Got this pm (slightly edited) will answer here:
I went through my journal for last month and tallied up the results for only HL / LH trades. I came out with 31 trades, 17 winners, 10 losers and 4 BE. I don't include the break-even ones in the numbers, so it came out to a 63% wins. My reward/risk came out to a solid 1.88:1. As I'm sure you can tell, that gave me a great outcome for the month.
So my question is this - how does your own trading typically break down? I'm interested in trying to reduce possible drawdown (was minimal this month, luckily) so I might look to make a few adjustments. Given your stated 70%+ hit rate and a reward/risk that must be 1:1 or more, you probably have a very smooth equity curve. I'm willing to trade a slightly lower reward/risk for the higher win % if it would help smooth out drawdown. So the reason I'm asking this is to figure out what you might be doing differently and to see if I can use that information to achieve that goal.
The major thing I've noticed is that you seem to take considerably more BE trades than I do. I know that this month has been a greater percentage of those than normal, but it still seems on average you take more. I'm sure this leads to your greater win %. Could you perhaps tell me, on average, around what percent of your trades are closed at BE or very close to it? As good as your methodology is, it seems difficult to achieve a win % that high without moving stops to BE quite often to protect against loss.
As I mentioned before, I know you might not want to share your average win rate per month, reward/risk, percentage of BE trades, etc but anything you can offer will help. Right now I am more than happy with a little bit of a bumpy road in my equity curve but I think the time may come soon where I start shifting from equity gains as a primary focus to capital preservation with more modest returns.
That said, I still do want to have one of those 40% months! Great stuff! Thanks again for the help, Vantage!
I also exclude the BE trades from my win loss numbers. Last month for whatever reason my trade numbers were well below half of normal months. Its not unusual (da dum da dum da dum why Tom Jones would jump into my head goodness only knows. Tom who the youngsters ask??) for me to do 3-5 trades a day and I was below 2 a day last month (something like 7 days no trades whatsoever).
My numbers are very close to yours, BE trades (edit these are higher for me), RR and win rate. 63% win with a relatively new system for you is stunning I think. The diff between that and my results is literally the odd trade here and there and I'm sure that will come with just a little experience with this method to cut some of the marginal trades. I cannot think of anything else specific to say at the moment. So I suppose its follow the rules.
The diff between last month and prev months basically seems that in a good run we could easily enter 3 times in the move. Add in the odd 1 min entry (typically reject of a key level in direction of main trend) and you get 3-5 trades a day. We also moved away from doing as many trades in FH which reduced trade numbers.
There have been a lot of questions in the last few days about how would I handle this, what would I do there. Have a look back over the last few weeks as thats often stuff I'd never think of to say until theres a specific question.
Have a look at your MM, maybe its that, trade 1 lot per $10K, 0.1 per $1K on the kind of numbers you mention that should be getting around 30%pm. 17 x 25 pips less 10 x14 pips. Thats great trading.
I went through my journal for last month and tallied up the results for only HL / LH trades. I came out with 31 trades, 17 winners, 10 losers and 4 BE. I don't include the break-even ones in the numbers, so it came out to a 63% wins. My reward/risk came out to a solid 1.88:1. As I'm sure you can tell, that gave me a great outcome for the month.
So my question is this - how does your own trading typically break down? I'm interested in trying to reduce possible drawdown (was minimal this month, luckily) so I might look to make a few adjustments. Given your stated 70%+ hit rate and a reward/risk that must be 1:1 or more, you probably have a very smooth equity curve. I'm willing to trade a slightly lower reward/risk for the higher win % if it would help smooth out drawdown. So the reason I'm asking this is to figure out what you might be doing differently and to see if I can use that information to achieve that goal.
The major thing I've noticed is that you seem to take considerably more BE trades than I do. I know that this month has been a greater percentage of those than normal, but it still seems on average you take more. I'm sure this leads to your greater win %. Could you perhaps tell me, on average, around what percent of your trades are closed at BE or very close to it? As good as your methodology is, it seems difficult to achieve a win % that high without moving stops to BE quite often to protect against loss.
As I mentioned before, I know you might not want to share your average win rate per month, reward/risk, percentage of BE trades, etc but anything you can offer will help. Right now I am more than happy with a little bit of a bumpy road in my equity curve but I think the time may come soon where I start shifting from equity gains as a primary focus to capital preservation with more modest returns.
That said, I still do want to have one of those 40% months! Great stuff! Thanks again for the help, Vantage!
I also exclude the BE trades from my win loss numbers. Last month for whatever reason my trade numbers were well below half of normal months. Its not unusual (da dum da dum da dum why Tom Jones would jump into my head goodness only knows. Tom who the youngsters ask??) for me to do 3-5 trades a day and I was below 2 a day last month (something like 7 days no trades whatsoever).
My numbers are very close to yours, BE trades (edit these are higher for me), RR and win rate. 63% win with a relatively new system for you is stunning I think. The diff between that and my results is literally the odd trade here and there and I'm sure that will come with just a little experience with this method to cut some of the marginal trades. I cannot think of anything else specific to say at the moment. So I suppose its follow the rules.
The diff between last month and prev months basically seems that in a good run we could easily enter 3 times in the move. Add in the odd 1 min entry (typically reject of a key level in direction of main trend) and you get 3-5 trades a day. We also moved away from doing as many trades in FH which reduced trade numbers.
There have been a lot of questions in the last few days about how would I handle this, what would I do there. Have a look back over the last few weeks as thats often stuff I'd never think of to say until theres a specific question.
Have a look at your MM, maybe its that, trade 1 lot per $10K, 0.1 per $1K on the kind of numbers you mention that should be getting around 30%pm. 17 x 25 pips less 10 x14 pips. Thats great trading.
