What would be a decent performance in this kind of move?

We all know our profits depends purely on what market is willing to give and our skill to bank it.

Can we have some feedback as to what would have been a decent earning % for a retail trader during the past three days eur usd move?

I understand there are many factors like the whether one is a trend rider or a swing trader or scalper and the %risk per trade etc would clearly influence the result.

However, there will be
1. Traders who kept trying to skate uphill and lost big time
2. Traders who ride the decent part of the trend and made money
3. Other who would have risked big and may not held on for long and still made some money.

Please share what would be the ideal max draw down and the percentage gain or loss during the three days.
If it is Okay with you you can also share your own performance as well.

I am hoping this could be a good case study for beginners and for not yet fully seasoned Traders.

Thanks in advance,
TradeStar

How long is a piece of string?

5cm

That's what she said!

err i'm not trading the euro at the mo coz its bullish monthly bearish weekly and bullish daily, like its been for a while now like most currencys even the chf
So i'm just trading the ft100 at the mo and hae been most of oct and looks like most of nov to at the mo.

OK, I'll play.

But first, let's assume that everybody trades the same way as I do.

In the first screenshot, we have a very strong breakout candle 'B', at the RHE of the M15 chart. Now where is price likely to pull back to?

Candle 'A' low is the Asian session low to date, supported by a pivot line. More importantly, it's also supported by yesterday's low, which happens to be a double session low, and a climax volume candle (diagonal white arrow). Better yet, there's another climax volume candle with a low within a couple of pips (the other diagonal white arrow). And there are a few other candle lows within the white box that I drew.

That's getting close to an A+ setup, IMO. The kind where you can place a 5 pip SL, and have a better than 50% chance of not getting stopped out.

If I'm still in that trade, I'm ~ 430 pips up for a 7 pip risk (allow 2 pips for the spread). If that 7 pip risk equates to 0.5% of my account, then I'm 0.5 x 430 / 7 = ~ 31% up over the 3 days. Or 62% return for 1% risk. And so on.

Plenty of chances for pyramiding on the way down, also. Although some of them would have been killed off by yesterday's retracement.

And of course a lot depends on the exit. If I'd run a trailing SL, I would have likely been stopped out by now. But if I'm playing the millipede, I'm sitting with my SL at BE, risking the possibility of losing all of that 31% gain, in the hope of gaining even more.

Did I take the trade? No. I rather fancied AUDUSD better than EURUSD, and I don't have much time for trading these days, in any case.

So as the other posters have been saying, there are too many variables. Just for starters:

1. Accuracy of your entries. If you use fixed frac, a 5 pip SL will return double the RR of a 10 pip SL, and 4x the RR of a 20 pip SL, and so on. Of course how tightly you can screw down your SL (and get away with it often enough overall to make it worthwhile) is the big IF. If you think it's the impossible dream, check out this thread.

2. How tightly you trail your stop. Depends on your exit horizon: are you a scalper who exits early (and then possibly later re-enters), or (at the other extreme) a millipede trader who's wiling to leave the position open for several months.

3. If/how/where you pyramid. Pyramiding gives the millipede (or semi-millipede, i.e. exiting after a large daily or weekly candle) trader the opportunity to leverage several high RR trades off the same price move.

4. How much of your account you risk per position. Risk 2% per trade and you'll win (or lose) twice as much as the trader who risks 1%. In fact, more than twice as much if you use fixed frac compounding.

And all of that is assuming that you trade in the fashion that I described.

Like Cindy said, how long is a piece of string?

David

I traded 4 times during those 2 days, making 305, 113, 38 and -15 pips.
It give me total 441. My equity is around 3000 pip, so the profit is 14.7%.

I traded 2 times again the day after that, hoping big rebound (buy order) and then short again 30 minutes ago, scored -22 and -12 pips.

Thanks for the replies.

When the trend is this strong there is a higher probability of getting away with 5 pip SL and make huge RR

TS

TS,

Yes, you got it!

But you have to be willing to suffer many small losses, until you finally nail a point where the long term trend resumes itself. As your knowledge of price behavior (and your patience to wait for A+ setups) increases, the number of 5 pip losses — and trades stopped at BE — becomes less.

In reality, and depending on the type of setup, I scale in to positions, using multiple entry and SL points. This smooths income and reduces drawdown.

But of course this is merely one of many possible approaches to trading.

David

I'm up 40% ish on the week, but I admit it's been a tough week I have a trend and range based system and as long as the trend doesn't change direction then I just don't lose with some averaging down cause with trend the chop / randomness will generally get you out up.

I was risking 15% area but account growth gets me down to 10% risking, I'll up the lots in a week or 2!!

The secret is accepting, your never going to get perfect entrys / exits you really can't predict and also jump in against the current move, when it looks the scariest with a very loose SL and averaging in method.

David,

More or less I am doing the same thing. Well, yet to perfect it like you guys.

One thing i figure is to keep the lot size rather small even though you are only risking 5 or 6 pips since you are going to try more attempts.
This paid well with controlled risk.

I managed to make 5% with max draw down at any point being less than .5% during first three days of this week.

Had I managed to reduce the no of attempts profits would have been even better

Thanks
TS

This looks scary. What kind of SL percentage and pipsize would you use for this kind of approach?

Using a 75 pip sl on gu. 60 on some others

Trading upto 0.6 currently will increase with account growth.

Bigger sl's = few hits but bigger losses when hit seems to cost me less losses and less missed moves due to sl hitting spikes

Was 15% down to 10% as account up 40% this week when your rarely losing might aswell gun it