Champion Trader

[JonnyT]

Don't waste your money

Hi folks,

Having seen the Champion Trader manual I can honestly say don't waste your money.

It will only work when markets are trending strongly, when incidently almost anything works.

Markets do not trend strongly for the majority of the time so be prepared for the chop. Sustained periods where you will make little or nothing.

The stop strategy is simply laughable in the first incarnation so seems to suggest to me that the Guy who wrote the manual might not have traded for too long.

The risk strategy is a joke. Trading futures (on the indices) you have to be stark raving mad to risk 10% of your capital never mind 20% on a single trade.

In my experience a simple breakout strategy performs better, as does Hourly RSI 14 crossing zero.

Once you have a decent stop strategy in place, the really difficuly bit is where to take profits. Again in testing points targets seem as good as anything mechanical, else EOD for day trades.

Like Chartman I have searched and searched for the Holy Grail and now know it doesn't exist. Trading intra-day simple moving averages on 1 minute charts give a good indication of trend so just go with the flow, when price is near the MA (I use the 30 and 60MA)

JonnyT

 

[Helenqu]

Re: Don't waste your money

I have searched and searched for the Holy Grail and now know it doesn't exist. JonnyT [/B]

We had some fun looking though didn't we

 

[ChartMan]

I wasted 2 years of my life looking I only recall having one brief moment of excitement when I thought I had found it........ Turns out it was something scribbled on the back of a Monty python book.

 

[Skimbleshanks]

I think it all depends on whether you are looking for a) THE Holy Grail, or b) YOUR Holy Grail.

The former doesn't exist, the latter does. You just have to carry on looking until you find a trading strategy which fits your personality, style of trading, risk tolerance, time fractal and size of trading pot.

One size does not fit all, and it never has done.

 

[JonnyT]

Thats what I keep telling the wife

One size doesn't fit all

 

[Skimbleshanks]

... and I expect she wanted to know how you knew

 

[neil]

Skimbleshanks


You are a wag

 

[orchard]

Hi All.
JonnyT - why do you assume that just because we bought a 'system, we are looking for the 'Holy Grail'. The fact is, that to a complete novice like me, the CT book opened up possibilities. It does more than give a system, it EXPLAINS the stock market in simple terms - OK experts may laugh, but it certainly taught me something. Doing paper trading, what it does is give you focus. When following trends etc, it is impossible not to take in some knowledge of the movement of shares. I don't think I will ever be an expert, but I am learning.
By the way Scrimbleshanks, thanks for your kind words - yes I feel trading with what is comfortable to you is important.
Enough moans.
Happy trading all.

 

[JonnyT]

Hi Orchard,

Having focus and keeping records is to be commended, probably also a requirement for success.

The point I make is that trading the basic Champion Trader system using the amounts of capital proscribed (20% risked per trade) is a sure fire way to lose your trading capital.

I'm assuming here we are talking Index Futures or Index spreadbets which is after all the market the system is aimed at.

Even the best system in the world will suffer strings of losing trades in a row. I have myself suffered 8 consequitive losing trades following a mechanical system this year alone on two seperate occaisons.

Now you need balls of steel to continue trading after such enevitable failure (basic probability theory). If you traded 20% of your capital a wack imagine how depleted your reserves would be after that little lot.

The single most important factor in trading is money management. Get that right and profit should flow.

JonnyT

 

[orchard]

Thanks JonnyT,
Sorry I fired off at you - I had not appreciated you were talking about % of capital - No I would not be that stupid. On my paper trading I am working only on points, not pounds. My real trading is much more limited and I am simply 'dipping a toe in the water' so to speak.
Once again thanks for your clarification.
Orchard.

 

[Paul B]

 

[tinhead]

Paul B
So you gave us 2 examples of two winning trades but why not give us examples for the other 90% your losing trades, 80% of your post is copied from sections of another well known trading website,So how can you give advice & tell someone to use level2 when you have no idea how to use it yourself ,Level2 is not easy to use and takes a lot of time to study and master and any new traders would simply get taking to the cleaners,i trade for a living and do quite well using l2 but still get caught out big time on occasions i would say to someone who is interested in using it to read the posts of people who know what they are talking about Naz ,and not some garbage of a newbie 2pennie ago spreadbetter.

 

[JonnyT]

Hi PaulB,

Mathmatically you are doomed to failure.

To maintain success you require a fantastic win ratio, and that no major event goes against you. Unfortunately they will.

You will not survive the next five years without being blown out.

JonnyT

 

[Bryan Greenham]

As a novice trader I have tried the CT system myself only on paper. Using end of day data from sharescopeand trading 4 Indices and 7 FTSE 100 shares I found the system records an overall loss.
My view is that its a good entry system but a bad exit one using end of day data.
I guess if I had access to real time data preferably from ShareSentry or Reuters pagers i would give the system only a couple of points stop loss and would close out the psoition immediately it moves against me.
Any views or experience welcome.

 

[ChartMan]

My feeling about a good entry is one that doesn't move against you by more than, say, 0.25%-0.5%.......One always has to allow some movement against you, and this is where support and resistance comes into play. If you want to play a move, it should be close to support, such that if the move fails, the support point is not too far away from your original entry, thus minimising the loss. You have to assume that if support fails, the whole move will fall considerably further.
There is no definitive answer to this as each person's pain threshold is different. The common rule is called " minimising losses"......

 

[JTrader]

Trading the evening Dow with CT or CTA

Hi there

I would be interested to hear about peoples experiences of trading the last few hours of the Dow using CT or CTA, both positive and negative.

I am considering starting using CT by trading the last few hours of the Dow after I finish work on an evening.

Any feedback will be greatfully received,

Jamest

 

[julesrules]

One question;
when using CT how do you identify potential trades?

 

[mmillar]

Just to reiterate what was said in an earlier post (and to support poor Mr CT)...

Mr CT does actually talk about using tight intraday stops (though on his website, not in his book) to get out if the market moves against you (on the FTSE he uses 20 point stops). The idea is that you get stopped out if the market moves against you and then reenter if it moves back in your favour and crosses your entry signal again. This is the same concept as Signalwatch - enter, stop, enter, stop, enter, stop, giveup.

It is therefore not valid to use end of day data to measure the CT formula's performance. If you add in your intraday stops then his performance could be better or worse then predicted by an end of day measurement.

 

[eddyjo]

champion trader

I have recently purchased C.T. and I am not sure when checking
for the trend which periods give the best results. I am using
at the minute a 3month, daily. for the long term trend and
1day,15min for the short term trend, and they dont always agree
this is for intraday, I suppose for position trading it is maybe
better going to smething like 6 months.weekly. on another
point I am finding that the Tradindex spread for daily bears no
relationship to live prices, anybody else notice?

 

[Dr Mike]

Hi

In general the index prices used by spreadbetting companies are based on the prices of the "futures" ard therefore rarely correspond with the indexes you see on web sites.

There are quite extensive discussions on this elsewhere on the site.

If you wish to trade the FTSE index intraday you need to get access to a live futures chart or use D4F who have live charts and a very low spread.

HTH