Hi there,
Here's just a little follow up from my side. I have posted only a few times in the past but am using MTP a lot!
Many things I read on this forum are leading just to a few keypoints.
scepticism; greed; patience; trust
Trading is about making money and it's not a sort of occupational therapy that leads to succes just by doing it as many times you can. Searching for set-ups on many different timeframes does (in my opinion) not lead to succes it just leads to a lack of overall oversight in what you're doing. Make up your mind and than stick to it, don't go chasing other timeframes or products as soon as you're having a few losing trades.
For instance, the starting of januar didn't bring me any good but I did stick to my approach. After 3 weeks I was down 15% on the account, now at the end of the 1th quarter my account is up 75% from the end of 2005 on. The same thing happend before and I am sure that it will happen again.
One other thing that I also mentioned before is the use of different timeframes and the influence on your fees. About a year ago I did trade the es ab and ym over a 3 month period and found that (using 3 and 5 min timeframes) my fees were very high, about 25% of the net performance.
I than did some research and found that by using a 15min timeframe over the same period, the performance was similar (larger waves etc) but with lower fees, 5% of the net performance.
I now only trade on larger timeframes. Also by doing that, it is easier to follow different markets without losing the oversight.
Boredom is something that comes with the job, using larger timeframes it might even be worse than trading 3 and 5min. However I don't sit at my desk all day, my approach only uses the close of a bar, so I know when to look at my screen and I will. When you start looking for other trades/timeframes or whatever as soon as you're bored, I guess you either still have to learn a lot or you're not suited for what you're doing.
I have worked as a Market Maker and professional futures trader and can truly say that boredom hasn't got anything to do with mtp, markets can, from time to time, be boring. Oh, and yes, using hindsight I can tell you now what you should have done last friday but I can not tell you what you must do tomorrow.
A few weeks ago I went skiing, after a week it seemed that I picked the right week to go, I didn't miss a single trade. That would have been a boring week, and with hindsight one can say that there were plenty of swings to trade.Friends (also traders) keep saying things like: the market went up, did you get a signal? They somehow asume that mtp is some sort of holy grail that works as a car navigator, well, wake up!
I use the automatic generated signals only, and I use some of the moneymanagement that Steve is teaching, I slightly adjusted the riskmanagement rules and I use my own exit strategy.
Without the signals I don't do anything, I did exactly 90 trades this quarter and the w/l ratio is exactly 50.
The MTP software I bought almost 2 years ago is not some sort of black box. It generates signals and insight in the market/chart and moneymanagement. Work with that and you can easliy achieve good results. If you want a blackbox, what is the point of doing it yourself, just bring your money to a hedgefund or cta and you can play golf all day.
Also, one stated that Steve might start making reports for just one product or timeframe, ask Tony, he did a great job on that before.
It doesn't make sence to have a monday report on es and a tuesday on ym etc, you can not measure the performance on a days trading. By measuring my performance on a daily basis, one would have thought of me being a loser in januar and probaly will think differently now.
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