Hi Niel,
I prepared a couple of responses which merely had a “cautious” mood, but I was reluctant to post them.
I now think I did well on that (not post them).
It is not easy to explain (or confirm) how good your approach is, which merely is about experience on for example the win rate (which you only now just showed – or at least just now got to me – and which is in the area that I would prefer myself for a 100 reasons).
What is also new now, is the number of trades per day, which may look “suspicious” (the biggest aim I have myself). Regarding that, here is an excerpt of one of my texts I wrote earlier today but did not post yet, but which may be applicable :
Did you take into account the spread sufficiently ? I say this because I see you using the ZAR, which probably is your local currency and thus nothing wrong with that. But in relation to other currencies – probably always in order ? – it may not work out at all.
My experience does not go further than e.g. EUR/ZAR, and that does not work out because of the huge overnight interest (and huge spread IIRC).
If you recognize that I could be correct, it is a matter of not using the ZAR *and* having your portfolio account in USD (looking at your other examples). Now there is no interest in order for the USD instruments, but for the European there still is – plus of course what you use on margin.
I now post this text because to me it may be obvious that at 31 trades per day (15.5 In + Out) you could be “scalping” as such, not taking into account the spread or commission. I don’t think I could do this, hence I would need longer being OnMarket in order to gain what you do, which conflicts with the 15 full trades per day. I may achieve 7 or so.
The Gain with that is unrelated because this is all Money Management and your 90% may be a theoretical 400% in my case. This is again not important but proves the base method you use, which really would be my thing.
Please notice that although I use such means in practice, in real life it does not work out because of too many times our Systems being kicked out because of IG broker issues**. So you would get crazy of restarting them with the proper Money Management parameters fed (and which you need to keep track of because nothing else does that for you). Net I now don’t use it, because it would take more than one day effort per day and one human being can’t do that (hire people for it …).
What you do is to my heart anyway … 🙂 🙂
**): As we speak, see below. Not that this happens every hour, but every day would come close and restarting it with the current MM parameters would take me 30-60 minutes to do it in a decent fashion. Restarting it without MM parameters takes a minute. Don’t worry about the reasons of being kicked out for now, it is something we have to accept.
Another real life matter is the limit on position size; if that approaches USD 5M per trade, IG will be watching you and put you on “manual”. This may be fair, but now forget about the number of trades you “need” per day because regarding that nothing will work any more. So notice that IG has special triggers for AutoTrading, and nothing of those we will like for the better.
A kind of solution is make all trades Market Orders, but I suppose you will know that this doesn’t bring the best spread figures (to say it mildly and without further elaboration). And might you be on (or consider) IBKR (PRT-IB), then Limit/Stop orders are out of the question anyway because of a too slow response of IBKR and PRT not being able to deal with that (system is kicked out again). The result is once again way less profit per trade. And so in all this context I look at your great figures. I have them too. In Backtest.
For a heads up : it is all doable but it may take you a year more in making things more decent and more profitable (because else you may be under water).
.
