20151130 - Discretionary Trades today

Today, I system hopped once again. This time to discretionary trading. The losing steak continues nevertheless.

4 trades with 3 losses, and no decent winner. There could have been a couple of entries that would have been profitable, IF taken.... but I only "thought" about taking those. The first trade, the Long, was a typo. I went long instead of short, and hence SAR'ed when the Stop hit.

The marked-up chart may look cluttered, but perhaps would make better sense when taken in conjunction with my live tweets.

The Value of Nothing

Really??! It's just a big stone. Give that diamond to us speculators, and we will find it's value. We will bid and ask different prices, but we will find the value. We don't really care about the value, but we will find a Price. Price is what matters to speculators.

Why is a diamond valuable? (Actually, why is anything valuable?, but we will address that bigger question later.)

When we were kids, we used to collect those nice smooth or shiny pebbles, didn't we? And cry if we lost a pebble, fight for it, protect it, steal it? But then we grew up..... and realised that stuff wasn't worth much.

Guess what. Mankind still has to grow up. We still strive to own these useless pieces of stones and metals (they do have industrial uses and we can throw them at wild animals when they attack us, but that is not what we value them for).

Settlers could rob natives of things like land and country (and people/slaves), in exchange for bright beads and clothes, because the natives valued those beads... and not iPhones. Unlike those natives, we value money, those pieces of paper, metal coins, IOU notes, virtual money (as if the rest is not virtual), because we believe a goverment or something has guaranteed their value - when most of the time there are no assets to back them. Random names/places/animals/things are valued, and sometimes worshipped.

Monkeys don't value those stones as much as us. That gets me thinking... maybe our society/civilization is built or based on stuff that I think don't have value. Don't we value our culture/civilization? If we stop valuing a random stuff that we value now, then that basis of our society/culture/civilization will change.

Diamonds and modern art will continue to be valued by society for more than a generation. People who fight to own them will not appear as silly as the children who grew up, because society will not grow up enough in their lifetime.  Could the value disappear in a generation?.... then they would look silly like those who were in the Tulip mania or Dot Com mania or the craze for a Justin Timberlake ticket?

The Power of Compounding

Yes, it's the very same thing that we all learned in school. However, in the heat of trading, we tend to forget this simple principle. So, here's a reminder. Consistently earning even a few points everyday will make a trader rich.

Below, I am pasting verbatim what I posted on the topic on my thread in Traderji. Note the need to deploy full capital to get the results indicated. As mentioned in the post, a high win % and low risk per trade would be great. However, I am now thinking that high Recovery Factor and low risk per trade would be a better criteria to give the confidence to deploy maximum capital.

Recovery Factor = (Net profit) / (Maximum system drawdown)

The Power of Compounding NF is at 7700. If you are able to net 10 points per day, then you are earning 3.24% on margin on MIS basis, and 1.62% on NRML basis. If you have a high win %, and low risk per trade, and deploy full capital on each trade, then with NRML your capital would have multiplied 24 time in an year. With MIS, then your capital would have multiplied 588 times. I am assuming that you are able to trade 200 days in a year. If you earn 0.1% of capital everyday, compounding your capital will make it 1.22 times after 1 year. If 0.2%, 1.49 times. If 0.3%, 1.82 times. If 0.5%, 2.71 times. If 1%, 7.32 times. If 2%, 52 times. If 3%, 369 times. If 4%, 2550 times. If 5%, 17292 times. If 6%, 115125 times. If 7%, 752931 times. If 8%, 4838949 times. If 9%, 30570292 times. If 10%, 189905276 times. Get the drift? Now don't find excuses. Just do it

20151127 - Bad run continues...

 

This bad run is taking a long time. See chart below... I have to do something about reducing the number of entries.

20151126 - End of the series... not a great one

This week has not been good at all. In comparison to last week, it has been boring.

Today, took 3 trades, and lost all of them. It was expiry day, but there was no great movement in the market. 

Pre-brokerage,  I made 170 points from 55 trades in this series. That is down 59 points from the peak of 229 points on Nov 18th. Looking at the daily stats shown below, it is clear that I could have done so much better if I had avoided losing big time on an unidirectional day like Nov 19. Regrets and all that, but..... My costs are approximately 1.55 points per trade - so that's not many points earned in the current series that had some really good movements.

I am wishing myself luck for the next series, and hope to continue blogging and live tweets (it's not motivating to report losses ☹). I plan to include the trades for the next series in the current spreadsheet. The complete report of my trades in this series is available on the Trading Stats page.

Daily Statistics of the November series

20151124 - Another Bakwaas Day

That's Strike II. 4 trades with only one small winner. This time it's a loss on both gross and net basis.

Trade 1 was a long one (duration-wise). I was in that trade for 2 hours and 18 minutes. MFE for the trade was only 13 points, and I booked a loss of 7 points on it. A good data point to add to the Holding Period Analysis that I had done last Wednesday. Another way to look at it is that I was lucky to be in that trade during that sideways zone. If not, I would have probably entered multiple losing trades during that same sideways period. ☺

Trade 3 went into profit with a sudden fall, and reversed just as quickly. Out of a MFE 41, I booked 24 points. That's better than the 50% booking rule that I had at the start of this series.

Also, completed 50th trade of this series today. Statistics available on my Trading Stats page.

NIFTY M3 Candlestick Chart

NIFTY M15 Candlestick Chart

20151123 - Bakwaas Trading Day

6 trades - 2 small winners among them. Made a net loss. Today's trades match the name of this blog.

20151120 - Roller coaster week

Monday: +70 points from 3 trades
Tuesday: +3 points from 4 trades
Wednesday: +98 points from 2 trades
Thursday: -72 points from 7 trades
Friday: +33 points from 4 trades
*Points are pre-brokerage

It was a happy week, except for the scary jolt on Thursday. This always happens when I trade mechanically. Every once in a while, a day comes that make me lose confidence.

The SL hit on today's trade 4 was just too bad. My SL for the short was 7908. Price came to EXACTLY that point and reversed. This stuff keeps happening all the while with this system.

The M3 chart below is what I was live tweeting throughout the day. I live tweeted today. Follow me on my twitter handle @BakwaasTrading. I have also added a live tweet widget to the right pane of this blog. Check it out, though I cannot promise that I will keep live tweeting every day.

20151119 - Disaster!!!

Karma homed in today, and exposed all that is bad about this system. 7 trades - all losses - at an average of -10.53 pre-brokerage points per loss. The trend was all one way up, but the current system rules do not bother about that.

Given up everything that I earned yesterday, small consolation that the biggest loss of the series so far happened right after the biggest win.

Almost time to scrap this system, but I plan to give it another try, maybe with whatever small modifications I can think of.

What next????

Data Analysis: Holding Period and Profit Locking

Here's some analysis of the holding period of my trades vs. the actual and potential profits.

31 trades so far in this series, 9 of them profitable.

Relation between holding period and profit:
Of the profitable ones, only 1 had a holding period of less than 60 minutes - trade 3 on Tuesday.

94% of the trades held for less than 60 minutes resulted in losses. So, is it anything of significance? I guess not. I think it is just that I did not get into any trades that zoomed into profits and reversed significantly within an hour. Lazy Nifty!

Amount of profit locked:
For the profitable trades, the average MFE is 63 points, and on average I have booked 45 points out of them. Not bad!

For losing trades of less than 60 minutes duration, the average MFE is 8 points, and on average I have made a loss of 9 points on them. That's nearly OK for the kind of system that I am trading.

But for losing trades of more than 60 minutes duration (there were 6 such trades), the average MFE is 21 points, and the average loss is 7 points. This is certainly a concern. On the average, here I am giving up 28 points to book a loss. I hope that the aggressive profit locking that I adopted this week will improve this statistic. As usual, this aggressive profit locking will also have negative impact in terms of shake outs, and probably increase the number of trades.

The system will continue to be modified (and over-analyzed) or may even be discarded to balance out all the pros and cons. Never ending process...

Glossary: MFE stands for Most Favorable Excursion, which means the most profitable point during the duration of a trade. See the definition at    MyPivots.

20151118 - Dropped catches in my century today!!!

Today, luck was with me. Since Monday, when I moved to the M5 chart, and tightened the Stops, shake outs (bad luck) have been affecting. The market pulls back just to eat my SL and then continues on its way... See the trade 2 on Monday and almost all exits on Tuesday.

Not so today. The price came within 1 point of my SL 4 times but did not touch them. Finally, I have a century in this series with the help of all those dropped catches!!!

I have no clue about why the market fell. I don't really follow the news, I follow only my system. The advantage of a mechanical trading system is that you get plenty of free time, since you don't need to analyze the price moves in real time. Unfortunately, I do not do anything useful with all that free time.

20151117 - Back to my losing ways...

Many shakeouts today due to the tight SL's. I think the price reacted ok at DP's.

What should I do next?

20151116 - Losing streak broken!!!

Changed the rules to be more aggressive - which means that I traded off the 5 minute chart, with tighter Stop Losses. I expect that with these rules there will be many more trades, and lot of SL hit shake-outs, but I will lock in a higher percentage of profits than last week.

Today's Trade 2 was one of those unfortunate shake-outs.

The day ended happy - the best day for me in this series. Good recovery. Almost wiped out the drawdown. In post-brokerage terms, I still need about 12 points to get back to my peak equity this series.

But finally I have a winning streak - 2 consecutive wins today. Another point is that all 3 trades done today were long. In fact, 5 of the last 6 trades have been long... so is it longing season, as opposed to Shorting Season?

20151113 - Did (Could) not lock profits

3 trades. All losses.

MFE: +17, +29, +25     Booked: -6, -5, -0

Could not lock profits because of the system rules. I had tweaked the system a bit for today, but I guess it was not good enough. DP trading would have done better today....

So, the losing streak continues....

 

 

20151110 - Losing streak continues

1 win and 2 losses. The smallest of all wins in this series, and biggest of all losses in this series. From the data, I can see that the max. MAE of winners has been -7.1 points, so keeping 15 points initial SL may not be worth it... but the data set of trades so far is small.

Time to make changes to the system....

20151109 - Completely missed the move

A good up day. Perhaps the best intraday move in this series so far, and I got my biggest daily loss of the series....

20151106 Dull dull day

Only one trade: a loser. But there were a few iffy bars...

20151105 Shorting Season

It's shorting season. I shorted 3 times today for 2 losses and 1 win.

I have done 12 trades in this series so far. Out of these 10 (83%) have been shorts. Both my longs have been losers. Of the shorts, 4 (40%) have been winners. 4 (80%) of the daily bars are red and one is doji. So, it's good that my entries are in sync with the market. (I always have a tendency to attribute these things to luck.) If only the win rate was better....

 

System Hopping

I change my trading methodology frequently. I was doing discretionary trading in the October series. Now, I am trading the November series mechanically.

Whenever I trade a system, I hope that it will work out well, and for a long time. But soon, I get disillusioned and change my trading method.... mostly because of a losing streak, but many times simply because I don't like system behavior in further back tests and scenario tests.

At this point, I really don't care about the systems, as long as certain criteria are met. And the criteria itself is not well defined. However, from the top my head....

1. Profitable
2. High rate of growth of capital
3. Small drawdowns
4. Peace of mind/Less screen time

As long as I make money, hopefully fast and with low risk...

I have posted thoughts related to criteria in my Bakwaas Trading thread on Traderji.

• http://www.traderji.com/trading-diary/88102-bakwaas-trading.html#post945775
• http://www.traderji.com/trading-diary/88102-bakwaas-trading.html#post1073146
• http://www.traderji.com/trading-diary/88102-bakwaas-trading.html#post991428

20151104 Nifty Futures Mechanical

3 losses and then a winner. Was unlucky with SL hits in trades 2 and 3. Was lucky to have captured trade 4. Even, trade 4 hung around for a long approaching my SL a couple of times, before making its move. Persistence pays (sometimes!!)

Today, I kept myself busy filling up the 'Trading Stats' tab of this blog. That activity is still WIP. Used Google spreadsheets for this. If I update the Google spreadsheet, the info is automatically updated on the Trading Stats page. Nice!!

 

20151103 Nifty Futures

2 trades. Green day.

 

20151102 NIFTY Futures Mechanical

Only 1 trade - mechanical. Did not do well.