No not that. I'm referring to losing. Since I began keeping proper records of my trading activity on a spreadsheet, my strategy recorded it's second losing week out of 38. That's not too shabby! Of course some weeks were only a handful of points, however, when I am trading at £200 per point, as I will be one day, a handful is a lot more than a weeks wage in my current job!
In fact as I write this I am 4 days deep into this week and today was my first positive day, points wise. I am fully aware and accepting that ALL strategies lose, and no one wins 100% of the time, but it is still painful, especially when it's losing day after losing day for more than a week.
But, you have to stick with it. Don't be tempted to change. Just keep trading your strategy, and if you have a winning one, you will come out ahead, in time.
It's exactly the same with Variance in Poker. There will be sessions when you run like Usain Bolt and other times when you run like a nose. In poker, variance is measured in hands played over the long term which no one has actually pinned a number too, but most say if you don't have a sample of 500,000 hands or so, then don't bother to look at it. Now that gives you a better idea of just how much trading we potentially have to do to see if our strategy is actually a winning one. Mine could be a loser still, because 38 weeks is not a long time and I have not exactly taken 1000's of trades. But, I am happy to keep applying it's rules and keep trading it day after day. I will say this though, I know it is not a good strategy when the markets are erratic and rangebound as it lends itself to being whipsawed in and out, but then it is up to me to adapt it to the conditions, which is what I have done.
When the markets appear to be rangebound, I will simply move my stop to breakeven a lot sooner than usual and if I get stopped out then so be it. I will then consider adding scalping to this so once a trade is 8 or 10 points in profit I will close it, once my stop has been moved first, and whatever happens after is of no consequence to me. It's cant be, because I have closed my trade so I was never going to be in any move to start with. This is the hardest part of trading I still and likely always will, on some level, struggle too comes to terms with. Leaving points in the market. But, it is the part of trading you HAVE to come to terms with if you want to be a success. Not only in terms of closing winners too early, but also manually cutting losers.
Well, tomorrow is Friday and I am looking forward to what opportunities the market brings my way. So long as I follow my strategy, then that is all I can ask. The results will take care of themselves.
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