The Perseus Project

I've decided not to do this trade journal because I'm already logging them in my own database and it's taking too much additional time to post updates here. It's distracting me from focusing on what I see on the screen.

Project scrapped.

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It felt like another rough day today. Ended up with 5 winners out of 13 trades. That’s below the 40% mark that I feel will really keep this system profitable.

Five of those losses all came in a row too. I’m glad that I’m following my money management program because it preserved the capital so that I had some to make a comeback from. At the end of the day I had three winners in a row that put my account back over the 1,000 mark so that it could be back in the original money management program.

Definitely made a few mistakes today. Took a trade on G/U when there were longtails present. I guess I was just asking to have the stop punched. It did. I took an AU trade and an EU trade that were not quite right either. One failed and the other closed for a win, but I consider both bad because of the lack of discipline.

I’ve got one more trade riding right now on U/J. It’s R1 in profit and I’m hoping that it will close out as a winner. If it does, I’ll have a 42% win rate for the day, which would bode well for the future.

I backtested another Month/Pair today between candles too. Last December on E/U. Would probably have turned out quite well. I’ll probably end up saying this a lot but nothing builds my confidence in this system more than loading up data in the strategy tester and winding back the close and testing to see what I would have done. From what I can tell, I would have taken 118 trades for the month on E/U and 52 would have been winners. That would have been 44%. If each win was $50 and each loss was $25 (not taking into consideration leveling up over the course of the month) then it would have worked out to $960 profit for the month for that pair alone on an account size of id="mce_marker"000. Biggest take-home truth from that experiment though? There was a losing streak of 10 trades in there. Ouch. The money management system would have kept things going though.

This is a U/J trade that just kinda hung on there for a hours. I thought about cutting it early when it was in profit, but the system says to let it ride. I guess it could have turned into a winner just as much as it could have turned into a loser.

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New day...new trade. I'd like to have started off with a win...but a loss is okay too.

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I think that I'm going to just put a daily tally post up where I'll update links to the various post detail pages on my blog as it seems to clutter up the page by posting them individually here.

Here's the tally for today:

#1 - NU Loss - immediately started worrying about all the others going bad.
#2 - EU Loss
#3 - GU Loss
#4 - AU Loss - obviously need to address what to do when simultaneous signals show up like this.
#5 - KU Loss - check the pick and you'll see that it was a weird drop that signaled and entry. Pulled plug early - which is unusual for me.
#6 - EU Win - break loosing streak.
#7 - GU Win
#8 - EU Loss
#9 - GU Loss
#10 - GU Loss
#11 - AU Loss
#12 - GU Win - break loosing streak.
#13 - EU Win
#14 - E/U Loss
#15 - G/U Mini-Loss - stopped out early @ -1. Probably shouldn't have ejected.
#16 - N/U Loss - completely not to plan. Faked out and entered, then had to eject when it showed its true colors.
#17 - U/J Win - frustrated with this one. Should have been a profit of 2x risk...but my failure to control technology properly prevented a full haul.
#18 - GU Loss
#19 - EU Loss
#20 - GU Loss

So I took a pretty harsh beating today. So far, I've ended up with 5 wins, 14 losses, and 2 scratches. I've still got an E/U and an U/J open but they're stuck in a range.

Even though the wins are 2x the size of most of the losses, it's still very much a losing day. While I know there are going to be good days and bad days, the whole thing took me by surprise. It just seemed like my system just wouldn't jive with the way price was moving today. Very much the opposite of what I have been seeing in strategy tester.

Of course, all the feelings that they tell you about washed over me. I watched a few videos about keeping your psychology under wraps...but it seems to have all gone out the window. I'm extremely tense with stress and feel a little bit sick. Usually, I'm ready to crash once it hits noon EST but today I couldn't even rest.

Between bars I fired up strategy tester and drilled through another month bar-by-bar using my method without "peeking" to the right. Worked like a charm. Went through today on the various pairs, and found that as long as I followed my system's rules, I would have made most of the same mistakes I already did. There are two in there that might have gone differently. The N/U I pulled out of early because it was gonig against both the E/U and G/U would not have touched my S/L and is slowly heading in the original direction anticipated while the G/U betrayed me and stopped out and the E/U is stuck in this range.

In any case....I use my method on historical charts and things go well. Use it on today and things go poorly. I suppose that I should just chalk it up to being a bad day as I've yet to step bar-by-bar through a single month and come out losing for the month. The inner voices are ruthless though. Goes something like this...

"Are you freakin' kidding me? You must be one of THOSE people they always berate on the forums. Noobs who think they're actually going to be successful at this out of the gate. We tell them again and again that it's going to be a lot harder to enact a stragegy on demo than it will be when just trying to piece it together from historical data. But you think that YOU'RE gonna be the guy who that doesn't apply to, right? You're freakin out over a bad day on demo? What are you gonna do when you have a bad day on a live account?!?!? It's like they always say...systems seem to work good until you go live...then everything falls apart. You're really gonna blow this, aren't you?"

So I'm fighting off that type of stuff. Just putting it out here in tihs blog post kinda helps expose it for the rediculous line of dirvel that it is.

In any case, I've got to come to a decision on what to do with the N/U pair. It's either:

a) Trade each pair independently...even if they are looking as if they are in contradiction of each other. Enter and commit to either S/L or T/P without pulling out. Period. The G/U faked me out when it went up in concert with E/U and the N/U went down. If I'd left N/U alone, it would be reaching for the R2 profit level right now while G/U has stopped out for a loss.

b) Toss N/U completely - I might just do better if I remove a pair from the mix completely. That leaves E/U, G/U, A/U, and U/J. All the pairs with the lowest spreads - which is important for my strategy.
We'll see how it goes tomorrow. I think I'm going to take some Vitamin D and take a walk out in the sun after I eat lunch. Then I gotta punch out a 5-page paper for a clinical psyc class tonight.

I ended up doing two major reworks on the system which seemed to improve the success rate of this approach.

The first is to toss three pairs. E/U and G/U stay...A/U, N/U, and U/J are gone.

The second is that I'm not longer utilizing the "only buy when price is above the daily open line, only sell if it's below that same line" concept that I stumbled across in the DIBS method thread.

Here's the breakdown of the trades today. They were all at 0.5 lots which was double what I had planned it to be. I had that number plugged into the preset on my trade management software. The day ended up being pretty profitable, but the results are skewed as to the system overall because of the doubled risk.

Also, I found out that the MyFXBook thing logs your trades for you. So I won't have to do it manually. The final tally for the day is: 6 Wins/3 Losses/3 Scratches. Without factoring in the B/E trades, the ratio for the day was 66%...quite a bit higher than what I typically expect to see.

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