How long do you give a strategy/system before switching to something else?

Oh yeah for sure. I feel like algos and systems backed with tons of data are behind smaller timeframe movements and flash crashes which is why trading 1D and 1W timeframes is more reasonable at least in my mind. Perhaps intuition can work in longer time frames. :rofl: Although sometimes I feel like what really is intuition vs. data centers worth of history.

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So do you trade a system at all, in the practical sense of the word?

No, just what ever I see on the chart at the time. I have rules for certain situations, but pretty flexible. For example, if I see a higher low major trend reversal with confirmation, I’ll just take it. I have a maximum risk, but profit will depend on tech levels. Make sense?

Yea, absolutely. I just need more time on the charts, and on demo. I’m all over the place at the moment, looking for perfection…

Hate to say it, but there is no perfection when trading. In fact, it’s just one big ugly gray area! You have between a 40-60% chance of making money on any given trade. I know that doesn’t sound very reassuring, but stay positive. Your edge is always going to be excellent trade management.

More food for thought.

if you understand the proper use of renowned tools & indicators to analyse the chart, you wouldnt have to spend time testing.
just 3 months of practice is enough to get you started because those are not well known for nothing.

Well, with my newbie experience i can say price action analysis seems to set better with any pair and any timeframe. With it you’ll can get trend, reversal and range easier just looking the chart, despite needing time as much as practice in front of the charts. My trading ability just better then i went to study price action or naked trade, anyway, this is art! financial art to feel the candles

In my personal experience, while indicators can help to visualise info, I would never base my trading decision on indicators alone. There are so many different cases and ‘grey areas’ that you really need to think much more contextual and weigh in different scenarios of what can happen. I’m fully pro backtesting your strategy with historical charts, but doing it completely manually so you really learn to interpret the markets. If you have gathered a fair amount of paper trades on your historical charts and see that it is profitable, (eg on average have a 2:1 profit vs risk ratio, win 50% of the times, and have this as an average for 50-100 paper trades you did) you can start applying your strategy live. Document as much as you can from your findings and try to make your backtesting system as close to how it would look like for you when going live. Eg if chasing 4H candles and you can only trade in the evening for practical reasons, don’t take any paper trades at other time points even when you see there’s a good opportunity, because you wouldn’t be able to chase it live anyhow. And remember that every time you make a slight adaption to ypur strategy, eg include another indicator in your decision making, you should start your paper trading all over again because you will take trades you didnt before and vice versa. Good luck!

Hi,

If you know wy you take a trade at a given point of time your a machanical trader. A mecanical trading dont mean use only one strategy. Mechanical trading is a matter of plan of trading.

Allways keep thing simple. So your plan of trading should be backtested before start trading to keep your edge.

Yup, slowly realizing this. I just need to get more trades under my belt, watch the market. I appreciate the advice.

What tools are you using?

More art than science maybe? What do you think? Would explain what some see and others don’t.

Yea, my document game could be a lot better. What are you documenting other than the obvious trade details (entry, exit, TP, SL)?

Hey @dudebro, these are the kinds of questions that getting answers to becomes difficult to answer. So sorry this might be a bit too long for comfort :neutral_face:

I think the answer shouldn’t be how long you have tried the system, but by how much it has deviated from the norm when you developed it in the first instance. There are strategies that perform just at breakeven for a large part of the trading year but require just a few home runs to generate the profit target for the same year. The rest of the time the strategy might just be trading to PROTECT CAPITAL. Do you discard such systems because it’s done nothing but break even for six months?

Someone who just happens to COPY that PROFITABLE system would have gotten frustrated and binned it after three months, probably because he’s used to and expects his trading balance increasing every week

What I’m driving at is that the answers you will get from others will be based on THEIR OWN PERSPECTIVE, THEIR OWN experience and history with their own systems and not yours. So you are liable to fall into the bias of using other peoples timelines (or any other parameters for that matter) to judge your own system.

An example in case is @steveepperson’s personal opinion that mechanical trading is for gamblers. Is that true?

For him, yes but not necessarily for everyone. Staying away from Mechanical trading systems and focusing on pure price action keeps him profitable. However it just might be the other way around for you. Traders who have weaker Psychological strength to make real time market decisions in trading will fare better with mechanical systems as that’s basically part of what it deals with.

@happypip and @RoboPip have mechanical systems which have run profitably for multiple years on this platform. I don’t know if they would agree that their systems are a form of gambling.

So in a nutshell steve, find your trading system (mechanical or otherwise) and give it parameters outside of which you will have to make changes or say goodbye to it and move on.

  1. Year on Year Profitability
  2. Maximum Drawdown
  3. Win ratio
  4. Expectancy

These are just examples but a bit more digging within the BP community will give you more answers than you might expect.

Remember no system wins everytime (or every market session, day, month, quarter or even year). But as long as it makes money in the long run, it’s a keeper for me.

Hopefully you’ll eventually find something that works for you real soon buddy and come tell us about it all :slightly_smiling_face:

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Include screenshots that give you context you could revise later, exhaustion levels, write down your rationale before entering the trade + certainties and uncertainties and reflect how these played out afterwards, what you should have given more/less weight…

candlestick pattern
chart pattern
pivot point / support & resistance
fibonacci retracement
boilinger band
zigzag
stochastic

of coz you dont need that many for a starter.

1 x price action - candlestick pattern
1 x price level - pivot point
1 x strength indicator - stochastic

these 3 are enough to begin with but you gotta understand the proper use of each individual tool first.

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If your trading strategy is not profitable, I think that you should first understand why it is not making profits? The root cause will tell you a lot about your strategy but sometimes also about your skills and method used. So, the problem might not be in strategy but in trader

What a trader will require from a trading strategy may not same like other trader. Usually I give each trading strategy at least a period of 3/4 months to realize whether I am able to take benefits from the strategy as per my expectations. If a strategy is not giving me earnings as my my expectation, then I try to revise it.

Main thing is that you never give up belieeving in yourself and your abilities. After all its all your accomplishments to havevfinished elementary school. Trading can be hard but with consistent work you can do it. I also heard that it helps to eat tuna in the morning abd do basic excersice. Also some people say to avoid co2 as apperently it harms your decition making process. I also think it is helfull to eat a nutrition rich and carb low diet. Glutenfree is believed to enhanche a traders abilities. Also always keep yourself hydrated drink a lot of liquids. But you should never drink and trade, nono. And you should not drink hardcore liquits like liquid oxygen or super glue. But most important is that someone continues online learning from forums and blogs from other people. Believe in other people then it will come. Build it and he will come. Very important also is to always think positive and reduce critical thinking to a minimum.

Yes i think thats the way to go.

If you build it they will come.

Yea, this is it right there. Everything always comes back to the individual trader. “What works for me?” That’s what I need to keep asking myself. And the answer to that question will change with the amount of experience I gain trading and trying new things (and trying old things for that matter).

That’s the goal!

Yea, man, good stuff.

Thanks for adding this. I think I just need to stop being lazy and be consistent in recording things like this. Not just entry and exits, not just the easy stuff, but some of this too.

This is definitely a big part of if. With more experience, hopefully the trader part gets better :slight_smile:

How many strategies have you been using at any one time? Just one or more than one. I think with multiple strategies, you open yourself up to more trade opportunities, but then there’s also the worry of over trading, no?

Haha, nice one. I’ll start… building. :joy:

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Indicators can gives several way to take the chart and the way to analyze the chart with price action also can gives other, a trend will can be over for one but for another not.

How long do you usually trade a strategy before moving on?

nowadays i’m keeping my setup, how i have started less then 3 months, likely the misses are mine