Thursday, November 4, 2010

Thurs. 11/04

2:15pm CDT - Higher Reward:Risk (RR) ratio is all the buzz these days in trading blogs and forums. But I'm convinced that it's all BS really. Let's assume a 1-lot entry and a fixed target and stop with no scale in/out, no trailing stops, no slippage, no commissions, etc. The higher your RR, the lower your win% will be, and they will be inversely proportional. If your RR is 1:1, your win% might be 55%, 2:1 might be 45%, 3:1 might be 35%, 1:2 might be 70%, etc. This week has reminded me of this basic fact more so than most. Today was another day I used tighter stops for ZS and got stopped out and lost. Had I been using the same stop levels (lower R:R) Tues, Wed., and today that I had used on Monday, I would have recovered much of what was lost Monday because many of my stops wouldn't not have been hit. But you never know what kind of day it's going to be (choppy or trending) until it has happened. I need to get back to a single system that works. Not messing with the criteria and changing the variables day by day. I know better.

Net breakdown (contracts traded):
ZS -$1686(24), ZC -$15(3), RLM $133(3)
RESULTS FOR DAY
Contracts:30
Net $P/L:-1568
Wins:3
Losses:5
Win%:38
Avg$Win:80
Avg$Loss:-362

2 comments:

  1. Hi MBA,
    I had bad days too. Still not clear what went wrong. All I knew was when I was not trading (CL) it moved very nice. When I'm ready to battle it became the land of mine field.

    ZS seemed very volatile these days. Since you can trade multiple contracts, why don't reduce the size, loosened the SL. Make it same SL in term of $$. Of course you might want higher
    PT

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  2. Thanks De'T -that is one idea (varying size based on risk/SL) I have built into systems before. Need to do more homework this weekend.

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