Afternoon all...
QUOTE FROM CEYDABABY: "Letting profits run, Risk/reward - Its all non-sense. You don't just set a profit target and a stop loss and leave it, you can do, i'm sure.... But its not neccesary the best way to go about it; Another option would be to constantly adapt your target and stop loss in corespondance with market conditions".
QUOTE FROM TOMORTON: "One way I have found it useful to build 'cut your losses, run your profits' into trades without becoming obsessive about it is to re-TA each open position at the close."
Yessss! That's great to hear you both say those things. I've been doing that so far on both my own developing strategies, ie redoing the TA on all my open or prospective trades plus checking Reuters et al every night for expected announcements, but I was doing it feeling very unsure whether it was a legitimate approach.
I think my doubts were coming from the fact that the one strategy I was taught by the TU (the seven-day powerplay) is built around setting a stop-loss and a target then not moving them for the first five days of the trade being live, and thereafter moving them to a rigid pattern? (I'm not saying the PP strategy doesn't work, it just doesn't seem to work very well for me, and when a fellow-weekender queried his lack of success with it, he was told that we're in the wrong kind of market right now).
QUOTE FROM TOMORTON re. re-TAing: ..."if I was not already long here would I buy now? If I can't find a good reason to be a buyer, why would anyone else? Its the new buyers who make a price rise, not the number of people holding, price does not float up on its own. Without a continuous influx of new buyers, price will not rise."
I hadn't thought of it that way, but that makes perfect sense, thankyou!
QUOTE FROM BLACK SWAN: "IMHO you will not create a decent equity curve out of this £1K, when/if you witness it reduce by 25% you should stop and evaluate your mistakes etc. Making that £1k last perhaps a year, whilst you make/learn from just about every possible initial mistake will form the basis of a sound market education...a far better market education than you could possibly achieve from a 2 day residential course."
sorry, dumb question here...by "create a decent equity curve from 1k", did you mean that once I'm fairly confident that I can trade profitably and consistently that I'll need to fund a much bigger a/c so that what I'm risking (and hopefully making) will be "real money", rather than the price of a pint or two? If so, then yup, that was my plan,though if I'm honest, I'd hoped to get to that stage in six months or so, and then use my annual bonus from work to fund the "real thing". But if it takes a year, or longer, then so be it, I guess. (and if my 1k "apprenticeship" a/c lasts me the whole of my training year, I'll be delighted TBH!)
errr...and if that's not what an equity curve is, then pleeeze ignore that waffle, and explain? *g*
I totally agree that putting 5K into a SB account and trading with it is a far better spend of money than giving it as a charitable donation to a slick marketing operation. However, I am not and would never suggest that someone 'brand new' to trading simply bangs in 5K and alternatively donates it as a charitable donation to, for example, IG.
