if you earn money you must not ask anybody. what you do for me it looks like a strategy, that is positive, but it is extremely overcomplicated. markets are extremely complex, and if one wants to deal with them, make money there, one needs dumbass simple approach, that is my conviction, without telling details an writing 1000 explanations.

jebus89 wrote: my best setup for manual trading systems

Just curious … have you tried coding and backtest your manual strategy?

If Yes, are results acceptable?

GraHal wrote: jebus89 wrote: my best setup for manual trading systems Just curious … have you tried coding and backtest your manual strategy? If Yes, are results acceptable?

The problem would be to make it enough accurate (which demand enough data/pivots) and at the same time enough fast to execute… Looking for accurate supports/resistances, and trendlines would make the system very laggy in realtime and would need lot of time to backtest (not hours, but days for 1 backtest of 200.000 candles)

I used to try and cobble together trading systems using all sorts of indicators, hoping they’d make me money. It worked more or less… sometimes… Then someone gave me a not-so-subtle hint… I think it was you, @justisan. 😉 Since then, I see things much better and more simply, and it works. It just works. These days, I focus entirely on mean reverse in the S&P 500 or Nasdaq, and it works even with the simplest rules. You just have to filter out the extreme situations… like Covid or Trump.

Nice Topic @Jebus89

I regretfully haven’t replied but feel I should as this is my domain. I’ll say why, because I have been profitable manually for years maybe 7 or 8 by now. But not wildly so for the first part of that. Personally I only went auto some years ago due to raising a family (3 under 5) for that period and a chronic pain resulting from a previous business. You must know, this has been a 10 year dream to reality and losing the ability to provide for my family and unable to work like regular Joe’s has put me with my back against the wall. Sometimes I long for the comfort of a ‘cough cough’ J-O-B.

System 1: Even my first basic system was trading Daily time frame Pump’n’Dumps on small and micro stocks, mostly resources but what ever the thematic was. Think lithium, cannabis, gold etc.. I’d move through them short listing anything that may not get whacked with a capital raise for 6-9months because I may hold for a 2 days to a few weeks or more. I would then run through them scanning for a MACD rise above 20 on heavy volume. There HAD to be anticipated results or announcement due in the near term and I would position before this. On the day of the announcement I would I would make sure to be available to scalp out the first 20 mins or so. Sometimes hiding in a hedge or on a roof (I was a landscaper/gardener for the ultra wealthy), sometimes just be late for the job haha. This was very profitable and taught me L2 order flow reading and I soon learnt I was a scalper. Other traders would bid up the open price and my money was usually made or lost during pre-market before the bell I would have to type my order and get a spot in the queue, often adjusting to front run larger blocks or dummy bids that could get lifted. The Red Herring with this system and the reason I stopped was the research time involved and the many times the announcement was followed by a capital raise.

Things are different for the 5 years I’ve been trading futures, or more correctly the cash market as I don’t hold for more than the session…if that. The shorter the better. But there was a progression from somewhat discretionary to systematic manual trading. Let’s call it Hybrid trading where we have some statistical validity of a basic condition and apply some subjectivity through way of structure studies and regime. I see the obvious argument here is if you can’t code it and see the results how can you trust it. Well this is the hard part, but I can only say that that due to ‘bar close’ vs the ability for the human to detect things and screen subjectivity it is very possible you are all sitting on a few gemstones that you have written off.

System 2: Lacking regime, I set out to prove this to myself by going away every week for 3 months straight. I trade XJO, a mean reverting market due to commodity exposure and currency fluctuations, same as FTSE. I also had the BTFD as the reverse and I took every signal I could on both markets, trading around the clock for data. I design a signal (attached STFR). A mean reversion system that highlights the highest 15m close from 8 bars ago. A breach of this and a 5m HA Doji w/ break of ST trend line (fractals were the real pain of this method). Enter with 15pt stop and 20pt scalp target for half, run the rest and trail with a step. It was the hardest thing in trading I’ve ever subjected myself to. I could cry. Sometimes I was so sick but in a trail I would wake up every 30 mins to see if I could move my stop down. On paper the math is geared towards a D grade system of by expected value ie. not even worth trading. After the experiment (100+) it summed up as a 49% WR with a 1.34 Gain/Loss. I used the signal to test various filters and scalp vs trail etc. but traded it raw for data. It was profitable and still is, only I found years after this study what made it to a 80% WR system with a far higher profit factor. Out of that whole time I spread sheeted as cleanly as I could (there are biases in there of course towards the system mostly) and it was one trade, just one that made it so effective. It nearly got knocked out twice during that run but went on to make a trade that rewired my brain completely as to how this should be approached. I am all for scalp, scalp, swing. But now add on the first scalp instead,

So you see, for the darkest days where I became a robot I now know if I find a signal that presents anything like this as a first idea testing then I know I can make money off of it. Anybody can, but this way is not good for health.

Moving on, I actually did this for several other systems and I learnt something that was to change me forever. They all suck. Trading sucks. Even slobots do my head in. It’s always hard. Everything works sometimes for a bit, then sometimes very badly. Most importantly nobody really has a clue, but must find something to believe in! So what is missing with all our strategies?

Imagine how much data I have collected! So moving forward, a brief snapshot of how this all looks now.

System 3: 5m chart. I call it Trade of the Day (TOD) as I aim to capture one main move as fast as it can be then walk away for 23 hours. I now categorise every day into BO/BD or BOMR/BDMR before the open using VPOC, now as an indicator but I still check it manually. I shortlist a few red flags for each regime and mark news catalysts as the charts can flip, this is where it is possible to have the incorrect entry even though the regime is 86% correct. Takes practice. I draw macro structures by TF and weight the higher TF’s as potential targets. My train will turn up everyday in the first minutes or sometimes up to 2 hours if not already in progress. I have one way of taking a BO, one place to put my stop and the size is volatility adjusted. I have 2 further independent systems (Halt9/Halt20 or Vvoid scalp) to add size for scalps or holds but MUST trail the initial parcel to the end but never losing my entry bar or the adds entry bar. I’m allowed to scalp the adds but found it best to maintain 1%-2% risk if the trail has tightened I MUST add more risk most days maxing out my account for margin. For mean reversion it is a bit different and this is the bulk of my scalping as that BO trade is an A set-up and only comes around every week or two. MR trades are bread and butter with 4 variations + STFR, often counter trend I use 4 stochastics. This is not my system design and is available on YT. Ask me more and I’ll tell you sure, but be mindful that this type of cycle reading requires fast decision making and intense concentration 100’s of hours of rehearsals and thousands of hours screen time. Try doing that at a standing desk…sigh. I can’t sit FFS due to sacrum pain. That pain shows in the intensity of my trading, a little bit angry. Output is around 65% WR with 2.2+ PF but fluctuates with my stupid humanness. But hey, this a lot to remember and measure in real time so even with errors it’s the best way I’ve found to make money and shun the mediocrity of the capitalist world we were born into.

As a scalper I expect to return 100% per year+. I am not rich yet because like any business I have bills to pay and started with a very small account so suffer from the cost of the learning curve, but this is my sole income thus performance based. I’ll get there. My main points are, don’t write off signals that test poorly if you can trade manually. Second, regime is everything. This is the reason why people can’t stick to things for long, not because they can’t trade. All systems cycle this way and it’s visible in the data but it’s not filters but structure that determines the probabilities. I’ve never studied ICT yet but suspect this is what I have found. So hopefully this inspires someone to put lipstick on a pig and make some money because all strategies suck as the bulk of losses are trading where they shouldn’t be executed and the winners are not being pushed hard enough.

Ever wonder why you ‘see’ its a short at the open but are left with could’ve, should’ve would’ve? It’s because there is a trade cycle in progress that you haven’t learnt to identify yet.

Wonder why you can’t trade the size you deserve? That’s about conviction and you need to turn over every stone and look in some very dark places. The above post details some, just some of how hard I looked for this conviction. I train for this in the other 23hrs per day looking to improve my edge even a little bit. I review my charts routinely and have a Daily, Weekly. Monthly, Quarterly and Annual review process. Wifey gets the Quarterly and holds me accountable, but I have not been able to train her to stop asking “How’s your day?”. It is a perpetual conversation as I have explained I can have my face ripped off but nothing is wrong or I can win big but broke a rule for a few minutes to do that and am left with disgust and self loathing. I just want green marks for compliancy and the law of large numbers takes care of the rest.

I can’t even get close algorithmically but have built a handy pension fund so I can graduate out of high stakes scalping as a sort of succession plan if my oldest son doesn’t take to this profession.

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