YM journal

Jonnyy,

Varied/s (swings wildly?) between roughly 15% and 30% pa, slowly improving with experience. Not that you'd believe it on the evidence above (I'd be the first to admit my last year has been poor)! Of course this figure is less impressive when one considers the monster leverage available from SBs/futures, but I musn't grumble.

I had the impression that a skilled daytrader would be hoping to make more like 50%-200% pa, hence my desire to acquire new shorter term discretionary skills. But perhaps I'm just cut out to be a wider stop, more time, greedier target type of trader? Time will tell...

I posted some of my trades on fillyaboots.com a while back, but looking at a few of them now makes me feel a touch sheepish: Lots of schoolboy errors and far too many indicators, but at least the majority were discretionary.

Hey, perhaps that means I have learnt something in the interim!

Not sure what to do with this journal/thread now. I've been dipping into intraday YM occasionally (good advice re position sizing ChartMan: I do find YM less stressful and I'm beginning to believe for myself that the YM TA may be easier than ES!) while running a couple of slow-burnin' small stakin' 60min systems in the background which will be of little interest to anyone unless you're after a system with 35% accuracy and 10 max consecutive losers (backtesting over 1,2,3,4,5 & 6 yrs of ES hourly shows it grabs some big ones too and comes out ahead, fortunately!).

When my confidence and skill improves I'll post some more, but lurking, learning and devouring Jiler is the order of the day for the moment.

Have you given shares a go?4X leverage with IB.Timing's not so critical and as you've done it before (swung)! 15-30% pa should be sufficient?
This last year was a special case with the war giving the capitulation sell signal and heralding the bull market so it's been unusual but you've been trading since before so you'll know prices can go down as well as up.
When you've perfected your system maybe you'll remember your old mate jonnyy and tell me about it?

Hourly system's been in operation since 02/04 but today I couldn't resist a little extracurricular trading after the morning's sudden waterfall decline.

I was scared by the spike below the trendline (strongly tempted to close system long, but remained resolute!) but reassured by what I later realised was a clean bounce off 61.8%.

Cautiously late into a long on the 2nd wave pullback to the 10 day EMA / 38% level at 1145 then out on the 5th /wedge top at 1149. Then a small short below R1 upper pivot (red) 1147.5 closed at 10 day EMA / 38% 1145. Edit for the eagle of eye: Taking this short involved closing my IB long first and temporarily transferring it to SB to keep the pos open. A pointless squandering of commission - next time I will trade SPY from IB! D'oh.

I missed some obvious fare - e.g those 3 123 patterns that Skim illustrates here but content to be cautious.

If any scintilla of interest can be drawn from today it is that running my 'always-in' relaxed hourly system provides a lot of reassurance. I've backtested it thoroughly and though it's rather tepid in performance I still trust it to eke out a sufficient return to at least pay my bills, though not of course to furnish me with a fiscally unfettered existence boasting an infinite supply of designer chinos. Groan. Another month of fettling Investor/RT and this may change though (I wish!).

To precis a foolish ramble perhaps "following a mechanical system without deviation has improved my discretionary discipline and yielded a suitable reward." Good habits stick etc. And of course following the hourly makes the 10 min decisions easier, filtering or reinforcing as necessary.

Anyway here's a chart...

And a question if I may. Technical itch I'm unable to scratch...

Highlight the entire line with ES and right click and the delete it.
You can then type ES on another line and set it up again.


Paul

Frugi,

I had that stuck order thing with Globex last year when Globex went down for hours (May day). I emailed customer services and eventually they cleared it off their end. So send them a screen shot and ask them to sort it.

Cheers folks...will take action on Monday...if my brain still works after a night at Basics. ;-)

Monday - poor. Threw away $200 from overnight long, churned and ended up down.