Full-Time Day Trader Success Story - Ceri Bryans | Trader Interview

so we get triggered in here we hit one to one then we have a pullback we hit our two to one then three to one then four to one so we're at four to one here we don't hit our three to one We Carry On Up Hit five we don't quite hit the six so we're still at five now we hit the six so my two to one trailing stop would be at four my stop loss and my one-to-one trail in stock would now be at five okay so we're on the six I'm out there on the one to one at five once again we spoke a while back and seriously someone that I I love for her down toward attitude she's very linguistic about trading very focused on enjoying life as well so sorry we'll come back to the podcast go tell you here again thank you thanks for the invite and well done on the uh 100K subscribers that's really good I appreciate I appreciate it that means a lot for sure so I want to go back a little bit and you are one of the interviews that people really love on my channel because we're like I said to be a Down to Earth person mostly day trading and you change quite a bit from there you still don't work for sure you still like realistic still enjoy your life a lot but tell me a bit more about kind of what changed since we last book okay so I was heavily into manual trading back in the day when we first talked um but then kovid hit and I lost both my parents in within a couple of months and I've also um moved house uh big renovation going on so I've been heavily involved in that and I've also had a heart attack well a couple of heart attacks um so I had to go to hospital and have a little operation for that so all in all um it's been a time that um has been chaotic and I found that manual trading wasn't going to suit me moving forward because now um I mean I've always tried to live my life but now even more so so I didn't want to be tied to the screens manually trading um because I want to make the most of still physically being able to to travel and and what have you so now I've moved over to Mechanical trading even more so so it's been a busy time doing some back testing for the the strategies but I've done all that and now we're just I'm just letting them run I don't do any anything to them the robot does it all right what do you say mechanical person you've also a people here before but now it's you have our goals training for you instead of you trading the like taking into it manually basically exactly yeah yeah mt4 expert advisor I just put in the settings and let it go it does its own thing then how did you make that move from manual to automated was it through like calling a strategy that you already had before or was it completely different it was one that I used to manually trade that gave me the idea it's a very simple strategy I'm happy to to show you the basics of it I'm not gonna share the actual settings but we can I'll show you how I backtest from and find it from the chart um but it's basically placing finding a candle before a market open probably around one o'clock um UK time so we catch the the US opening um and then we place an order long and an order short and just let them trigger if they trigger they trigger if they don't they don't but it's finding the right time frame to take the take the trades on so I'll show you how I go about it interesting so you're not looking at picking the right direction you're looking at picking orders both sides and whichever way it goes and you go that way interesting exactly yeah there's no technical analysis no discretion it is what it is and it either wins or it loses and the I don't know if I mentioned this before but I um for my psychology I I don't like people all shout at me what I don't like having a high win-loss ratio because for me personally that means that every time an order kicks in I subconsciously expect it to be a winner so for me my perfect scenario is a 40 about a 40 win loss um with a three to one target for me that's great because psychologically I think um okay 40 I'm gonna lose more than I win so now whenever an order kicks in I am thinking well it could be a loser it's probably probably going to be a loser and it helped me so I know that's probably different to what everybody else does but it just suits me and my personal style of trading yeah it's very surprising that you like it that way because other people would prefer to have a heroin right because it's less struggle to to deal with like they are able to just kind of remorse into his on their mindset but then yeah the episode could be true yeah interesting and um experienced obviously in trading now and so the drawdowns um of the 60 losers um they really don't bother me because I look at the bigger picture um especially with mechanical trading um because there is no discretion involved um I you have to have faith in your back testing and have faith in your numbers um and so long as I calculate my risk correctly which I'll also show you how I do that um then I'm more than happy I I don't bat an eye at like eight losers that's fine how do you avoid the fake also because I'm guessing if you just look for a breakout board size it could be a lot of fake moves and more that will happen then go back the other way exactly um and that does happen so one of the key parts to this whole strategy is um to add padding I call it padding but add a few points onto the high or the low of the candle so that and the the amount of padding depends a on the market um so you need to eyeball the market um but more importantly it depends on the spread of the market so my rule of thumb is for example if a market has two point spread then I'm going to add five points onto my entries that will that eliminates quite a few losing trades it don't it won't eliminate Lots all of them because um obviously the the more padding I add the further away my targets are going to be by the amount that I've added so you've got to find that sweet spot so for me I do a general rule of thumb of maybe two times minimum two times the spread interesting and that's not in the five inch chart so this is more like a higher time frame okay so I start off on a one hour time frame and then I I look for Market uh like the US Open or the London open and um I see if there's an hourly candle that's consistently winning just before the open if it doesn't work out on an hourly candle then I'll drop to a 30 minute and repeat the process and if I still can't find anything I'll drop to a 15 minute so and which is fine for me to do um because I have a robot that places all the orders for me but if you're going to be manually placing these orders you really don't want to go below a 15 minute candle because then you're putting yourself under a pressure to get both orders raised because you have to leave it to the last couple of minutes sometimes if the price action is right you know at the low or the High um so you you can put yourself under a little bit of pressure there that's uh that's what I do you gotta remember how you do this again if you want to and we can go through it okay right so share screen okay perfect so knowing that I was going to be talking to you today um this morning I've had a quick look through the NASDAQ and it's a market that I want to back test for this strategy because I'm I'm currently running this strategy on Dow um but I keep getting margin calls because um it's I'm with a UK broker so we have tighter uh controls on our margins um so I'm looking for an alternative to Dao and hence I thought right I'll go for Nasdaq because the price is like a third of what the the Dow price is um which means that I've got a greater margin so I started off looking at a one hour chart I'll just zoom in now when I start any back testing I wonder if I can move that yeah move that there um when I when I'm looking for um a strategy I will eyeball the charts I'll decide on my which candle I want to use um and then I'll do six months worth of testing and then I'll analyze the the data because initially it might not look very good but I haven't optimized it yet so it can all change um and I'll show you that with another set of data that I've got um and then uh so six months I will optimize it then I start trading it live but I also go back further in time and um do do more testing because the more testing you do the more accurate your results are going to be over time does that make sense yeah nothing interesting yeah okay so I looked um so we can see here we've got um a clear break I'm on the well actually I never trade I don't know if you do but I never trade the first couple of days back after Christmas break because um my data tells me not to I don't know if it's because people go crazy and they're buying and selling but it just seems to be really volatile so I'll always leave like the first couple of days so uh third of Jan thought I'd probably start on the 5th of Jan so looking at the 5th of Jan I can see that we have a big move here um and now I'm looking at the 12 o'clock candle okay and that looks pretty good because I catch all of that move so then I what I do is I go to the next day and I look for the 12 o'clock candle and I can see that I'm going to have a loser but then I'd have a winner and I keep going through the chart looking for the 12 o'clock candle which is there [Applause] um and that would be okay so 12 o'clock's looking good but the issue is I'm having this is quite a high a big range because it's a full hours action and remember that it's going to cut out at 12 o'clock the next day so around here so in actual fact if I put in my I'm only going to make three to one on that because the candle range on an hour is too much too much it's too large so therefore I will drop down I'm condensing this because I did look at more data but I'm I'm aware of time constraints so now I am going to look at a 30-minute chart so each candle is 30 minutes I'll ignore so fifth I'll start so now I'll look at where's the Big Move and that big move 12 12 30. so now I'm thinking right it's either going to be 12 or 12 30 candle then I'll move to the next day and I'll look at uh oh it might be a one o'clock candle but that one o'clock candle is a lot bigger than that 12 30 candle so yeah I might have a loser but I'll gain back that loss because I've got a smaller Candle on the longer break so I'm now looking at 12 30 so again this one here um I'll have a short loser but then my winner will run up to here so all I'm doing is eyeballing the chart and looking for where the big move is and what is the candle or the can two candles before and try and see if they're they're the same moving forward so we're looking at 12 30 so that's this candle here so this candle here for example um would be a decent winner so I think moving forward 12 30 now it's not going to work every day no no strategy will work every day but I think the 12 30 candle 30 minute candle oops works pretty well so I know this because I've looked this morning and moving forward I think yeah the 12 30 candle so what we'll do is I'll show you what I do on the back testing okay so this spreadsheet please don't ask me for this spreadsheet because this is my my little baby and I don't give it away um but this spreadsheet gives me all the data that I need to know so that I get a a really detailed snapshot of um the back testing and what it tells them it tells me everything that I need to know so obviously your viewers are not going to have this this spreadsheet so it's quite easy the the key things that you need to make a note of are what your targets are so I've got a T1 a T2 and a T3 and I've also added a three to one fix so I'll be back testing four different targets or trade Management Systems sounds complicated it really isn't I'm going to show you okay um I also make a note of the range of the candle because it could be that when we filter the results it might be that for example don't trade anything if the range is greater than say 50 points or don't trade anything if the range is less than 10 points so we I always make a note of what the range is and also the day because the biggest difference to data for a mechanical strategy I've found is that it might not work every day for example I've yet to find one that works on a Wednesday Wednesday is always a losing day no matter the market I've done loads of markets I still cannot find a market that works on a Wednesday I don't know why it must be a news day they'll know so you filter out your results it improves your your win loss ratio Etc so we're going to test the NASDAQ on the 30 minute chart um so we're going to start on we're going to go back in time and we'll start on the Thursday the 5th so I've got my 30 minute chart it's also important to have a lower time frame I like to have the one minute chart open as well because sometimes it's not evident what happens within a 30 minute candle so you might be um triggered in what you think short but it might also have triggered in long and then gone short or it might have triggered in short and you think it's gone straight down but it hasn't actually gone straight down it might have nicked you out so I always have the one minute uh chart open on the separate another screen however I can't fit that on this screen but we'll see how we go so uh right so the first candle I'm looking for is oh I'm gonna have to do it the other way around yeah this way so I can see at the bottom of the screen um right so we're going to do the 12 30 candle so this one here now I have created um some I've used the I think it was the Fibonacci extension and what I've done is if I just show you I've I'll show you the settings I've changed it from the fibonaccis and I've put them in one-to-one ratios so that now my Fibonacci is basically my one to one two to one three to one four to one Etc just makes it so much easier for for back testing okay so I've got my Fibonacci adapted I've started at the high click to the low and now I need to think right okay I need to add my padding so on the padding for this Market I'm going to use Five Points padding so I need to take off Five Points from my entry price so this will be 16 and not 21. because these two point two and three have to be your entry price and this point one is your stop loss price so 62.9 if I hover over the candle you can see that 962.9 is the high which will be our stop loss now you can see there's a little bit of a gap between the uh lowered the candle and our entry yep see that so I've decided to look for a three to one fixed do a one-to-one trailing stop but not kicking in until price hits two to one because experience tells me that I can hit that one to one then it will re retrace back past my entry into the red and then it will roll over so that's why I use a one-to-one trailing stop but I don't bring that in until two to one okay so this one here we cries price comes down we hit our one to one closes there opens there closes there opens there comes down closes there then we go right down we don't quite hit four to one now at this point our trade management is kicking in so we're we're currently at three to one we haven't hit four to one and then we go back up and we are stopped out at two to one on our one-to-one trailing stop uh right so that's the result for our one-to-one trailing stop kicking in at two to one now a two to one trailing stop as an alternative so we're at three we haven't hit four so my stop loss is now up one to one but we don't retrace back up to one to one we keep going and then eventually we hit four there okay we so now my stop loss is down at two to one we don't hit two to one then eventually we hit five to one here and then we go back up so my stop loss if I'm at five to one my stop loss is now at three to one so that's where I get stocked out so that is the result there so I know that I get I also get my three to one fixed um that was here earlier on there now I also do a one and a half to one trailing stop so now my ratio is a one and a half three four and a half Etc because sometimes I get better results with them and sometimes I don't so I like to do a two to one and a one and a half to one so we hit the one and a half we hit the three we don't pull back and get stopped out at one and a half We Carry On we hit the four and a half and then price moves down my stop loss is at three to one and I get stopped out at three to one okay so go through it again on the long order 12 30 now I'm going long which we get kicked in over here somewhere I need to add my Five Points padding and now the low of the candle is my stop loss and this is my entry so we get triggered in here we hit one to one we hit two to one at which point my one-to-one trailing stop is activated then we come back down so I need to check the low of that candle no it doesn't hit my one to one so I'm still in the trade we go on nothing happening sideways motion I don't think we hit no we don't quite hit three to one there nothing happening still consolidating then we have a breakout I hit my um oh no hang on we want this the next day now sorry right so another thing I do is uh so we're 12 30 candle so if I'm still in the previous day's trade as I am now then I will close it at the close of the 12 o'clock candle so the previous candle so I'm closing that about there so that is a two and a half to one uh result okay so my result there is two and a half to one and it's still going to be two and a half to one there we hit on three to one there I'll fix no trade management straightforward win or loss three to one no moving stop to break even and our one and a half to one we hit one and a half we hit three there uh do we hit three there no we don't so again it's two and a half so it's two and a half for that Okay so I need to make a note of the range which was where is it where is it oh it's back here 41.7 I realized a mistake 41.7 we broke short first the entry date was the fifth of Jan then we had the long which actually wouldn't have triggered because I thought this was Friday but it's actually Monday so we've gone past so our 12 30 candle is there the next day so we didn't actually get that long trade sorry my bad okay so we only had the short trade trigger right so now I'll move on to the Friday look for the 12 30 candle which is this one here now I can see that the short trade was a loser you can see that clear as day so I don't need to put on my my fibs because I know that's a loser so I can fill in my sheet there the range is 21.3 and that is a short trade and that's on the sixth and it was a loser all round minus one minus one minus one okay so obviously losers are minus one and and the rewards are whatever that rewards up but we do trigger in Long here so I need to add my padding Five Points now I need to on a candle like this I absolutely go to a lower time frame because you don't know what has happened so I know you can't see me but I'm just going back in time and I'm going to just drag this I've done it on a two minute but it's same thing right this is the trade so you can see that it went straight up and then came straight back down now unless you go tick by tick or what have you um sometimes I drop to I'm on the two minute normally I go to one minute but the reason I can't on this is because my one minute data only goes back six months and we're slightly over six months so I've had to go to the two minute but I prefer to go to the one minute um and I've even dropped down to a 10 second if there's any doubt if you're in any doubt put it as a loser put it down as the worst case scenario you don't want to be inflating your your data so I can see here that we went straight up we hit five to one and then we we came straight back down so I can move that out of the way we hit five to one move that I can go uh that was a three to one winner it's still 21.3 but this is the long trade on the sixth and that was out at four to one that was out at three to one and I'm just changing for the one to one and a half on a different screen sorry no you can't see me but we hit four and a half to one and I was out at three on the one and a half to one okay and then that one's done so next day now we're on a Monday and we're looking at the 12 30. so I can see that we've immediately had a loser there short so the losers are really quick to to put on the on the sheep it's just minus one um 23.9 Range short and this is what date nightmare doing it on oh I'm doing the wrong candle uh 24.1 it's a nightmare doing it on one screen 24.1 and it is the ninth so I'll just do this one and then we'll go to a different sheet where I've already got a lot of data I just wanted to show you the process that you're not actually having to log a great deal of detail I'm not interested in prices or you know I'm not interested in any of that so that's our setup I'll just finish putting in the losers on the from the short trade again we've got a big candle so I'm looking on the two minute drag that two minute across so we get triggered in here we hit one to one then we have a pullback we hit our two to one then three to one then four to one so we're at four to one here we don't hit our three to one We Carry On Up Hit five we don't quite hit the six so we're still at five now we hit the six so my two to one trailing stop would be at four my stop loss and my one-to-one trail in stock would now be at five okay so we're on the six I'm out there on the one to one at five so let me just put that in the sheet three to one was a straightforward winner 24.1 on the long on the ninth that's a plus five uh so we're at six um the two to one trailing stop we get kicked out there at four to one and the one and a half to one let me just configure it right we're here we don't hear so hit three hit the four and a half don't quite hit the three hit the six there and out at four and a half there and that is it that's the process and I just go on and on and on um you know building up my data okay it's very easy it's very straightforward but you have to do the the back testing to give you this information so I mean I know we've only done five trades but at the minute it's very Even Stevens there's no real difference in the results the things that I look for which are important are the win loss ratio but I also want to know what my worst run was and also the overall return so you do are you about this manually or do you actually do some with the Argo automatically no I do it all manually because for me I've got to have complete faith in my data so I know that the the mt4 strategy tester it's not very good it's not very reliable to say the least so for me I'd rather do it manually and know that I'm spot on on the data that I'm entering because Bank testing is only as good as your honesty um I've seen a a big rookie mistake is like you have a load of red so you might have your trades and and you get a big block of red um from losers and then you get another loser and I know that some people have like oh I won't put that one on well you can't do that you have to put it on because it's critical it's absolutely critical to know your worst run realistically not like oh it's too much red I'm not putting it on or you know that that doesn't who are you kidding at the end of the day you know it's your doesn't affect anyone else it will only affect you so you have to be 100 accurate with your um logging of your data also remember to allow for the spreads very important because just those two three points can make a difference so if in doubt put the worst result down because it's better to be you know safer than than sorry okay so you build up you go on you go on you get on your build up so I'm going to shrink that and I'm going to bring up um this is some that I've done from uh the gold gold market now I've hidden because I I'm not going to give everything away so I've hidden the time handle because um I'm a great believer I my sort of Outlook is I'll help anybody so long as they help themselves and so for people who don't want to back test um why would I give you my data I'm not you know my I I've spent hours and hours finding my strategies and why would I give you them if you're not prepared to find them out yourself so I'll show you how to find them out but I'm not going to do the work for you you have to do the work for yourself and it's not just from a um me not not giving you anything for nothing it's because you need to get familiar yourself and you'll only get familiar if you do the back testing so you'll begin to once you start doing a few you know after a couple of weeks you you might notice something you might think well you know what if I had like seven points that would have saved three losers there um and you might change your criteria which is fine so long as you make a note of what date you changed the criteria and Carry On from there so that when you filter to optimize your strategy to find the best settings you're you're getting a clear picture with the consistent data make sense totally yeah yeah no that's definitely a good point yeah so you've done all your back testing and you've got hundreds of back tests like this um and now you think great okay um my spreadsheet works it out automatically but you'll need to work out your win loss ratio so do I assume that everybody knows how to work out their win-loss ratio I'm going to assume yeah let's do this I think so let's hope so okay um another important thing is the worst run okay so um I'm trading at one percent per trade I've got set up and I've just put a thousand pounds in okay uh so I'm gonna I'm going down 11.2 percent my worst run so that's important to to know so for me I'm looking at this this and this they're the three most important things so if you like I'm gonna I need to write these down because I'm going to be chain I'm optimizing now so we're at the optimizing stage so unfiltered is 113 percent um worst run is minus 11.2 and win loss is 30. okay so now comes the optimizer which is the bit that I love so the first thing I do is um which I can't show you is I I look at the range um and I filter out um let me go back to that so I look at the range and then what I'll do is I will feed all the different ranges that are logged thus far um will be in a list here so what I'll do is and it could start from like 10 and it can go on and on so maybe I don't know 60 or whatever but I'll go to the last few like the really high numbers and uh I will only show those results so I'll I'll say right only show me I don't know what that 41.7 is from but all right okay I don't think that's right so I'll filter to only show me the the the late the last few things if it's still profitable then I think okay yeah I don't need to to uh make a rule in the criteria that don't take a trade if the if the range is greater than 41 because over time that tells me that they'll lose more than they win um and I do the same for the low um ranges so the extremes so I might say um uh filter only only trades that uh sorry there are 21 but it could be 15 16 17 18 21 so I've filtered them out I think yeah okay I'll look at the results and I think yeah still in profit so that's fine I don't need to reduce the the ranges okay so that's how you do the the ranges now days it's important to do this because it makes a massive difference so I go through each day individually and I filter out so I only show Monday's trades and as you can see they're all losers so that tells me don't trade this on a Monday okay it won't work doesn't work on a Monday then I go through literally each of the days Yep they're all fine Tuesdays is a good day Wednesdays yeah a good day blimey Wednesday's working uh Thursdays yeah that's fine and Fridays Fridays not a massive increase but okay it's better it's still positive so now if I take out Mondays because we know Mondays don't win it'll adjust I know that this is my spreadsheet but you'll have to do this by hand if you haven't got a spreadsheet that's capable of this now I look at my key figures and I've gone from 113 to 152. uh my worst Runners dropped down to 8.6 and my win losses increased to 33. my average win per month if I I've got summaries here um that I open balance closed balance uh the profit for the month Etc and my average at one percent per trade is 15.6 percent over six months seven months per month okay I don't have I'm actually trading this one and I do it on this one on the one and a half trailing stop um I've I've yet to have a losing month which is unusual um really unusual because normally you do but I've yet to have a losing month so the whole point is when you see loads of red don't panic because you've not done any optimization and you can cut down and lose a lot of losers get rid of a lot of losers by optimizing the data so um now that we've got our I'm happy with that personally I'm happy with that so now I need to work out my risk so can I ask you Etienne how do you decide what risk per uh trade to use I'll calculate the risk of Rune so make sure maybe 70 zero percent and then I'll try to figure out what am I comfortable losing in terms of Microsoft so you look at your biggest drawdown in your back test and you compare and maybe go a bit below that just to be safe right perfect lovely very similar to what I do Okay so um I so let's say well not not maybe a thousand let's put ten thousand in the account so the way I do it is I have One account or one set of variables for the robot so I've got lots of accounts and I run different variables on different markets on different accounts because then I can monitor um easily which are doing really well and which are not and also I have different starting pots depending upon the the data that I get here okay so for me my comfort zone the way I I explain it to other people is I say right okay how much money have you got to put in your trading pot so let's say that you said Etienne ten thousand pounds and I would say to you at the end how much out of that ten thousand pounds are you prepared to pay in order to generate that 152 percent so you would say I'm happy to pay a thousand pounds as in lose a thousand pounds or I'm happy to lose fifteen hundred so what would your comfort zone be I think that's not okay probably somewhere around 15 20 percent 15 20 perfect okay so mine's 25. I'm I'm totally uh you know gambler um okay so let's go 15 then for safety okay so we know that your uh worst run is minus 8.6 okay so what I then do is I say right okay your house so 15 of 10 000 is what one and a half thousand pounds my rubbishop Max one and a half thousand pounds so you can either increase let's say one and a half percent per trade and we're coming up we could go a little bit higher let's let's go a little bit higher let's say 1.75 it might be too much but believe me the difference between 1.5 and 1.6 is is is a lot over time oh I've crushed my oh no right okay so you would be comfortable with that 14.7 down or 1500 quid more or less but now you'll your return has gone from what was it 150 to 371. just by increasing your risk per trade to match your comfort zone does that make sense I will say yes to this camera people tend to overestimate how much they're willing to lose and trading they think they can handle fifty percent right arm but when they get there it's a lot tougher so keep that in mind yeah absolutely so exactly for those type of for that for for guys that have that mindset of like oh I'll lose half I don't mind well you will mind if it happens but um what I suggest then is that what they do is have the pot so half the pot five to five thousand you're still making 371 obviously financially it's not as much but 371 in six months is really good trading at 1.75 but look you said earlier you were happy to lose fifteen hundred pounds we're only at 734 pounds so we could go let's say three percent per trade now you're at 1077 but you're still way under that fifteen hundred pounds that you said you would be okay with does that make sense so it's a you have to understand the relationship between your starting pot and how much you're prepared to lose so I've already reduced your starting pot you've still got 5 000 in your in your savings account you're only trading with five thousand so psychologically that is already better because you're thinking oh you know ten thousand it's a lot of money you know um so half the pot and up the risk and it makes a massive difference to your results so that's how I calculate my personal Comfort zones exactly that process I'm happy I start with either five thousand and I go in at a higher risk um or I start at ten thousand with a slightly lower risk all depends on on what the the win loss is and the worst run that is it in a nutshell I know I mean average average per month 49 I know it sounds crazy but I actually do do this like there's a strategy let me just this is one that I do on oil I actually risk four percent because it fits with my um risk parameters so this is from January 2019. so if I'd stuck at um my four percent all the way through I'd be at silly money now five years later whereas if I think oh no let's play safe everyone says we should never risk more than one percent per trade if I change it to one percent and it calculates a big old spreadsheet this then I've only made fifty three thousand so understand your risk for me I'm happy on Ten Thousand to lose two and a half uh thousand twenty five percent so I up my percentage to reflect that and as as so far this is all the back testing but I I'll show you I've got my live results um I'm slightly over my comfort zone but I bring my live results um at four percent I have only had a worse run of 19 so I'm nowhere near my two and a half thousand so it does work but you've got to be realistic and it's only as good as your back testing data and your honesty when logging those results and if you have a load of red then you have a load of red and you just calculate accordingly so any questions on on that what have you got people who say oh well I don't have time for about this thing it takes way too long to go through my Trace that way um obviously it's their choice I I you know I I'm like go back test but people don't like to do it and I understand why they don't you know it can be boring personally I don't find it boring um but for the driver personalities then yeah it's boring but without that that okay let me show you I'll show you a classic example so I'm in a draw down scenario now on the on the oil so let's the last 10 trades I've only had one winner am I worried no not at all because I can go back because I've done back testing well this is my live results but the back testing is this results I can go back and I can see that I do get blocks of red it's not a problem it's only a problem when my win loss ratio goes below whatever my break even is so this is a straightforward three to one that I trade so I know that my win loss ratio can drop down to 25 percent and I'm still breaking even I'm not losing money because 25 times 3 is 75 and then your 75 loses zero so I know what to keep an eye on with my win loss over the last I do over 20 trades so I'm literally right on my my uh Break Even point now but then I'll go back and I'll look at my data so it's this one let me just hide them because that'll confuse you if I look at my data I had a horrific month February 19. but then it's more than a year later before I lose 12 so you can see scrolling scrolling scrolling that actually I don't have many bad losing months this month's horrendous I say horrendous but because I've made I'm so far ahead in profit that I don't mind I don't mind this because you know I'm thousands and thousands up it's only the initial investment so another idea is like if you start with 5000 in your account for example when you've doubled that up take that 5 000 out and then you're not losing any of your original you know investment you're just playing with profit which is what I do basically what I do is I find a market I test it I start running it and then as soon as that market doubles I'll take out my ten thousand and I'll put it into another market and start the process again because whilst Market one is trading I'm back testing for another Market so as soon as Market one doubles its money I'll take out my original and I'll put it into Market too and so the process repeats mark it one and two are now trading as soon as Market two doubles its money I'll take my original Ten Thousand out and I'll put it in another account for Market three And So It Goes On does that make sense so I'm not actually I'm I'm expanding my markets but it's not costing me anything because I'm using my initial profits from Market one yeah it definitely makes sense interesting with the management yeah so as a result you've seen live being the same or similar to what you've done in the back this or are they like far different yeah so so if I go to this is the one that we I I trade so I've got a 38 win loss on my back testing yeah and then if I go to my live so yeah live I'm at 39 it's something that I must I keep an eye on um that's why on my back testing um I still log all of the results so that I can make sure that this figure stays in line with my live trades figure very important because if you start getting a big difference then you need to you need to look at why so I also do like uh I'm I'm a visual person I like to see visuals so uh the dotted line is the average monthly return so it's a nice smooth curve the solid line is the actual so these are my the blue is the closing balances and the purple is the um the profit so you can see that I'm below that's because we're in a bad drawdown at the moment I'm below but there's normally not such a gap between the reason there's a gap between this is because I cannot trade this 17.35 is based on four percent per order in reality there are weeks where I can't do four percent because I get a margin call so I might only be able to do two and a half percent or three percent and that's why there's a difference between the two um a better way of looking at it is so this is the Dax one which I do at two percent you can see that the the smooth curve I'm actually above Target at the moment um but you can see the profit is kind of hugging the target we had a horrific month in June last month horrific month but hey ho you have them 21 Grand um but I also what I do is I keep an eye so I'll add up my actual months profits and that's 120 and then I'll go to the smoothed which is the dots where you don't ever have a losing month it's just nice and smooth and that's 128 so I'm not a million miles out makes sense so it's it is important to to keep an eye on the the average and where you are in relation to that average because if you drop drop there's got to be a reason why and what is that reason especially if you go below your Breakeven um win loss ratio so for me if that got to 25 which it has currently um I'm now going to be keeping an eye on that because if I have another loser this week then I'm I'm into sort of Uncharted Territory and at that point I've got to stop making a decision right what do I do do I take out a load of money and start afresh do I just ride it out because looking at the data um you know I I don't have horrific I've had one month that was 29 loser so it's all about the analysis so if people don't want to do the back testing I understand why um but hopefully after this you can see the information that you gather from it is not just oh I had five losers and two winners you know it's much more than that it means that you can market conditions change how do you know if you don't log your trades and um keep an eye on the win loss ratio Etc how do you know when the market conditions have changed at what point do you think no it's time to pull the plug because you've got no data to look back at and think yeah actually we're in we're in dangerous territory here there's some good points there for sure and all this is something else you do when it's very in there but people could benefit from that kind of stuff for sure uh we're really now in here so I want to expect your time but why do you prefer checklist over any kind of like software for journaling is there a reason why like especially people were better for you in that case or um spreadsheets tell me everything I want to know I personally I'm not a journaler I never have been um nothing wrong with journaling works for a lot of people but for me no um I'm journaling I think is um great if you don't have any confidence or um in your strategies but I do have confidence in my strategies because I've got all my data and my data shows me so I don't need to you know make a note of how I felt emotionally or whatever because I'm I'm past that point I'm comfortable with losing runs um I'm totally emotionless with when it comes to to the results because I know over time it will um be profitable very profitable so for me journaling no so working for connect or find out more about your work after this podcast um because I left Traders support Club a couple of years ago um to concentrate on on my manual trading back then how life has changed um I was as I say inundated with with people finding me on Facebook Etc um and I think what I will do is I will put up uh I'll create maybe a YouTube channel and I'll just put a couple of videos explaining in a bit more detail and maybe a bit clearly a bit more clear um of what we've talked about today um and people can go and have a look at that but in the meantime um I've got a a Google Mail so they can email me at Kerry Bryan's trading at gmail.com um and I'll make sure that when I put up the the video like I'll link to this Etc um I'll drop them an email and and they can ask questions or just watch the videos and listeners I think there's been a lot that people can learn from here and I think you're really going fancy in the back on the back testing here and stuff but I think it's a good thing and it's worth it and hopefully you can catch up later and discuss more about it like this thing in new results perfect okay thanks very much Legend

Channel: Etienne Crete - Desire To TRADE

Views: 8,688

Keywords: becoming a full time day trader, ceri bryans, day trader, day trader full time job, day trader success stories, day trading for a living, forex, forex day trading, full time day trader, full time day trader story, full time day trading, full time trader, how to be a profitable trader, how to become a full time day trader 2023, learn to trade, live day trading, stock market, swing trading, technical analysis, trader success story

Id: RAALSMTiYJs

Length: 60min 41sec (3641 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 17 2023