Step 2 Grind Continues
After my triple reset earlier this month, I believe I did make two more. It's been so costly that I sometimes wonder if it's still worth it to continue. For the time being, I will.
With my last string of resets, I was basically jumping in live with new parameters. This did affect my performance quite a bit. One major change was dropping the 3,000-contracts increment down to 2,000-contracts. In other words, faster price action and more noise. A quick glance with historical data seemed to say using the 2,000-contracts increment should work. Not the case in real-time. I definitely need to be more careful using Tradovate's replay feature to test out new parameters.I finally went back to my default split-screen setup - 3,000-contracts increment NQ chart on the left and 4,000-contracts increment ES chart on the right. These "legacy" parameters seem to work the best so I'll be sticking with them for now. I do lose a bit of information, but I get much cleaner momentum signals. This leads to my next weakness - forcing trades.
I find that I still force trades in every session. This is because time is money. More specifically, I try too hard to complete the Combine before my monthly renewal kicks in. As a result, this has cost me quite a bit because I'll hit my daily loss limit (DLL) in one session rather than spreading it out. The lesson here, especially with futures, is that there won't necessarily be opportunities to trade every single day.
With that in mind, I took a small loss of $192 on Thursday. I just decided to call it quits since my "read" that day didn't really favor me. The following day, Friday, was just killer.
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I think this goes to show that my good days can be very good. It's just a matter of realizing bad days and stopping them from getting worse. Since I still focus on momentum scalps, it has been very difficult to make my ALT smaller than my AWT. On good days, it's sustainable because my win rate is quite high.