China's FTSE 100 swing trades

[D70]

6067 views, who are these sadists who enjoy watching me lose money. To be honest half of those views are probably mine. I don't want to put people off with my waffling posts but I think it's a good idea to write down my thought processes.

PRU stopped out, Been a while since I had a winner. I should not really have been in the market on the day of such a major news announcement as yesterday, but like all things I seem to enjoy learning the hard way. The good thing about being stopped out so often is I am getting so used to it I react with the same emotional response as I do when receiving an email informing me I have won the Nigerian state lottery.

GFS cancelled.

Make or break with six longs for tomorrow. I am a bit nervous having this many orders but I think the fact so many stocks are showing a long signal at the same time is probably a good sign along with the FTSE hitting some support. Saying that, that bozo candle looks ominous.

GFS
IHG
SL
WEIR
MRO
MRW

You are not wrong to continue trading through the news. There is ALWAYS news.

If you're about to go balls deep with a load of longs. Sling in a ftse100 index hedge. If you dont want to hedge the whole £ amount. Do half.

Ps. Do you need to take all the signals? What about just taking the best 3 from the day? If you ran a correlation matrix on them, you'd probably find that you are essentially going long once in a position 6 times larger than you should be.

 

[tomorton]

I agree with D70: unless financially impossible, continue to trade your strategy regardless of expected news, and let the strategy take account of the market's reaction to news.

I am sceptical re strategies that involve adaptations in anticipation of news, it makes their previous performance statistics and historical chart readings hard to verify.

 

[barjon]

china

It's the nature of the beast that these will come along like London buses after a general market pullback.

If they all trigger it's almost certain that the market is with you so you'd be with the tide and want to make the most of it (ie: not play about trying to be selective). The better bet, imho, is to contain your overall exposure by adjusting individual position size.

 

[China Diapers]

Tomorton! Where you been?

Thanks for comments guys will reply later got to focus on the work which actually pays the bills right now

 

[tomorton]

Tomorton! Where you been?

Thanks for comments guys will reply later got to focus on the work which actually pays the bills right now

Promised myself last year I would stop contributing until I had achieved 6 consecutive profitable months. If a trader can't do that, who is he to tell other people how to do it right?

Unfortunately, .....................

 

[D70]

china

It's the nature of the beast that these will come along like London buses after a general market pullback.

If they all trigger it's almost certain that the market is with you so you'd be with the tide and want to make the most of it (ie: not play about trying to be selective). The better bet, imho, is to contain your overall exposure by adjusting individual position size.

But this increases your costs. Paying multiple bid / offer spreads.
And what if ALL your stocks triggered long, how would you divvy up the position sizing then?

 

[China Diapers]

Promised myself last year I would stop contributing until I had achieved 6 consecutive profitable months. If a trader can't do that, who is he to tell other people how to do it right?

Unfortunately, .....................

Yes I realised the irony in my giving any advice too, so now I consider myself more of a shoulder to cry on

 

[China Diapers]

Hold that thought, it's not irony, it's something else

 

[barjon]

But this increases your costs. Paying multiple bid / offer spreads.
And what if ALL your stocks triggered long, how would you divvy up the position sizing then?

True - but, again, that's the nature of the beast. Otherwise you might as well just apply the method to the ftse pure and simple.

If you wanted to do it you'd assume all would trigger and position size accordingly. You can always make some additions later on.

I wasn't having a pop at you about selection. It's just that it's the method that provides that selection and my experience is that what looks best often comes out worst and vice versa. China doesn't have the advantage of watching momentum leading up to entry point - which is a pretty decent "discretionary" filter - so he's reliant on the basic rules.

 

[China Diapers]

Regarding the news, generally I take no notice of it but on big news days like the budget it makes sense not to be committed on one side as god know what could happen. I was quite fortunate in this case that the market reacted with almost complete indifference (still got stopped out though). Also I thought it was good practice to avoid stocks which are going ex-div? NFP? I really need to be looking for reasons why this trading business is not working out for me and the news might be a factor.

The reason I couldn't hedge today even if I had wanted to is I am not at my screen when my stop orders get activated so I could place a market order to hedge with the FTSE and none of my long stops get triggered and I end up being net short the FTSE. I really need to be able to be in front of my charts in the morning and I am working on this. I work for one of these Silicon Valley style "make your own hours", "wear Bermuda shorts to work", "bring your dog to work" kind of places but my manager is a bit of of a micro manager (I mean jobs worth) and likes his team to do 9 - 6 but I might have to tell him to take a hike, I have orders to execute.

I can take the occasional peek at my account during the day but try to avoid this as the progress of my positions can have a noticeable effect on my mood for the day. Also I work with a bunch of over-educated people and if they saw me looking at charts I would get the efficient market hypothesis talk and I don't need that. I have alerts setup for when a position enters it's target area so I can deal with that if and when it happens, not received any of those today so for all I know my positions could have all been triggered and stopped out again and my account is 6% lighter.

I probably don't have to take all the setups, but I don't know which ones have a higher probablility, that would make my method not a method, but a random trade generator (to quote D70, classic). I do see the sense in limiting my total exposure on my account at any one time to a certain percent though, I am thinking 5 times my usual risk on a trade so 5% ought to do it. I actually had this on my trade plan and but decided I didn't like that idea and it got removed.

Thanks to whoever rated my thread.

 

[China Diapers]

Hold that thought, it's not irony, it's something else

It's a case of the blind leading the blind.

 

[China Diapers]

If you think I talk a load of drivel most of the time you should hear me after a few pints of Guinness, which I happen to have had tonight but will do my best to keep things on topic.

GFS and SL triggered

IHG, WEIR, MRO and MRW cancelled.

Long TSCO, WG, HL and SMIN for Monday.

 

[China Diapers]

El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer

 

[China Diapers]

OK...time-out folks. I've been writing this post as I watched the FTSE tank this afternoon, much to my annoyance.

All orders triggered, WG and TSCO stopped out, the remaining four positions aside from GFS are in the red and I plan to close these manually on tomorrows open and then close my account.

My win rate is now so bad I don't see how a chimp with a dart and copy of the Financial Times could possibly do worse, I might as well let my 11 month old daughter do my analysis for me. The £40 stop-outs are really starting to add up, I literally cannot bring myself to place another order knowing it will be stopped out for a loss within a few days and that money could have been spent buying two rounds of drinks for my mates. I know trading is not meant to be fun but I am really not enjoying this. I am not interested in looking at any other methods which may suit me better, the thought of looking at another chart makes me feel quite depressed.

Also we could be living in an authoritarian, centrally planned economy within 15 years anyway (see Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy - Joseph Schumpeter) so why waste my time with this market business (tin foil hat, tick)

It's been a pleasure trade2winners, but no more trading talk for me, you might bump into me on a coin collecting, gardening or other random forum I choose to pass my time on some day, if so be sure to say hi.

Best of luck.

Adrian aka China Diapers

 

[China Diapers]

Had to make one more post so I leave on a round number!

 

[D70]

OK...time-out folks. I've been writing this post as I watched the FTSE tank this afternoon, much to my annoyance.

All orders triggered, WG and TSCO stopped out, the remaining four positions aside from GFS are in the red and I plan to close these manually on tomorrows open and then close my account.

My win rate is now so bad I don't see how a chimp with a dart and copy of the Financial Times could possibly do worse, I might as well let my 11 month old daughter do my analysis for me. The £40 stop-outs are really starting to add up, I literally cannot bring myself to place another order knowing it will be stopped out for a loss within a few days and that money could have been spent buying two rounds of drinks for my mates. I know trading is not meant to be fun but I am really not enjoying this. I am not interested in looking at any other methods which may suit me better, the thought of looking at another chart makes me feel quite depressed.

Also we could be living in an authoritarian, centrally planned economy within 15 years anyway (see Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy - Joseph Schumpeter) so why waste my time with this market business (tin foil hat, tick)

It's been a pleasure trade2winners, but no more trading talk for me, you might bump into me on a coin collecting, gardening or other random forum I choose to pass my time on some day, if so be sure to say hi.

Best of luck.

Adrian aka China Diapers

Tough roll China.
I'm sure you'll be back after the wounds have healed.

 

[Benj1981]

OK...time-out folks. I've been writing this post as I watched the FTSE tank this afternoon, much to my annoyance.

All orders triggered, WG and TSCO stopped out, the remaining four positions aside from GFS are in the red and I plan to close these manually on tomorrows open and then close my account.

My win rate is now so bad I don't see how a chimp with a dart and copy of the Financial Times could possibly do worse, I might as well let my 11 month old daughter do my analysis for me. The £40 stop-outs are really starting to add up, I literally cannot bring myself to place another order knowing it will be stopped out for a loss within a few days and that money could have been spent buying two rounds of drinks for my mates. I know trading is not meant to be fun but I am really not enjoying this. I am not interested in looking at any other methods which may suit me better, the thought of looking at another chart makes me feel quite depressed.

Also we could be living in an authoritarian, centrally planned economy within 15 years anyway (see Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy - Joseph Schumpeter) so why waste my time with this market business (tin foil hat, tick)

It's been a pleasure trade2winners, but no more trading talk for me, you might bump into me on a coin collecting, gardening or other random forum I choose to pass my time on some day, if so be sure to say hi.

Best of luck.

Adrian aka China Diapers

China, sorry to hear the recent bad run of results you've experienced. It seems to me though that you hadn't done nearly the amount of required testing necessary to risk real money. You shouldn't be tinkering with any aspects of your method while live trading until you know unequivocally that those changes will result in a better performance over the long haul of hundreds, or preferably thousands of trades. Also, you need very high confidence in your methods in order to execute them through the worst times, and put simply you don't have that, infact, we still don't know if your method has a positive expectation. So, enjoy your break, but if you ever decide to return to trading, you need to do it the right way to give yourself a chance.