Hi phoentzs,
If I would be able to answer your questions, I would most certainly do. But as I tried to bring across more often : my very stort TF strategies are technical only (though some trend aspect would be part of it for entry). Let me try to give an example – see below 1st attachment.
What you see is a Long and after it exits there’s right away a Long again. The Exit is justified (my means of signal does its job), but it is *not* justified because another force tells to Enter Long again (thus at the same moment). You can try to solve that with signals, but for me they would be too difficult. What is not difficult for me is preventing the Exit when an other signal tells to Enter. Thus, this is still a pure technical solution because I can’t design the signal for it (think retraces and you will understand how difficult it is to get this all right).
I have no selection on trading times, as they all don’t work out, net (the ones I tried are countless).
Long only or Short only – also does not work out, ever. Also not when each is run in parallel in two strategies. And thus “all” in one strategy (it just brings more).
The skill is, I think, that one should avoid focusing on Long/Short. You can see it happening past week – Long prevails and thus my past month’s Short-focused lose.
(I coincidentally worked on this this whole Sunday). Thus, maintaining the curve you see below (2nd attachment, past month), instead of it going downwards because of the past week (it did for me).
3. With TP/SL or other exits?
Everything imaginable. For me it is THE thing, as I am not the best in Entries (you are, I think). Destroy the Exit – make the best of it. Was it right ? then squeeze all out of it. This is nothing like TP amounts or percentages. It is technical again. See 3rd attachment for relative infinite trailing (the blue line). Btw, this is a TF of 1 minute.
4. Many trades per day or just a few selected ones (1 trade per day)?
As many as possible (4th attachment). This is 609 full trades the past month (thus ~ 30 per day) and a relatively low number because this focuses on the higher win rate (63% here).
If I would like to summarize the above, then I would need to say that this is not 1 (or several) second I have been used to, but 1 minute because of again technical reasons. I even tend to go to 2 minutes for (more) technical reasons. Let’s say that this is about breathing space for Limit orders – it has nothing to do with more easy averages etc. because these can be made just the same at the second level. More importantly (and also technical) is the lack of history on indexes in the “seconds” timeframes. You won’t come further than 3 days or so, which is only because of a lacking seconds-database (for IG). For Fx it’s no problem (but still only 200K vs 1M history of course). And for minutes it is no problem throughout.
I’m afraid you won’t learn much from me, although I try !
Maybe it is telling that I usually need a 1000++ lines of code to get somewhere. You wouldn’t even want that ?