Too many traders clutter their charts with a million indicators and just end up confusing themselves.
That said, the setup is just one piece. I used to take every engulfing candle off support/resistance, but over time I realized filtering them with things like liquidity grabs, session timing, or even just a quick HTF trend check made a huge difference in win rate.
The “quick HTF trend check” part you can even often do on the same chart you trade from, by “multiplying up appropriately” whatever indicator(s) you might use on the HTF to fit your trading chart.
“Liquidity grabs” are a little more subjective, perhaps.
I used to find, when trading engulfing candles (this is “history”, not “news”!!), that it was relatively easy to increase win-rate but very much harder to increase overall profits, by trying to filter out losers.
I follow your posts and I ask questions when I don’t understand. As you maybe notice.
I don’t understand that. If you filter out losers, why do you not increase overall profits? At least as a percentage on your turnover? 
You increase profits, as a turnover-percentage, if you successfully filter out losers preferentially, but you don’t necessarily increase profits by trying (key word!) to filter out losers, and usually fail to, for three main reasons -
The reality tends to be that people usually try to do this by “adding indicators”, and that usually doesn’t work because price movements that don’t go as the first two or three indicators suggested likely also don’t normally go as four or five indicators suggest likely (if you think about that, you’ll quickly see why!);
It’s really easy to take out several very small losers and one or two really big winners as well, producing both a measurable increase in overall win-rate and a measurable decrease in overall profit;
The way people do this is typically very subjective and not statistically significant, and without their realising it, their assessment of what’s going on is really wide open to both survivorship-bias and confirmation-bias (I know you use Google Translate to read replies to your questions, and I don’t know if I just made that harder for you, but ask again if what I said was confusing!).
Agreed.
I hope you don’t mind if I add something else which I think may assist @AnnaProbably
If you have a reasonable-looking method and you’re trying to get more out of it, trying to increase its win rate is normally a bad use of your effort. Trying to cut losers shorter and/or let winners go further is usually a far, far better thing to try.
Yeah, that makes sense. Win rate isn’t everything! Sometimes filtering out too many bad trades also means missing out on big winners, which can hurt overall profitability. It’s a balance.
I agree on the HTF check. sometimes, even just tweaking MAs or structure-based cues on the same chart saves time. But with liquidity grabs, yeah, they can be tricky. Some are obvious, like a clear stop hunt before reversal, but others feel more like guesswork. Do you have a specific way you filter them, or is it more intuition based from experience?
For confirmation, do you rely on the order flow or just the price action?
I trade the “breakfast breakout” on London open, with a few tweaks based on my test results over the past few months.
It had been doing quite well, up 2-3% in both the first weeks I tried it, but the last week is down about 0.5%
I’m going back over data and seeing if it’s something I am doing, but certain pairs seem to work better than other so I may focus on those more.
I can’t get it to work with the NY open though!
Sounds like a good approach but have you tried adjusting your stop size or the trade timing slightly for NY? Maybe that would help.
Trading in the London open markets will give you a clear picture of the market so that you will be able to adjust the Entry timings easily.
Your system was up 3% and now you feel unsettled with a mere 0.5% drawdown?
I would take a chill pill and confidently repeat that process over and over if I were you. Many traders would give an arm and a leg just to have half the results produced by your system.
I found many helpful things, including good systems, in the Nekritin and Peters book but haven’t read the other one.
I haven’t been able to trade profitably using what you’ve mentioned above, though. I did try. By backtesting a lot, but then abandoning these ideas.
I think looking for reversals is probably a bad idea, especially for inexperienced traders. It’s true that they can run a long way, when you hit one, but that’s a rarity.
So they tend to be “high-R, low-win-rate” trades.
Those may be ok and profitable on backtesting and on paper, but for most of us they’re terribly difficult to trade.
They need tiny position-sizes and wide-ish stop-losses too, and trading them still incurs long losing runs which beginners can’t really handle.
The markets have changed a lot, since Nekritin and Peters wrote their book.
As Linda Raschke points out, there are far more fake-outs than break-outs, too (the underlying reason behind the old “Turtles” system no longer works and the reason she invented her very successful Turtle Soup methods.
So my own feeling is that breakouts and reversals aren’t really suitable methods for aspiring traders, and are more likely to do harm, overall, than good.
But I definitely got some value out of the Nekritin and Peters book, and I think it’s a refreshing idea for people to understand that they can trade profitably without all the indicator stuff that forums, sales websites and Youtube are full of…
I lean primarily on price action for my confirmations. I find that clear chart structure, HTF cues, and key support/resistance levels give me the best read on market sentiment, especially when it comes to spotting those liquidity grabs. I do check order flow occasionally for an extra layer of insight, but it’s more of a secondary confirmation. For me, the clarity of price action usually outweighs the noise that can sometimes come with order flow data. How about you?
I’m with you on price action being the cleanest one, especially when I combine them with strong HTF levels. I have also found liquidity read to stand out more when I factor out volume. Do you find it more helpful in specific market conditions, or just as a general secondary filter?