50% double reward strategy

It clearly wont work in the way you currently have it written down.If it did then we would all be rich by now. Let me say first of all the market is not random. Heres some proof take one min volume spikes on the dow or russ2000 and if taken with trend they are well over 50%.Even without that volume moves the market so there is no randomness in time.The guy who wrote the book about randomness ends up saying that patterns are above 50%. The biggest problem you have with systems like that is the person who operates them. On paper you can build a system to work but it doesnt take into acccount our emotions which will always differ when we are trading at looking at charts in real time.What Zupcon says is right if you just took random trades you would end up with the Zero sum story before dealing costs.The biggest problem all new and many experienced traders have is that our brains are not acustomed to losing money which affects the way we operate any system. As a principle staking plans are very important,but I always ignore them if I see an opportunity that I feel is worth more.
Many many people have driven themselves mad looking for some Holy grail which includes a staking plan and R:R.Also the more indicators you add the closer and quicker you are to a zero sum game. At the end of the day I could sum up this post by saying that to succeed and get an edge you simply have to read the market and be above 50%.Oh and history repeats itself just like patterns

It clearly wont work in the way you currently have it written down.If it did then we would all be rich by now. Let me say first of all the market is not random. Heres some proof take one min volume spikes on the dow or russ2000 and if taken with trend they are well over 50%.Even without that volume moves the market so there is no randomness in time.The guy who wrote the book about randomness ends up saying that patterns are above 50%. The biggest problem you have with systems like that is the person who operates them. On paper you can build a system to work but it doesnt take into acccount our emotions which will always differ when we are trading at looking at charts in real time.What Zupcon says is right if you just took random trades you would end up with the Zero sum story before dealing costs.The biggest problem all new and many experienced traders have is that our brains are not acustomed to losing money which affects the way we operate any system. As a principle staking plans are very important,but I always ignore them if I see an opportunity that I feel is worth more.
Many many people have driven themselves mad looking for some Holy grail which includes a staking plan and R:R.Also the more indicators you add the closer and quicker you are to a zero sum game. At the end of the day I could sum up this post by saying that to succeed and get an edge you simply have to read the market and be above 50%.Oh and history repeats itself just like patterns

Oh well, after debating different ways of doing this i will just give up and do something stupidly simple.

At 9am every morning, i will enter a trade on the FTSE100. I will only exit at either a 40 point loss or a 80 point gain. I use a 50 day simple moving average (don't ask why there is no reason). If the average is going up i buy, if it's going down i sell. The trade holds until either -40 or +80 is hit.

Assuming a starting account of £500 and trading at £1/point.

I will record the results here, good, bad and ugly.

Please don't actually trade this with real money people. Much better to bankrupt a demo account- will be satisfying knowing how much you have saved .


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note: i don't actually trade this on my real-life account!

One of the pitfalls with trading is to fall into a state where we are forever looking for a smart solution. Wasted months and years can go by looking for the 'right' system instead of learning to trade what you have. It can be a convenient excuse for not actually making a profit. Been there, done it. For years...


How come posts are jumpimg up to the begining? I posted this well down on the next page.

There has been a lot of discussion on here of the possibilities and (supposed) easiness of being able to make money by doing the following:

1. Having a winning ratio of 50%
2. Having a reward twice that of the risk (Risk: reward ratio of 1:2)

Hence what follows will be a test of the above to see if it is possible.

Some possible problems:

1. A 50% winning ratio sounds good, but just as with flipping a coin, it is possible to 'lose' 20 times in a row, 30 times, or even more. A run such as this could have serious impact on the strategy and render it bankrupt.
2. How do you decide a simple 50% winning strategy for the purposes of this system. If you believe the markets are random then perhaps you can just decide to go long on every trade (or short).
3. We need to define an exact set of rules and stick to them without deviation (easier said than done).
4. By attempting to gain twice as much reward as we have risk, are we not reducing our chances of having a successful trade? Therefore, assuming that the markets are random, we actually reduce our 50% win ratio. In a truly random market i believe that 50% ratio could only be acheived by having a 1:1 risk:reward. (please note i'm not saying the markets really are random, i'm just simplifying for the purposes of this thread).

These points are just touching the tip of the iceberg of problems. I don't believe it is possible to conduct a totally correct, 'scientific' style test of the strategy rules.

Hence, i have taken a view and just chosen a very basic method of determining the general direction of the market at the time of placing a trade. Make of it what you will, add your own theories and current strategies into the idea if you wish to give it a go.

Please feel free to comment/abuse/shout/praise/hug me as you see fit I will post more on the strategy specifics i have decided soon.

p.s. just wanted to add that i'm not overly enthusiastic about this. i wouldn't want to inspire enthusiasm into unsuspecting newbies here... the reality is that i'm thinking this will fail.

It wont work

Open up a 1 minute chart of anything your interested in trading and take a bunch of demo trades over the next few weeks, perhaps opening trades every hour or so, and letting them run for a couple of hours. Dont set stops, and dont set targets Once you have a few hundred trades, calculate the profit / loss for each trade on the close of each bar.

Roughly speaking you'll find a 50% win rate, and 80% of the trades just sort of meander between positive and negative territory either resulting in a small win, or small loss. 10% of the trades will result in large gains where you where lucky enought to catch a trend, and 10% will be large losing trades, where the trend went against you.

Thats the benchmark that a complete moron with absolutely no trading experience should be able to achieve, pretty much break even minus transaction costs +/- a degree of "noise" (and I'll quite happily bet my shirt most reading this wont be able to beat that )

The next step is repeating the experiment, but specifying targets and stops to give you a variety of reward to risk scenarios. What you'll find is that the 1:1 reward:risk ratios will result in pretty much the same outcome, a 50/50 win loss and break even minus transaction costs.

If you half the risk, (or double the reward), your win rate will simply decrease, although you should achieve pretty much the same break even scenario.

if you double the risk, or half the reward, your win rate will increase, but you'll end up with the same break even - transaction cost scenario.

Before anyone starts claiming the 1 minute timeframe is noise, you'll get the same outcome on any timeframe you care to try this on.

This is as good a starting point for developing a trading strategy as you are likely to get, and it allows you to start asking questions such as can you limit losses ? can you let winners run ?, can you perhaps time the entry ?, does timing the entry actually result in smaller stops for winning trades ?, whats a suitable size for a stop ?, are trades taken with the trend more successful than those taken against the trend ? (and what is a trend, and how do you measure it), do indicators help ?, do candle patterns help ?, whats happening in other timeframes ?, are the number of consecutive gains or losses effected by your strategy ?, what elements of TA are useful ? support / resistance ?, do fibs work ? are oscillators useful ?, does divergence work ?, can you optimise a staking plan or money management strategy ?

The only way you'll ever know if you have an edge is to measure the distribution of gains and losses from your edge against the distribution from a random sample.

Ironically by the time you've spent a couple of years staring at charts to answer these sorts of questions, you'll have gained enough exposure and screen time to develop an instinctive feel for price action, and formulated the other 1001 questions that need to be considered.

A good example of a simple risk reward strategy is on this blog (Infiniteyield Forex)

The trader here is doing an experimant through this blog trying to turn $500 o $150k in 10 years, he's up over 200% already.

He's tweaked the concept slightly but all he was doing before was placing a OCO order in 5 different currency pairs a buy and sell stop 60 pips from the open at 7am Monday with a stop 110 points away, risking 1% of capital per trade and either exiting on Friday afternoon or getting stopped out

and


Placing an order to Buy/sell on Friday at the high of the previous 4 days (i think) and exiting monday morning.

Not complicated but look at the return......

an interesting read if nothing else

The bottom line is, you still have to know which direction the market is moving. If your on the wrong side, there's nothing you can do right.