In the book he talks about all trades being 1 standard lot (100,000), and then the $2000 limit can come into play, esp with the Conqueror II.
I havn’t been applying Slingshot, but after my account has taken a bit of a battering the last 2 weeks (mainly from some accidentally oversized CFDs) I will need to re-read that part of the book
That’s the thing, standard lot means that 200pips is $2000 - he was saying that was the max, but 2x ATR is almost always more. Probably misread, but either way - very nice systems in the book, and your results have me drooling 
I’m curious though, considering the amount of success you’ve had so far on his systems - are you still using the ADX filter before entry as confirmation? Or simply setting pending entry orders above/below the channels - set and forget so to speak?
I use the ADX filter, with a touch of discretion.
Due to the time it can take at a trend reversal to drop and start rising again, I will sometimes enter trades that have a falling ADX, so long as I can see it is shedding ‘ADX-ness’ from the previous trend, and should soon turn around to go with this one.
Hey Cyco,
Couple more questions sprung to mind. You were mentioning about Conqueror II. Does Courtney have a newer book with an update on his strategies?
Also you were mentioning about trading on new york close charts too. Do you open separate positions for these if you already have a GMT position open with the same strategy on the same pair? I’m guessing not in this case.
The last day I saw a huge hit to my equity so now I’m back to break even. [Update after several EUR news events - now I’m down 7% on capital!]
Conq II is very briefly mentioned in the book, its stop is 12x ATR, rather than 2x, so requires quite a large account to be able to afford any positions…
My account have been bouncing between about +/-4% over the last week.
I trade just after the NY close, but the candle isn’t fully closed. I have found the few hours there rarely make a difference, but until I’m a full time trader I have to fit my trading time around the day job, so I trade after NY close…
Now I remember the part about the 12x ATR. Going to have to reread again.
I’m still trading the GMT close candles which close at 8am but I’m finding it hard to get enough time to review my trades in the morning since my work start time varies.
My work start time has moved back an hour to 7am, generally, as there are some days I’m starting at 5. That makes it hard to get the trading in before work
Lots of wiped out positions for me - currently 13.5% drawdown - but after reviewing I can see my mistakes and sometimes ignorance.
I’ve started incorporating a weekly price vs stochastics divergence table (if a divergence exists) for each pair into my entry/maintenance of positions. After looking at a bunch of trades I can see that this has some significance both for entry and exit.
Wonder how this week’s NFP announcement will go.
Cyco, it’s been a year since you started trading this way, hasn’t it?
What a perfect opportunity to post your results, if you don’t mind sharing again.
Thank you, much appreciated as always.
I agree - I’d very much like to see the results too - and I’m sure I speak for everyone when I say great job sharing everything over the last year, I know it’s helped me out quite a bit and pointed me in a good direction for trades!
Hi guys,
I’ve been rather busy of late - 60-70 hours/week at work, plus other commitments.
I’ll get back to this when I get a chance.
I will say though that I had a few oversized traded that negatively affected my account equity, and I’ll try and filter those when I’m posting the results, and will point out where they are
Thank you for an amazing thread, i just need to ask a question.
If you find an entry and short the EUR/USD for example, do you open another sell order the day after? The same time every night / early morning? Or finding retracements? Or do you stick to 1 position per currency pair?
Thanks!
Hi MayZerG,
I don’t mean to speak for Cyco but I am very familiar with all his trading strategies, so I’d gladly give you my answer.
You enter one position per strategy, so if you first get a trend analysis trade, then conqueror and the channel breakout, you will have 3 trades and that’s the max per currency pair.
If you are already in a channel breakout and get another signal a couple of days later, you will not add to your positions but just let the original one grow.
As far as fibs and retracements are concerned, from my own experience I can assure you that it’s best to just follow the strategy rules. If you for example project a target and exit your positions, odds are that the previous trend strongly continues and you miss out big time because you exited too soon. On the other hand, adding at retracements can definitely add to your profits but you are safest by just following the original rules of the strategies.
Have a great day!
Thank you for the reply but I’m not too interested in the 3 systems that he is currently using, i use my own trading strategy with MAs, PSAR, ADX and Fibs :).
I used to be a scalper, anywhere from the M5 to the M15, or keep small day positions on the H1 timeframe. However i am new to swing trading, keeping positions for days/weeks/months. So i was keen to learn if Cyco (or anyone else i guess) adds to the position every few days if the trend remains intact at good entry points. Or just not risk it and keep the single trade per pair?
I guess i can stick with 2 or maybe 3 if i was to try the strategies mentioned?
Anyone else copping an equity flogging the last few week or so? I’ve closed out all my positions as i keep getting hammered, taking Smith’s advice and having a week off. Week before last my mistake was over trading and entering before ADX was rising, start of this week was good, but ended bad, can’t see the any errors. Anyone else having issues or just me?
I have too Henry. My equity’s been destroyed over a matter of 2-3 weeks (around -20%). I’m going to take a break from it for a while too.
Likewise, when i first started had two very good weeks, and the last 2 - 3 weeks have been a shocker, so i’m down 10% overall, but probably 20% in the last 2 - 3 weeks.
Can you see any errors in your trading that would explain such losses? or do you think it’s the market conditions? If both of us have had similar losses, unless we are both screwing up the exact same thing, i’m leaning towards the market conditions.
I’m on night shift next week, so i’ll be sleeping at GMT so i’ll take that week off and reaccess the following week, might even start fresh in Dec.
I wonder how Cyco’s gone over the same time period?
MayZerG: I will take multiple entries as the systems develop them - so long as they are not right on top of each other. e.g. I have 4 Turtle entries, a 55 day channel and Conqueror entry on the US500 CFD at the moment.
souljie and djhenry: I have had a draw down over the last months, and I am blaming the market conditions. I had initially taken Smith’s time off with a draw down recommendation to be for those who could not continue to trade well, but I am now thinking it may be part of the whole strategy and am starting to implement it.
I think it will help you get out when the market stops working for you. I am thinking of tweeking it slightly as I trade far more currencies than he does, and would find it incredibly easy to get tripped out of the market all the time
Yeah, I was up initially over a month ago as well.
I did make a few judgement errors but they were a minority after I reflected the results in my journal. I noticed some single days especially on yen pairs would swing a large number of pips the opposite way. Even if they didn’t hit my stop I would have to forcefully close them out with a relatively substantial (e.g. 0.8% out of 1.0%) loss the next day according to the strategy.
Although my risk is approximately 1% each trade I always had several (8-25) open positions at a time which gradually dwindled the account down. One thing I didn’t pay much attention to was news events, as I thought most of these would be mostly absorbed in a single day of trade.
Currently I’m reading “Trading in the Zone” by Mark Douglas which I think is a really valuable book for traders. One of his primary messages he emphasises is not blaming the market, and taking full responsibility for your actions and results. I was running through different scenarios of the reasons of our results. It may just be our sample trading time is just not enough to give a good picture of the overall viability of Smith’s strategies. It may be that we are missing something crucial or maybe just something minor. Other possibilities are that either the strategies aren’t viable in the current market or that we are applying these to currency pairs that do not fit well with the strategies.
Also it may be that we increased our risk inadvertently from highly correlated and taking opposite positions in highly negatively correlated pairs.
Cyco could probably give a better insight. Looking at one of his histograms of daily % balance change there is quite a degree of variation but that is over quite a large sample size.
*Edit: Cyco posted as I was writing lol. Yep I think a break may be a good idea. Market conditions may not quite be right for the strategies at the moment.
Smith recommends backtesting the strategies for 5 years from memory on basically a printed chart of the pairs, might be a job for night shift this week, doing that on every pair i trade, I might be able to rule out some pairs that arent so good, and captialise on the winners. Pareto’s theory. I was going to write a program in access a DB to replace my excel sheet for trading but the backtesting is probably more worthwhile for now.