Don_xyZ wrote:Jhx wrote:aliassmith wrote:
There are many paths. There are even less paths that fit you. For sure there isn't one size fits all.
There is a lot of mental that is involved.
As I pointed out before specializing in 1 edge is best chance of success mentally and with outcome.
So far this is the most dedicated I've been with a method, both in terms of sitting my a$$ every day of the week for 5 hours and then some more time logging everything to my journal. Well I don't really know if it's a method in itself
because this whole thing just came up off Don's posts and merged it with the deadhorse's SMA, though I have my checklist for entering so there's that.
Never thought too much about edge other than the thing that gives you an advantage over the house
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In your opinion, what does an edge consist of? Is it an event in particular that one tries to take advantage of, or is it the strategy as a whole (entry method and trade management)? I might've seen the words method, edge, strategy, and system used interchangeably by some people in the past, but I'm pretty sure they represent different things.
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There is a very strong reason why me and Alias kept repeating "1 method, 1 pair, 1 session". What you are doing is essentially trying to combine mine with Alias in the hope to get the best of both worlds. This is, IMHO, your biggest mistake. My style didn't use MA because it relies on patterns (a whole lot of them as I already clearly defined) and also multi tf. Alias' Deadhorse has its own set of requirements. I'm not bothered if I have to sacrifice a few losses here and there because I also operate using 2 tactics, scalping and anchor trade. Alias' on the other hand excels in his high win rate. Trying to do both defeats the thing me and Alias reminded you of because you have no one to guide you in that path. At this point, you're going to be the master of that style but it will require a lot of time, energy and money. I don't know how many years exactly Alias spent in perfecting his strategy but I spent a lot of time thickening my WIL and perfecting mine. Also, I see you're trying to incorporate IgazI's stuff (correct me if I'm wrong).
So the questions are:
What is your short term (now) goal?
Is it to create your own trading strategy?
Or to make money ASAP?
And then align all of your effort accordingly.
I know at some point I said "make it your own" but what I meant was in the vicinity of the respective method that you are using, not trying to combine them.
I'm all about saving time and make more money so take this as me trying to save you the headaches of losing your time and money.
I'm going to reply this in two posts to organize it a bit better. This first one is a recap of this whole thing.
There is a very strong reason why me and Alias kept repeating "1 method, 1 pair, 1 session". What you are doing is essentially trying to combine mine with Alias in the hope to get the best of both worlds. This is, IMHO, your biggest mistake.
Just want to mention that I'm not doing it this way in the hope to get the best of both worlds (although I admit it might look like it); it was always about trying to find a way to scalp that made sense to me.
A recap:If I go way way back to the beginning of the thread, it all started with me just picking a method to be able to scalp for about 4-5 hours every morning. Before that the plan was going to longer term stuff (and I really mean longer longer term, due to lack of time), but I could work around some stuff that made me have these hours so I tried to get the most out of them.
So at first I picked one of TRO's method with the 3LZZ scalping reversals. I had a general sense of how the entry looked like, but as always, my trade management was poor because of my inability to read price.
Then alias suggested I traded only with the SMA, which I thought why not, the charts looked simple and clean.
Then I found out there were multiple entries, which is ok, but I was drowning with trying to do them all at once.
Then I read something about studying the entries and picking one; so I picked the one that made sense to me to enter on pullbacks after individual momentum candles (zlines with limit orders); to see how they worked out I backtested this on 100 sessions, but again I was really just looking at the entries and outcomes. It was very mechanical and didn't account for much that was happening on the chart; and that was evident when I then attempted it to trade them as I was making mistakes that I didn't understand because the entry wasn't really the problem, clearly. Again I was failing to read price.
Then I saw some posts from Igazi about patterns and breakouts which I tried to get but was just as lost.
Then you mentioned the whole pattern thing of breakout lines, patterns forming to fail and morphing and whatnot, which at first I was a bit skeptical because I didn't think it'd suit me, but in all fairness is the closest that I've been to actually follow how price moves. Then what Igazi said made sense and I started to see that idea on the charts.
And then you mentioned something that made complete sense to me and it's kind of what I've been and I'm doing now, which is making use of the continuations patterns (at the break or while it's happening; I'm doing the break)
after a reversal pattern appears.
I've been also gathering lots and lots of stats of this pattern (most lead to inconclusive results, but that's because I'm logging more than I need).
Now, I couldn't just trade that pattern 'blindly' every time it happens because it wouldn't work (I tried lol). I was also getting stopped because I was getting in too quick with very tight stops, I was waiting for a pullback within the same M5 candle and getting stopped out a lot, that's why I switched to using the M1 with the M5 overlays to see if there's anything I was missing in there. It helped in some situations.
After getting my ass handed a few days I noticed -again- that I was trading too 'mechanically'. So I tried to check if there's anything I was missing. From the stats I took, the only 'relevant' ones were that:
1) when the pullback goes way past the 1st breakout line, the continuation is very weak and is usually a loss if a take the next break.
2) if the trade goes against 60-70% (when applying the above rule), it will go to the full stop (length of the pullback).
That next part came along because I was trying to reduce my losing trades (to attempt to up the winrate, obviously).
But then I also noticed that I wasn't really looking for context of the trades. For example, since the pattern takes some time to happen, by the time it happens I might be near a wall that I didn't account for, price stops there and goes back. So this last thing I added was to not trade into a wall, nothing else.
Regarding the HTF stuff:I can sometimes see a larger pattern forming with this same idea and they can work, but it can take days to appear and more than a few hours to trade it that might not be the hours that I'm available to trade, specially if I only focus on one pair, so the focus is still on scalping. It happens way more often than not that the larger pattern (H1+) is in the middle of nowhere by the time I start my session. I don't know if there's a way to get larger R off these sessions consistently, other than attempting to enter at the extremes of the pullbacks and see if it 'completes' the whole continuation pattern. Or maybe I'm missing something.
Also, I see you're trying to incorporate IgazI's stuff (correct me if I'm wrong).
I don't think so, I'm just using bar charts because they looked easier on my eyes. Tbf I'm doing the same thing I've been doing for the past 3 weeks.
Next part in the next post
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