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Ok thanks, yeah interesting way to think about it. I personally cannot yet trade the swings from high to low, just have to wait for them to happen and hopefully get in on the rally.

I see thanks. And when you're talking about lost motion, this is another phrase for retracements i assume? I looked up lost motion in engineering-kind of interesting to know but couldn't really see the link to markets, other than if you consider that any dips are just inefficiencies in the system.

Hi THT, this week's stupid question. When you say 2 bar trailing stop. That's the low of the previous two daily/weekly bars behind the current day/weeks bar?

Hi THT, I assume you have this vertical time grid plotted out in advance and you're waiting to see if the market obeys it. Is this time cycle purely derived from observation? So following the Covid crash you could observe 3 lows and plot 3 vertical lines and see that theres roughly an equal distance between them. You could then plot out more further in time with the same interval. That seems very simplistic but perhaps that is not how you come about it. When I say it looks simplistic I realise there is a lot more to a strategy than this observation to make it work.

Thanks again for your comments

Forgot to mention your 50% lines THT, i see what you mean shaving off 50% of the market value does seem to be common when there is a big dip. Again don't see the sense why though but you can say that about a lot of things.

Thanks both, with the time cycles i struggle to believe that these big events can be timed. But if in history it shows that every x years something big happens then that's surely more than coincidence. The problem i have with that is i don't understand why they would repeat like this-i know a lot of things repeat in markets! But with crashes i cannot see any logical reason why they would conform to this because aren't they triggered by unexpected world events and how can they be timed, perhaps its my lack of understanding of how the markets work. Anyway its certainly interesting. I often look at forex markets out of interest and i just can't see the patterns at all, they look all over the place to me but i have upward trends ingrained in my retinas so maybe no surprise! Thanks for the article Caseynotes, some good general tips, nothing particularly groundbreaking there but does at least make you realise everyone is basically using the same tools and very few have higher levels of insight.

These are relatively rare events but I do find myself getting hung up on them.

If we take the 2008 decline on the US500, I've attached a daily chart of this. You'd be better off shorting but of course you don't know that it's going to be an ongoing decline and the risk potentially is that you switch to a short preference and then the market does revert back to an upward trend. The market stayed below the 100 day MA for an extended time so maybe that's an indication of which way to trade but I know it's not always reliable. Probably also helps if you use a trailing stop at least to minimise damage.

Hi all, As a solely long trader at the moment which in an uptrend as we see in many markets right now, it works. However, one day retracements will become a reversal, meanwhile its not easy to know that in advance so you might still be blindly trading long when its actually turning into a downtrend. The key thing for me would seem to be that you need to realise this as soon as possible and shift to short trading to avoid too many losses-easier said than done. Anyone got any experience or advice on this? The price moving below and not breaking above a long term moving average doesn't seem to be a bad indicator, lower lows etc but i'm just looking at past data. If you've been so biased to long trading its kind of hard imagining switching to the other side. I never wanted to have a strong bias to long or short but when i wasn't i struggled to make any profit although that was for day trading which i've given up on. Thanks for any input

Yeah the list sounds familiar, your first comment is an interesting one as I feel like you can't say anything about what you think you can make over a given time. But if you can stick to a system and the market doesn't behave in ways you don't expect I guess with time you can given the data, although you only have the past to go on. But as we know history tends to repeat itself.. Thanks

Great thanks, didn't even consider spreadsheet templates would exist for this stuff

Ok thanks, so I think what ig do is just give you the values, not plotted over time but it is cumulative over the total time you've been trading.. so in theory I could plot it myself if I noted down over each trade how the win rate and risk reward values changed.

Hi all, IG include trade analytics in their platform. For anyone not aware they give: Return rate (expectancy), Win rate, profit/loss ratio What good is this information? you know if you're making money if your account goes up on average. Can you use this information to help you improve your strategy in any way? Thanks for the feedback.

Yeah demo was very useful for me, wish i'd used it more when i first started trading! before jumping in. Managed a 5.6R trade today! Super happy with that. If only i could keep this up 😄

yeah i mean with such a low target e..g 5 points and no stop you're going to have a high win rate. Your risk/reward ratio is mental of course and as you say so flies in the face of every trading book/article you read. I also don't know what i'd do if the market fell a lot i felt like i had used all the available trades based on the balance and then you're stuck really until if/when the market recovers. Ideally you want to move with the market if you can find a way. Anyway, good luck to you, certainly building a buffer to trade with that isn't your original capital is nice to have.

This is basically a position trading, buy and hold strategy which i didn't think was really viable with spread bets. I did consider a no stop strategy but it didn't sit too well with me. There's always the thought in the back of my mind that you have to prepare for the worse case scenario and for me that was a market potentially losing 50% of its value possibly more in a big crash, so your account would have to be able to weather that, especially when you consider the margin requirement for multiple positions plus the cost to trade. I assume you're using futures not daily funded bets? What do you do if you future expires? Have IG always rolled it over? You say your account is protected but only from negative balance, IG will happily close positions if your margin out weights you balance and that's when the losses would come. You must have some sense of what you would do if the market made a massive move down. Then there's the assumption that the market a, will spring back and b, spring back relatively quickly. I once thought about having buy orders at % prices e.g. 2% fall, 5%, 10%, 20%, 50% of the market value but by account could only cope with this if the position size was very small because the margin would quickly become pretty large assuming all these were opened and kept falling. I think most people want to find what they'd consider a low risk strategy that makes money, if you never have to close positions and you never drawdown then i guess you may consider that low risk.Takes a strong constitution i bet! Once you're using the markets money i guess you care a bit less but i think once you gain the money you really consider it yours and dont really want to hand it back.

Does this mean you use a large % of your account at any one time. For example if we ignore unit size you could have 8 trades open all with no stops, at any point in time some might be in profit others at a loss and you just wait for them to come back to profit? I just don't understand at what point do you close trades if the market falls too far or you don't?

Thanks for your comments. I'll have a think about time based exits, I'm not about to ditch stops but could be used to set a limit. My trades are discretionary so it's diffult to get numbers based on a specific system so I can only go on if I trade for long enough and make money I have to assume that with enough time I will encounter all market conditions. I might be dead by the end of it mind you..I can to some extent look back historically. Yes I realise stop losses can be detrimental from a profitability point of view.

I will take a look at FXDreema too, thanks for the tip

Thanks for the comments, i will think more closely about how to trail a stop. I did look into a PSAR strategy a while back but i think my problem was i used it to signal entry and exit e.g. trail a stop with it and of course sometimes it worked and sometimes not but i think my error was that its not an entry signal but i can see how sometimes it can work as a stop loss location.

Ok thanks guys, what you say makes sense. I was certainly considering using multiple units and selling off at different points but just not decided exactly where. Also when you trade in the smallest size which I am as a long term way to test what works I don't have that option but I could step it up a unit. Of course trailing the stop will massively affect the expectancy of the method I imagine so I would want to sort this out sooner rather than later otherwise I've done live testing that doesn't count for much if I then change the method. Not trailing the stop really comes backt to the idea of wanting to be right about the situation which we naturally do but I can see that it's a hard enough game as it is and better to live to fight another day with some profit rather than a loss. Another factor that comes into play is the psychology of the unit size. I'm much more willing to risk a loss when the monetary value is not big in my view. The hope is after a long trial at small sizes I would step up and hope my psychology doesn't change when more significant amounts of money are at stake. In theory if the method works I should have some confidence to be able to do that eventually.

Hi all, Something i'm struggling with at the moment which i'm sure depends on the individual but interested in other views. I enter a trade with a stop loss and profit target limit in place. This is often a large risk/reward ratio, between 5-9 : 1. As i don't currently trail my stop there are only two outcomes in theory. However, what i have been liable to do is reduce my take profit target, and in the case of my last trade, my initial ratio was 8:1 but when i reached 6:1, i thought you know what don't be greedy and throw this away because in theory if the market reversed i'd then have a 1R loss. So what is my question.. I guess the main point is whether anyone should allow a trade to lose if its in profit 1R+? Logically it doesn't make sense to throw that away given how hard it is to make a profit in the first place and to not protect that might suggest you think you know what the market is doing, but to me i'm not sure you can ever really know that. To add some context i expect my trades to be open a few days, in this case i got to 6R much sooner so my time frame for the trade shortened as i closed it early and it moved further than expected in the time. In the end the market did move to 8R where my initial target was but of course i didn't know that with certainty so i didn't mind and that gives me 6R to throw away some other time Probably the only answer is to keep testing and gather as much data as possible but when you don't automate your trades i'm sure thoughts like this often present themselves. Thanks for any advice

How do i find short time period price data e.g. 1hr over many years? The brokers only show you so far back, then you have no choice but to view past data at lower time resolution lets say. If you trade over shorter time periods how can you back test enough data when it doesn't seem to be available.

Yeah I see what you're saying, I guess you only know once you have enough data to get some kind of expectancy and this is a bit like when investments show you how they've done historically.