Judge me

Plan is making constant returns for 3 month on this demo account and then switch to real account. In case of failures on demo, start overs under the same conditions will take place up until satisfactory results.

The aim of this thread is getting feedback from fellow traders, learn my mistakes and improve my trading.

Trades are mainly swing trades off of daily charts.

Wish me luck.

Unfortunately the first attempt failed. (23 Jan - 28 Feb.)
I did reset the account starting date and then refunded the same amount as previous one.
Starting from now, I will trade 3 months. (28 Feb - May 28.)
If I get a reasonable returns I'll go live under the same conditions.

Not really judging.
But have just 2 questions.

1. Why to risk so much to lose 40% in a single day?

2. What is the point to lock up 'demo' equity?

Thanks for your participation;

1. Unfortunately you are correct. I shouldn't be doing such trades. I was hopeless and the account was going bust so I decided to take the risk and... failed.

2. I believe it would be more accurate to just talk about percentages since the account (the money) could be at any size between 50 bucks up to infinity. That is why I did hide the money. Hopefully I achieve reasonable return and set up a real account, and there the account's money will be hidden as well. I don't think the money and trade sizes in terms of lots would be helpful to the purpose of this thread.

2. attempt update;
2 months out, the account had a lot of up and down but at least overall is green, up and running. 1 month more to go.

It is kind of a 3rd attempt now.
So far so good, not that I am satisfied with my performance and clearly it would not be comfortable to trade with large accounts since it is kind of a roller coaster.
Anyways, I will prepare myself to fund an account and start trading with real money on the line. I will follow same strategy and same mindset, rest is up to the market to judge me.
I will setup a real account's trade explorer as soon as I start trading with it.
I am not giving up on demo at the moment. I will keep trading it till the time I switch to real
cheers!

4th attempt on now.
I have made some analysis, the losses are mostly from frequent trades in ranging markets. Beside this, adding too many positions in the direction of overall trades made huge losses for me. Everything else, specially wining trades were fine, I wasn't sure how many of winning trades were result of luck!. Now that I have analysed them I am sure that I have a point.
The only things that I should stop doing is, not opening too many positions close to each other, it is basically increasing the size but somehow my brain thinks it is okay since there are a lot of small positions close to each other. Even though the trades are in correct direction, it causes huge drawdowns as well as huge losses. This was for the ranging market. The next thing that I need to take care of is almost as same as previous one, which is not trying too hard. Selling tops and bottoms are fine and there are nice trades which I had done in my winning trades, but forcing it with multiple tries would cause huge losses as well.
I will give it a go with these in mind.
I'll see how it goes, wish me luck!

Hello Slippage,

It seems you got the partial hang of it and congratulations for that! Tough never ending road it feels like some times I know

But, if I may, some free advice from a stranger, split your account balances in pips, 500-1000 or more pips, depending and your trading style, from here you will always know that if you have 5 orders opened for ex. than you have 1000 pips / 5 orders, so at this moment you have only 200 pips max DD left. It simplifies very very much and you have control over it. After that, hedge them early if necessary, do not wait for the market to move hundreds of pips, if you see that your setup did not play out simply hedge them and trade the next day for ex. And space your orders a bit, search for the relevant levels given the market context.

Good luck in your journey !

Nice! A solid effort for sure! What I'd work on is to try and minimise your loss percentage per trade? As they outweigh the percentage of a lot of your winning trades. Yours is between 2-7% losses and 0.5 - 11% on wins.

Agreed. Thanks for the input.
Well my balance is too small and the smallest trade that could be open is 0.01 lots; therefore, the loss/win percentages are huge.
I need to open an account with larger deposit and keep the position sizing of 0.01 going. Well, that's the lesson to learn.

4th attempt update!

It looks like a failure again. I'll try to recover.
My lesson from this failure was that I didn't take a break while the market was choppy and forced so many positions that might actually work.
So, it is important to take a break when things not working.

Dear all,

It has been 9 month where I've been trading in demo testing my strategy and training. I've decided to go live despite the rule of "Going at least 3 month and ending up with positive profit balance". Well sometimes you have to run before you start walking and I have no idea if this makes any sense at all.
I want to go live because; my strategy's outcome is kind of predictable, which means the more risk I take the faster growth or drawdown happens while the drawdowns' (because of the high leverage) make the account go bust, and I don't want to lose faith in the process trading demo, not focusing, not tracking the account etc.

As previously mentioned, my mistakes mainly was:
Large position sizing (Also mentioned by the contributors of this thread)
Frequent trials of same trading setups/ideas and positions despite repeating losses

To eliminate these problems I've capped my leverage from 500 to 30. It is unbelievable how much limiting is this.
I believe there is not much to say and let the work show itself within 3 months.
I am planning to quit and take down the TE after 6 months if I reach positive and satisfying results.
Cheers you all!

Mid-Challenge update,

(Things always turn upside down after I open my mouth, well here we go again.)

It has been 46 days, which is mid-way to the pre-defined block of 3 months.
The cut down of the leverage to 30 is so much annoying as it is helpful. It literally stops me from taking too much risk, you would know the sound that MT4 makes when there is no margin left to open a new position.

I am grateful that I took the risk and switched to real account. Even if this one goes bust, which I definitely hope not! at least I saw that I can have progress in the market. Plus this real gains really cheer me up and make me hopeful for the future.

I have been through some numbers and thoughts. Writing it down really helps me to understand, look over and conclude my thoughts, also I'm journaling so...

I am thinking to gradually increase my capital. This will be done in portions as well. The one of the many powerful things that market taught me is to increase the risk gradually. I am still not sure about this since it will change many dynamics in my current trading situation. For example, currently I am able to open very few orders therefore watching and managing them is so much easier than let's say double the same amount of orders. So, the order management is going to get tougher. Also, there is going to be room to open more trades at the same time in different pairs, this also may lead to more trading errors (The more number of orders, the more number of winners and losers). Currently due to leverage and capital limitations I can open very few trades which forces me to open only the best of the best trade opportunities (To solve this problem, I can increase my lot size accordingly. This will reduce the number of orders and I would be able to manage to trade same number of orders that I used to trade. However, this will again, limit me from participating in the opportunities that I see). Beside all of these, I am still in mid-way to my predefined time block, so it kinda makes me feel bad, "not sticking to the rules". However, I did jump in the real account without seeing any reasonable results in my demo trials.

Anyways, according to the statistics by the TE here in FF and on myfxbook, the results are kind of satisfying at the moment. I know as traders we just can not stand against these calculations, but I look at the salty ones as well;

According to TE, annualized Return estimated to be 90%, which is remarkable, meaning that year-to-year I am able to double my account, roughly.
On my equity though, the estimated annual return is nearly 500%, which is not realistic, but there is potential and it worth to note!
On the other hand, risk of ruining 10% of my capital is 52% which is quite high and it would take only 5 consecutive losses to lose 10%.
Risk of ruining my capital by 50% is 1.45% (23 consecutive losing trades), which is not that bad. This supports my second thoughts over rising my capital.
And risking of ruining the whole account, meaning, losing the whole capital is smaller than 0.01% (46 consecutive losing trades).
As per trade analysis, I have very few trades so there is not much to see. Typically I have very few trades closing in huge profits, I have few profitable trades with reasonable profits, I have (mostly by number) small-profited trades while the losses are less in numbers but huge on sizes. In short, my number of winners are higher than losers while the average of both are kinda close to each other. What I would want is; 1. Increase my winrate. 2. Increase my average size of winners. 3. Decrease average size of losers.

I am not certainly sure what to do. Well in the market, when I am not sure about a certain trade depending on the situation I have two options, taking it or not. Currently, the account age is very short and the statistics are not reliable; on the other hand, I have been training and trading for a long period of time and I kinda know what I am doing, besides, at some point the balance should increase as well as profits and losses. If I hadn't taken the risk 46 days ago by moving forward and starting to trade the real account I would never came to this point. I'll let these thoughts sink for a while and make the final decision.

Cheers you all and future me

Thank you for sharing this , I am new to trading and I didn't start yet trading in a live environment, however I will take into consideration what you've mentioned .

End of the period challenge update; (September-November)
Well, here we go again.

Performance wise; most important fact is that I am up 24.2% at the end of 3 months on Balance and 19.6% up on equity.


I've made 1 deposit one and half way through the challenge, and one deposit at the end of the period.

If I dive in more details:

While Profit factor, Sharp ratio and Sortino ratio are not looking interesting, Time Return (which mutes the deposits indicates 280.1% return. And Annualized return expected to be 1,175.2% which is very promising.
Largest drawdown in equity (from peak of the equity) recorded -23.9%. Since I am trading swings and my average trade duration is 4 days this is normal I guess because max return run-up recorded 70.4%.

Winrate: 55.8%, well this could and should be improved. This was higher but due to increase in balance by deposits and profits more trades have been opened and this led to lower Winrate.

Avg wins: 2.1%, Very few large % trades + Some stupid trades + Some BE trades
Avg Loss: -1.8%, since I have solid hard stops this can not be changed. I need to increase my winrate = I need to be picky about each trade

The more clean trades the better these numbers would be, very close percentages and only 55.8% winrate is not very satisfactory.


Risk of ruin:
Risk of ruining 10% of my account is 35% with only 7 consecutive losses.
Risk of ruining 50% of my account is 0.1% with 37 consecutive losses.
Risk of ruining 100% of my account is less than 0.01% with 73 consecutive losses.

I wanted to put screenshots and everything since these statistics change day by day and I wanted to document them in case if I wanted to come back and take a look in the future. Plus I'm actually journalling so...

I made 14.87% during September,
27.28% during October,
-0.33% during November (*Not closed yet)

The main reason behind this poor performance in November, where I am actually down -14.6% on equity (from the equity peaks), is that I couldn't read the market properly specially during election I took many trades where most of them was in the wrong direction and after that the market was slow or sideways or I was in the wrong direction most of the times.
The reason behind my last deposit, where I was not sure about, was the overall stable gains over the past two months and I knew that the loosing periods are inevitable so...


I would like to compare my performance with some of the instruments out there where If I had just invested the money in what would have been the outcomes from those investments instead of trading;
I will just consider my equity performance in past three months: +19.8% at the moment,

And in the past three months:
SP500 = +3.42%
DAX = +2%
225 = 14.07%
TSLA = 14.5%
AAPL = -12.5%
ETHUSD = 31.17%
BTCUSD = 60.7%


To sum up; considering that hopefully my trading habits and entries will eventually improve, 19% increase in equity isn't that bad. Also potential compounding of these earnings hopefully will be satisfactory for me in real world conditions where I would be able to actually pay my bills.


I am very sleepy while posting this so some of the analysis and sentences might not make any sense, I am going to be very busy in the next upcoming weeks so I just wanted to get it out of the way and post this to my future self.

Anyways, wish me luck.