51%

You could look at the series of returns and just use standard statistical analysis, null hypothethis being that system is not 51%+ reliable...

(and cause of that you are not goign to get a big enough sample size so you can't do it, in pracitce...)

That's the thing. if the real odds are that bad, expect some lean times ahead especially in Darren World where things never go according to plan.

Yeah... I don't trade enough as I'm more a swinger. It'd work fine for my sports trading (100 matched bets yesterday!).

how is that going? are you ready to start a journal here about it?

(ignore the ph challenge thread, that tldr)

Sports trading? CBA with a journal; only doing the PH challenge thing cos it sounded like fun. Doing pretty well considering "it's gambling, innit". I made some dumb errors a fortnight ago by trying to trade a couple of high risk (but high profit) markets and got stung. Now sticking to safer (for my technique) markets. Can make 100% yield per week if I remain cautious. Have taken nearly 500 trades since and all is going well so far.

Will let you know in a month whether I'm still in it or not. It's been an interesting learning experience, anyway, and as suggested earlier, has made me think about my financial trading so it hasn't been a waste of time even if I decide to stop.

I recommend everyone have a go at sports trading. It can be done without risk of real money, too, via the £25 offer. (If anyone's reading, PM me about the £25 offer.)

I think it's easy to become over-obssessed with strike rate when it's only one part of the equation and probably the least important part.

Here are some figures I produced recently over a 20 Wk period manually testing various parts of an Hourly system. I used a fixed entry, SL, etc. in order to test various exit methods. The final results are almost certainly over-optimistic (it's easy in retrospect) but the figures should still be useful for relative comparitive purposes. The figures show HR then total pips collected by end of testing period.

Exit A - 60% - 976
Exit B - 48% - 2146
Exit C - 39% - 2776
Exit D - 56% - 1997
Exit E - 51% - 2265
Exit F - 47% - 2156
Exit G - 48% - 3065
Exit H - 42% - 3073
Exit I - 43% - 3358
Exit J - 38% - 3624
Exit K - 33% - 3020
Exit L - 21% - 2403
Exit M - 14% - 379

What surprised me is that HR and over-all profitability were almost inversely related. To get over 3000 pips required a HR < 50% and the highest HR (Exit A) made least pips apart from M, explained below.

(The big drop off at the end is almost certainly due to the testing period being too short as these were very loose trailing stop methods that excel over long time periods with very extended draw-downs.)

As a matter of interest, what do you call the long run?

I've been trading a strategy with an 89% strike rate (0.5 R) since November 2009.

Not long enough?

stupid question for obvious reasons