Selasa, 27 November 2012

Holy Grail

As I progress with my book  I find it's really slow going- much harder than I thought since I want to do a really proper job. Meanwhile I thought I'd share some key ideas here on the blog that will end up in the book.

One of these key ideas is the search for the Holy Grail. There will shortly be a series of posts comprising a number of parts entitled: The Holy Grail and How to Find It. If you've signed up to twitter you'll be notified as this multi part series of posts hit the blog.

Selasa, 13 November 2012

Trading is all about Probabilities

Trading is all about probabilities.

We have pictures that have a high probability of disclosing momentum and order flow in certain directions. But these are only probabilities because it only needs a very strong hand to do the opposite of what the then order flow is showing.

But this is the best we can do. If our pictures are correctly described and we have backtested them up the wahzoo then we will have the statistics of the probabilities.

Calculation of probabilities is done in many endeavours including weather forecasting and electioneering. This is a link to a very intereesting article from the Sydney morning Herald on probabilities being used to forecast the recent U.S. presidential elections.

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/he-called-it-and-now-silvers-a-popculture-star-20121112-2978j.html

Kamis, 01 November 2012

Discretionary Trading

There are some great conversations in the comments to the previous post. The last question was:
El, per your stat, how many contracts, say on euro futures do you trade per $30,000?

As an example, 1 contract per $10,000, i e 3 contracts per $30,000?

Can you expand a bit on what you beleive is a "proper" account per so many contracts?
 The answer depends on many things including: Are you CP? What your win rate is. What your average trade size is (the average of all wins and losses). Your risk per trade and so on. In other words, how many contracts can you trade without wiping out your account. Making this assessment is crucial if you want to trade aggressively or even passively. Once you have this number then it should be reduced to half, to a quarter or even less depending on your degree of aggression.

All of this depends on having comprehensive back testing stats with a large enough sample size to be relevant. The back testing is not only to validate you as CP but also to provide the information for proper position sizing.