The market is up some to start the day today. I thought we might have some new trades trigger this morning since the watch list grew a lot last night, but no trades have been made as of yet. I closed my positions for AIG and FIS this morning. Both eeked out a small profit. FIS may have been tough for some people because it was booming upward a few days ago and looked like it was on its way to the profit target only to reverse course and erase most of its gains. Those can be tough to watch, but keep in mind a few things:
1) It goes both ways. COF looked all but dead last week, and it came back for a profit. These things have a way of evening out over time, and I have back tests to prove it.
2) It can be so nice to have trading rules. Imagine if you didn't have rules, and you'e trying to just use your intuition on when to get out of the position. Would you have cut the cord on COF last week when it was down big? Then you would have missed the climb back up. And what if you held FIS past its big boom upward in price, and it was starting to sink like it did the last few days. At what point would you have cut the cord? Or would you still be holding it (and as of the time I'm writing this, it's gone down even more since I sold it this morning). Those would be tough decisions, and in my experience they are a lot more gut-wrenching because if you leave the decision up to your own intuition, there can be a lot more self doubt and self criticism. If you instead leave it up to rules that were part of a robust 20-year back test, you really don't have to worry about any of this stuff if you don't want. I just stick to the rules and for the most part consider short term price movements along the way to be interesting statistical manifestations rather than gut-wrenching shifts in price. And it's because I know I'm leaning on this academic research.
3) Also remember that the stock trading strategy I use has a lot of raw edge according to back tests. So if you want to take a profit at 1 ATR instead of the 2 ATR mark that I like, you can absolutely do that. You would likely end up with a much higher win percentage that way. The tradeoff is the overall net returns might be noticeably lower because you aren't making as much profit on each win. But that might be a perfectly fine tradeoff for you that makes it easier for you to make this all work. And that approach still has back-tested edge.
For those following my futures trades, you'll notice I got into a futures position yesterday. Just to make sure it's clear, if the MES price closes above 3969.00 today (the prior day high), then I'll close the position at the open of the futures market at 3pm Pacific Time. Otherwise I'll leave it open. I have a video that talks about the "special instructions" that I sometimes have for MES trades. That MES trade I made yesterday, by the way, was based on a strategy where if the market (represented by the MES futures) has been below its all time high for about a week, then I go long.
If you have any questions or feedback, I'd love to hear from you.