Took Time Off + New Focus On Sizing & Backtesting | September 2022 Recap

Lesson/Review

Portfolio: Day Trading Small Caps (Unlimited) Stats

Profit: $2,240.47


September Analysis

Wow, I almost got a 1:1.5 risk reward last month. I'm not sure I've ever had such a good R:R. Usually, it's about 1:1 and before I really started focusing on it it was usually negative. But that came at the expense of a worse win ratio. Which.. was a bit because cutting losses quickly but a bit because last month was really tricky. I was almost never in a flow and missed tons of good moves.

My focus was and still is to increase to 30k+ position size on A+ setups. This will be my 3rd week focusing on that. Last month my max size was closer to $20k, so still missing about 33% of that ideal size. Also since it's Q4 now, technically I can increase my Max Loss back to $1k, but I've made a rule change where Max loss is 25% of my biggest win, summertime trading 12.5%,. Since my biggest win is just shy over $2k. My biggest max loss now that it's Q4 is $500.

One thing I'll be doing a lot more is back-test trading. I need to get more comfortable, using bigger size. I've never been wild about using OnDemand with TOS, especially because hotkeys don't work and Time of Sales is all messed up so it's not perfect but at the same time it puts your mind in the right environment. That's key.

I've already made some changes to my trading layout because of backtesting. Such as I realized if I want to be more nimble with the bigger size I need to increase the default quantities for my active trader. Little things like that do make a big difference in the end. One thing I'll be doing over the weekends and pre-trading is trading my biggest wins and some of my biggest losses again. You have to get better at maximizing the big ones and noticing when it's extra dangerous.

One thing I talked about often in last month's watchlists is not getting aggressive enough or letting a ticker run without me. If a ticker is in play I need to be trading it non-stop. Until my last trade is red due to it failing not due to me trading poorly. Also, something else I wrote I really liked "Anything pushing over 50k vol per 1m and it's over $1 is in play... that's just the market to be in. HOWEVER! We really want to see tickers over 100k if we want to play continuation. It might have a nice 3-5 min move but it needs to get that vol in afterwords or RED FLAG." The third thing is we've been seeing a lot of choppy and grinding tickers. Keep trading the frontside range on those but not the breakouts.

 

Trading Analysis

  1. Insights
    1. Took about 1/3rd of the month off (during the best part), Monday worst day, and Friday was almost break even.
    2. Rest stats are pretty consistent
      • 7-8 is still my best time
      • Holding trades over 2 min, is a bad sign
  2. P&L Calendar
  3. Running P&L Calendar

 

Posts In Review

Watchlist

Other

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Back to the post list  ⋅  2 comments have been posted.
disciplined_daytrader Oct. 10, 2022, 12:17 a.m.      
  
so tough to size in small caps cuz really difficult to know when its A+ or not but the more you try to identify it the more likely you are to catch it. hard to say though if its better to just stay same exact avg size and just increase that or just wait for that clean setup and really just size 2x up on that one ticker
disciplined_daytrader Oct. 10, 2022, 12:15 a.m.      
  
good stuff
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