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The biggest challenge I have faced with my trading is calculating my loss limit for exit and actually exiting when I reach that loss limit.
Your strategy and time frame now?
Great book by the way on the Turtles! Strategy/time frame: I enter options straddles when 1) price is at the mean or 2) day before earnings, on certain stocks. I enter calls or puts on certain stocks when price is at the mean. I enter calls or puts when stock is clearly trending down or up. I use several indicators for confirmation to enter. I use no more than 50% of my account. I started with $500. I’m now at $1000. I am in think or swim practice account. I’ve lost $750 of my real money. So taking a break. I buy from 1 to 13 contracts. I plan to have two real money accounts. One with $500, the other $3000, when I get back in the game. (I started my trading journey by actually entering trades late last summer, so about 9 months. But I started learning in 2019. Once upon a time I was briefly a runner in Chicago in the mid 1990s. But for the life of me I can’t remember if it was CBOT or CME.) My stop is half of what my exit is. If my exit is at 40% then my stop is 20%. Or if my exit is at 30 cents then my stop is at 15 cents. Once I enter I use indicators for exit but much less than what I use for entry. If I buy multiple contracts, I get out of all at my stop, but if I reach my original exit then I get out of some and stay in others and stay in based on next level of support or resistance for hard exit, and set a 20% trail stop limit with no offset for Mark price to manage loss. I primarily use day or weekly for finding trends, daily for everything else, including exit/stop. I also look at 233 or 34 minute chart before I enter. All of the above are my planned strategy based on Complete Turtle Trader and other books I’ve recently read but do I follow it to a tee with discipline and consistency? No. And last year when I started trading my strategy wasn’t this fleshed out at all. The Complete Turtle Trader has really given me steadiness with my emotions when I am losing paper money. One of the lines that resonates with me is that the Turtles would get back in after several losses in a row. I have a list of over 100 equities but would like to get down to less than 50. But then again maybe even less so I can add other types of securities/derivatives. Why so many? Because ultimately I want to be able to enter 15 to 100 trades per month. No more than 30 if I decide not to aim for Trader Tax Status with the IRS.
I highly recommend to throw that strategy out and go trend following. Nothing in your description is worth saving.
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