History: I've been trading since the end of 2008 (great time to start huh?). I started very small and for the first 3 years I would describe my style as semi-actively managed. It mostly consisted of picking solid companies with decent growth outlooks or dividends, holding onto winners and dumping losers. It worked but the returns have been slow, yet profitable.
Last year I started more active day trading. I started at Zecco doing small options plays. The platform is way too cumbersome for even semi-active trading. So I opened an IB account. Did fairly well at first which I mostly attribute to beginners luck and some great volatility. Over the past 4 months I've managed to take about a 50% haircut, or about 30% of my original deposit. I decided enough was enough. Signed up for futures.io (formerly BMT), reading books, looking at my trading style, my trading psychology and limitations.
Goals:
Improve psychology - Stop moving stops and take profits.
Do not force trades - stop taking trades because I'm bored or they look good enough. Just wait.
Trade consistently, within my rules.
Use my indicators wisely but don't rely on them and learn price action.
Stick to a plan. Don't be constantly switching indicators.
Use appropriate sizes for my account. Stop making huge bets that never work out.
Trading Style:
I would like to trade partly automated and partly discretionary. For 2 reasons, my trading psychology sucks and I want to improve my trading psychology.
I have built a few NT strategies that I plan on using to trade market leaders and trend stocks. I kind of feel like I'm going to take a slinging for that last part but my script backtests very well against these types of stocks and poorly against sideways or choppy stocks. If anyone is interested I can go into it more but it's a very basic bot.
For my discretionary trading I'm going to be trading with SPY and using TheWizard's strategy that he updated part way through his holy grail p2 thread. I'm going to be using this strategy while trying to incorporate S/R and learning price action.
Steps to get this done:
I'm going to start by trading a SIM account for 3 months, unless people think that is too long and that I should do 2 months. I'm going to be constantly looking to expand my knowledge or trading, markets, supply/demand, etc. I'm going to constantly be practicing self-disciple, no more reversing, no more moving stops, no more forcing setups because it might happen.
For my automated trading I'm going to be constantly assessing without getting in the way. This means looking for stocks that demonstrate the trend that trades well with this pattern. I also plan on re-optimizing about once a week. My bot only has 4 total parameters (2 of which are profit/stop loss targets, one is start hour and one is the size of the better renko bar bricks) but because the tick data only goes back 120 days I have to be looking to re-optimize quite often. If the whole automated thing doesn't work out or discretionary is just more profitable I won't be afraid to dump it. It has been a learning experience on its own and a good way to freshen up on some programming and stocks.
Another user mentioned "perfect trade" a process where he goes through the previous day bar-by-bar and replays the day. I'm interested in doing this as it will provide some extra practice and I will get to see where I am making mistakes and where I could be improving more.