What Are Your Trading Goals?
When I am having a trading discussion with someone, the topic eventually comes up – What are your goals?
I want to make money!
A common goal for a lot of people is – I want to make a certain amount of dollars per day. They will also usually have a maximum number of trades they will take per day. Or, they will quit after a certain number of winners in a day.
Is that the best approach?
The more I thought about this, the more I felt I had to go against these common thoughts. My goal is a lot simpler – it is to take every setup that meets my rules during the timeframe I am trading. If you think about it, when you are doing your backtesting, you don’t stop counting for that day when you get to a certain dollar value or number of winners – you count them all. And that’s what the stats and math are based on – all of the trades. I felt that if I inserted an arbitrary number that I came up with, I was changing the math.
Some days the market is in a giving mood – I want to take all that it is willing to give. Some days it is in a taking mood – I want to give it as little as possible – not keep feeding it because I am trying to meet my arbitrary daily goal that is not based on any stats.
That’s another reason I like trading with the Inteligex algo. It is going to take every setup that meets the criteria. If it takes no trades because there were none to take, I’m happy.
If it takes 20 in a day, I’m happy. Because it is executing every setup that meets the rules – and that’s what all the math behind it is based on.
But I’m in control
The only thing I have added is a daily loss limit. I have found after months of tracking it that once my daily loss gets above a certain amount, it is not coming back to profit for that day. So, as I said earlier, when the market is taking, I want to give as little as possible. I give it enough room to turn around – based on history – and if it goes beyond that, I shut it down for the day. Then I track the rest of the day so I can see if that trend changes. So far, it hasn’t. I don’t need to enforce this limit very often, but I feel a lot better having it there.
I realize my view on goals may not be what is commonly taught, but I feel from an analytical view, it makes the most sense for me and fits with the math oriented model Inteligex is built on.
Get an approach your happy with then be consistent in how you implement it, that keeps Trader Emotions away and makes it easier to hit your goals!