Good stuff !
I think it's all that spread trading you're normally up to in your firm that's messing you up for the realities of the real world. 😀
But hey joking aside all this seems perfectly normal so far.
Had this interview with Market Wizards author Jack Schwager on file, should cheer you up as what you're doing is basically not unlike what Seykota was up to, ie solid, robust trend following:
"Fleckenstein: The vast majority of the Wizards are discretionary traders, people who regardless of their discipline still include a large dose of human judgment in their decision making. Very few depend on a mechanical systems. Ed Seykota, who was in the first Wizards book, was an exception. Have you found that it's harder to achieve outstanding results with a Black Box vs. a well-disciplined but still discretionary approach?
Schwager: Yes. All the Market Wizards have a specific methodology, but most of them do not have systems. There's a reason for that. It's very difficult to develop a trading system that can realize tremendous returns with low risk. There are people who have systems that make a lot of money but have high volatility. Even in the case of Seykota, his phenomenal returns were still achieved with great volatility. When I went out to Nevada to interview him, I remember his pulling out this 15-foot-long graph, showing his equity appreciating from $10,000 up to $15 million. But along the way, it could drop from, say, $6 million down to $3 million."
Good trading !
🙂