focusing on oil futures.Can help you to maximise profits... Good trading btw!

 

Thanks, even though its all just SIM right now.

 

The only reason I trade what I trade is because of the price movement. I don't think any fundamental understanding I have about the future price of oil makes me any better at trading it. However, the way oil moves seems to be much easier to trade than other futures I have looked at. So basically, if you can find more instruments to trade that have similar price movements to oil, I would be interested but the mere associated of the underlying goods is irrelevent for me. I appreciate the idea though.

[Dinerotrader 10]

Does anyone trade varying lot sizes depending on how "good" the setup is? I remember some market wizards saying that they did this. I only trade 1 contract on every trade because I have no good way of testing the statistics of my setups so that I could concretely say that one is better than another. I may think some are better but I can't prove it so how could I bet on it.

 

Changing lot sizes sounds like a very risky proposition to me unless you have some great way to put rules around it that make sense.

[bathrobe 10]

Does anyone trade varying lot sizes depending on how "good" the setup is? I remember some market wizards saying that they did this. I only trade 1 contract on every trade because I have no good way of testing the statistics of my setups so that I could concretely say that one is better than another. I may think some are better but I can't prove it so how could I bet on it.

 

Changing lot sizes sounds like a very risky proposition to me unless you have some great way to put rules around it that make sense.

 

I do in my personal account, the one I post here is one contract, I would possibly go up to two. I keep detailed records of trades and setups to know the probability of it working.

[sappjason 10]

Another crappy day. Down $1616.

[Dinerotrader 10]

Another crappy day. Down $1616.

 

sappjason,

 

Without sharing more than you're comfortable sharing, what is the basis behind your program trading setups, exits, money management, etc?

 

It would be nice to have a program trade for me. Then I could yell at the computer program instead of myself on loss days.

[atto 20]

Not really active on the forums anymore, but thought I'd add my two cents.

Does anyone trade varying lot sizes depending on how "good" the setup is?

Yes, I do this often. I don't know the exact probabilities of my setups (and frankly, I'm not sure I could since market conditions are always changing). However, I do know relative probabilities. For people who trade on the extreme (Wyckoff, MP, or any other interpretation of auction market theory), trades in the middle have a less probability of working (and require larger stops). Thus, away from the "optimal" areas, I use smaller positions (usually half size).

 

* goes back into hole *

[sappjason 10]

Oh trust me, I still yell at myself on down days (lol)..... There have been a few times throughout the last couple years where I've had months that end flat or down. I'm still in the midst of a DD that I was really hoping to pop out of today, but that didn't happen (you can see the attached graph for my YTD Net P/L).

 

My worst DD has been 8%. Without divulging too much of the specifics of what I do, my software basically looks to get into stocks that are trading on abnormally large volume and ride the momentum. I have done thousands of backtests and simulations to try and determine the best type of exit, but I have never found anything that beats a simple 1:1 trailing stop after I've been in a trade for over 1 hour. I still have a "take profit" limit order at 8X my stop size, but as you might guess, that rarely gets hit. It got hit a hell of a lot more in 2008 than it has in the past year.

 

As far as money management is concerned, my position sizes are based on my stop size and I always try and size my position at .25% of my equity (a little over $500 per trade at this point). Now, on days where there are lots of stocks moving, my software will scale that size down until I run out of buying power. Basically, I try and max out my buying power every day, but I also don't want to miss trades. This balance took a lot of work and I came up with a rather complicated algorithm that simply ratchets my risk size downward as my buying power decreases. But I only ratchet down after I get to certain points.

 

Another thing that I do is I have a "slippage estimation" algorithm that attempts to estimate slippage for a given position size (before entry) and then down-sizes my initial position until my total slippage cost doesn't exceed 5% of my risk size. So (often times) on lower ave vol stocks, my max risk is considerably less than .25% of account equity.

 

If you want to talk more, please feel free to PM anytime you'd like.

 

Jason

 

 

sappjason,

 

Without sharing more than you're comfortable sharing, what is the basis behind your program trading setups, exits, money management, etc?

 

It would be nice to have a program trade for me. Then I could yell at the computer program instead of myself on loss days.

[daedalus 10]

^^ Holy wow. I'm friggin' impressed. Thanks for sharing sapp!

[Dinerotrader 10]

SIM

-$750

 

Tomorrow's another day. Silver slaughtered me. Got stopped out of its rally by one tick. Natural gas saved the day again but it took staying in one trade for 2 hours. It seems like everything was moving in tandem today except GNG. Almost called it a day when I was up $300 but I didn't.

 

[sappjason 10]

Wow. Thanks....... I appreciate it.....

 

Jason

 

^^ Holy wow. I'm friggin' impressed. Thanks for sharing sapp!

[sappjason 10]

Kind-of a bothersome day.... I made money (+$602), but my account was up over $1400 at one point. After doing this for almost 2 years, I really hesitate messing with anything during the day (in a discretionary manner). Many times, I wish I would, but I just can't bring myself to do so. I just let the math play out and over the long run, I strongly believe that this brings in more profit for me.

 

Jason