Matty’s Money - Trades, Ideas and Info

Some excellent life advice:

10 bad habits holding you back from your potential:

  1. Complaining Incessantly: Complaining never got anyone anywhere worth going. The world is split between complainers and doers—the former talk while the latter act.

  2. Falling Into Productivity Traps: Hustle culture lied to you. Obsessively optimizing your time with new “productive” activities is actually counter-productive. Free time is a call option on future interesting opportunities.

  3. Saying Yes to Everything: The ability to say no is a superpower of successful people. Be deliberate about what you spend your time on—and who you spend it with.

  4. Glorifying the Wrong Things: What I used to glorify: No sleep, 100-hour workweeks, Busy schedules. What I now glorify: Sleeping 8 hours, Regular physical activity, Unstructured schedules, Working in short sprints.

  5. Taking Everyone’s Advice: You’re going to get a lot of advice from a lot of people. Most of it is well-intentioned…and also utter crap. It’s dangerous to use someone else’s map to navigate your world. Learn to filter and selectively implement—take the signal, skip the noise.

  6. Defaulting to a Jog: There are four speeds in life: Rest, Walk, Jog, Sprint. Most people default to a jog—a staple of 9-5 work culture. But you’ll go much faster and further by defaulting to either rest/walk or sprint. Rest, walk, sprint, repeat. There is no jog.

  7. Wanting to Be Right: Finding the truth is much more important than being right. The most successful people legitimately enjoy being wrong. Instead of arguing your position—ask great questions. Learn to embrace new information as “software updates" that improve upon the old.

  8. Viewing the World as Zero Sum: Zero sum thinkers are the worst. Want to get ahead in life? Start genuinely rooting for others to succeed. When one of us wins, we all win—winning spreads. If you adopt that mentality, you’ll become a magnet for the highest quality people.

  9. Focusing on Money: Money is a byproduct of the value you create. Create value, receive value. If you focus on creating immense value for the people you work with, you’ll find a way to make money. Create value—then create leverage to scale the value you can create.

  10. Multitasking: Multitasking is fake productivity. You think you’re crushing it but you’re just running around churning out a bunch of C+ work. Instead, build your day around focused sprints. 60 minutes works well. Compartmentalize and focus on the one key task at hand.

3 Likes

Thinking about investing in Gold? Maybe try pizza instead!

1 Like

I’m playing around with a pullback strategy based on SW rankings, which looks promising so far.

I currently do my own SW analysis based on the same formulas Dennis uses in his SW thread. But I take it a step further and measure the % of change each day for each pair. This only takes a few secs extra to plug in.

Here’s last week:
image

What I am testing right now is trading the pullback on the strongest and weakest pair for each day. This would be a day trading strategy.

I have completed my analysis for June and have noticed something interesting. There is always a pullback, and it seems to occur within the first few hours of the New York session. This is only a 2 week sample, so take it with a grind of pepper.

image

On the left is all the SW stats.
On the right are 3 columns;

  • ‘Daily SW’ (Matches the pair with the highest and lowest % of change for that day)
  • ‘Retracement’ (Direction of trade entry)
  • ‘Possible Pips’ (The maximum amount of pips the retracement trade reached)

How do you trade this?
Looking at the number of possible pips reached, most got over 30. So, one way would be to set a 50 pip SL and a 30 pip TP. That would have given you 120 pips last week (TP @ 30 pips x 9 = 270. SL @ -50 x 3 = -150).

A 30 pip TP would guarantee you a win most days, where a 50 pip SL would give you some breathing room while price decides which direction it’s going, along with the wider spread for that first hour.

2 Likes

Since focusing mostly on my long term, swing trading strategy, I’ve had more time on my hands. So, I’ve really taken a dive into stocks.

It was quite daunting at first, trying to figure out the right approach. But, the more I looked into it I’ve discovered it really is a lot like trading Forex in many ways.The big difference is there’s literally thousands of stocks to choose from.

While researching which stocks would be best, I found several sites recommending screeners. Screeners are basically just programs that sort stocks depending on the criteria you enter.

Then I found out TradingView has an excellent built in screener. I use TV anyways, so I went to work…

With no criteria chosen, it pulled up 11,255 different stocks:

So I researched different trading strategies such as pre-market gaps, penny stocks, etc. Here’s the list of different strategies I’m currently playing with:

image

So far, I’m liking the gap and Swing trading strategies; the gap strategy is shorter term.

After setting up my swing trading criteria, the list dropped to 310 stocks, which is more manageable:

Last = Price
Ave Volume (60) is set at minimum 1 million, to filter out lower volume or low volatility stocks.
ATR 14 set to above 2.
ADR 14 (Average Day Range) set to above 2

These settings and filters can be tweaked a thousand different ways and new columns can be added for further sorting, but keeping it simple is sometimes better.

I still have some work to do, but I don’t mind putting in the time to do it. And maybe I’m overthinking it, maybe all I really need is a list of a couple dozen stocks combined with my TA analysis, using weekly charts, just like with Forex. We’ll see.

Everyone have a great weekend, and to all you Americans…Happy 4TH!!

3 Likes

This site has a lot of useful info: https://www.traderslog.com/

The daily SW pullback strategy I posted about back in June here has been on my mind. Why? because the 2 week sample test I did showed very promising results.

The reason I did not continue with it is because the numbers need to be pulled at the close of the last candle, which is 5pm EST (NY close). I work during the day, so it’s not feasible to manually enter everything required to find the pair I need to trade. Anyone currently doing this already knows it takes time, you have to go through each JPY pair, fill in the close price and then the 4hr 200MA price just to get the percentage (distance between price and 200MA).

BUT, I have found an indicator that calculates this for me, so all I have to do is enter the percentage into my spreadsheet, which I can do quickly using the live price before 5pm instead of waiting for the candle to close. That way I can place the trade around 5 and not have to worry about missing out on some pips while driving 30 mins home. Since my TP would be 30 pips, every one counts.

Here is a chart of the pair I would have been trading today, CADJPY:

The green arrow shows the last candle of the day, and at the bottom the indicator gives me the distance between price and the 200MA (as a percentage) = 1.41%, which is up 0.58% from yesterday (July 12th).

Here’s the spreadsheet I use to determine the 2 currencies that are the furthest distance apart. Yesterday was July 13th:
image

CAD was up 0.58% from yesterday and JPY is always 0%, so the difference between the 2 currencies was 0.58%. The higher this number the better chance of a retracement. In this case CADJPY long took top spot, which means I would have gone short at 5pm with a TP of 30 pips and a SL of 40-50 pips (to leave room for widened spread).

Coincidentally, CADJPY also took top spot the day before (Jul. 12), going in the opposite direction.

This trade would have been stopped out because price continued higher before retracing. But for the most part price usually retraces at least 30 pips before continuing higher. I could also look at opening a hedge position instead of using a SL, that would have kept me in this trade.

I am definitely going to keep looking at this strategy to see if I can implement it on a daily basis.

My pair for today is NZDCAD short. TP 30 pips, SL 45 pips.

image

It took all day, but I managed to squeeze about 16 pips out of this trade.

Chicken dinner!

I manually closed it at 4:30, mainly because it was Friday and the spread would have taken me out anyways.

I’m happy with that outcome. Looking forward to continuing with this Next week.

Today I will be short EURUSD based on the above retracement strategy.
TP 30 pips, SL 45 pips.

image

Well, I got busy at work and didn’t make my Monday entry, so I’m scrapping this, it just doesn’t suit my schedule.

Taken from another site. Great advice so I wanted to put it here.

“All signs point towards a looming recession and bear market.

That means it’s about to rain gold.

Of course, there will be economic pain and suffering. That’s beyond our control.

As an investor, the one thing you can control is your reaction to falling asset prices. What should you do?

Take a lesson from the world’s best investors, who use economic downturns to their advantage.

Guys like Warren Buffett, the world’s greatest wealth compounder, who once said the following about recessions…

“Every decade or so, dark clouds will fill the economic skies, and they will briefly rain gold.”

The world’s best businesses are about to go on sale.

Are you prepared to capitalize?”

1 Like

I made an EA that traded almost exactly what you’re saying. Entry time and TP may have been different, but it wasn’t profitable on a long term backrest. I’ll see if I’ve still got it later and put your numbers in

1 Like

Here’s a back test of that strategy since 2020 across all 28 majors. It performs better at London open than America close, but both lose overall. I optimised things over the last 6 months, but extending the test didn’t work, so not sure it’s a winner.

I’m sure there’s got to be some way to automate that SW analysis into a winning strategy, but I haven’t found it.

1 Like

@chesterjohn what parameters did you use, the same formula I used to find the pairs the furthest % apart from the previous day?

I used (price - 200sma)÷ 200sma for the SW analysis.
Then took the symbols with the biggest change over 24 hours. Eg if USD up 0.5 and CHF down 0.1 which are the biggest, then buy USDCHF.

I think that’s what you were saying, or was it to trade the reversal?

I used 30 50 sl and tp to test what you said.

I can get similar things to work really well over a given time period, but nothing that works when extrapolated

This. I’m trading the pullback of your example. Like an elastic band.

It’s a weird thing about backtesting. You’d think since it lost £2k that it’d be profitable the other way around, but that loses even more. Always the problem with SL bigger than TP.

Changing the time to London open does the same thing, but both are about £750. What’s confusing me the most is that if I set TP = SL = 30, it only has 40% success whether you buy the trend or reversal. That seems wrong to me. Surely a 2 pip spread isn’t that big a factor…

1 Like

Either way, doesn’t sound like it’s really worth pursuing. Maybe I went wrong somewhere in my manual 2 week test.

Anyways, thanks for doing that. On to the next holy grail! Lol.

I doubt you went wrong, I notice a decent amount of the time The market reverses at the open of a new session. The last few weeks the Asian has definitely been doing that, but looks like it’s not often enough.

If I get my VPS working, I’ll try it anyway. I’m confused about the SL = TP test. It might be the data that’s not great…

Always happy to try something new or different to what I’ve done. Maybe one day we’ll find that holy grail…

1 Like

Gold has not closed below $1685 since June 2020 on the weekly chart, which is why I decided to buy. I’m waiting to see what price does at R of the recent downtrend, because this is currently in a strong downtrend, which I don’t typically like to trade against. Reversing again at that level could mean another big sell-off: