FUCK I POSTED IM NOT DONE COME BACK LATER
What's been happening in the last 2 days seems to be complex issue. Between today and yesterday I put in 5 hours of review work attempting to solve the issues. I wish it was simple and sometimes it is. However not this go.
First thing is filtering out one of the most obvious culprits. Ratings... There's a tutorial here explaining the rating system:
youtube.com/watch?v=u6N5BHa0…
Green stars is perfect trading
Yellow stars is management issue
Red stars are horrific - I should of never done that trades
In the case of the image below is a white line which is raw combined equity curve:
Here's the issues that green line doesn't look good and that 15k trade is skewing the results.
So lets filter out that trade. I created an outlier tag which I attach to overly large wins and losses. The biggest issue with tags - is if you have a large outlier win or loss it severely skews your tags and all the data attached. For anyone taking
tradecraft.club seriously, and is trying to improve I highly recommend an outlier tag. Another user came up with the idea and it's been solid.
We can see now that the green trades which are what I consider perfect are not performing. The yellow is management issues but that's not horrible. Obviously the red stars are kicking my ass and there's 10 of them in the past 2 days out of 30 trades. This is 1/3rd of my trades being shit trades.
So that's something that needs to be addressed. However the 20 trades that are green and yellow combined PNL means I'd be down -$5932.40
Something else is a problem here. Can we filter are way into an answer?
Usually the blue line performs very well which is conservative trading. But they went to hell.
What I know that's not coming from tags is these trades were instant losers. I'd cut them fast which is good to do. But the amount of 0 MFE trades I had were high.
There were 16 trades with 0 through 2 MFE. The markets have been somewhat fast the last 2 days. So 2 MFE doesn't have as much weight in higher vol as the dwell time to exit is virtually nothing and I can't react. Notice the hold times as well. Only 2 trades exceeded a minute.
It doesn't take tags for me to know that I kept getting rugged. I can straight up tell you because I kept complaining about it. Wait a minute? Did I mention complaining? Yes I did. So lets check emotions which is in the above screen shot. 10 Trades didn't have total clarity. But for some reason total clarity on 18 trades came out -$2213.08. Okay so I'm clear on price action but I lost? What happened? I don't know I'm still attempting to narrow this down.
If we look at the green emotions Calm 3, Content 3, Patience 3, I'm not performing there either. So emotions when ideal still lead to shit PNL. What is going on?
Unfortunately sometimes our tags just wont tell us the issue. So we use the next best tool in our arsenal. Our brains, and trade recordings.
My speculation is the market was too fucking fast that I can't keep up with tracking deltas. I trade stale deltas or I'm getting in confliction zones. I'm too far from the signals when entering. I ran a replay today and attempted to upkeep my analysis. I can say for a fact I'm too fucking slow. Is this causing all the issues? No. But it doesn't help. I need automation. It takes a tremendous amount of conscious effort to manually draw and keep up with things. During my review I noticed what I had marked was not part of what was actually there. And certain signals were there that I didn't see yet.
This does not help.
Now I have some management tags I've share in prior posts - which I won't share here as I'm image limited on X. However Ill go over them now.
MFS which performs well sucked. Most trades had MFS so that's telling me there's still an issue here I'm not catching.
17 trades had MFS and I lost -$12,154.02
13 trades did not have MFS and I only lost -$1776.40
Fuck man I'm like in the land of backwards here. I've done a lot of the right things. But the performance has left?
I can tell you the spoofing was relentless. High volume pushes met with low volume hits right back the other way. This rugging certainly did not help. But rugging is always there so can we rule this as a culprit?
Nah - I refuse to blame the algos and bury my head like so many retail traders that don't attempt to narrow it down.
-Flip hit tags did well than tanked to -$2,244.90
-Only 2 impulsive trades -$1,743.12
-One getting married to a trade that cost -$2443.98
-Not gathering information cost -$4960.84
-Didn't see a pattern cost -$6794.90
So these above tags maybe combinations where some of them are attached to each other. The didn't see pattern and not gathering information may be some of the same trades.
However isolated we can see some real issues here. Didn't see a pattern is a sample size of 8 trades. So a chunk of the 30 total trades when the outlier is removed.
That's a problem and that's confirming the fact shit was too fast and I couldn't play upkeep. This is where some form of automation will help.
Not gathering information was 7 trades. I need to figure out how many of these are combined with the prior tag of not seeing pattern.
-Not gathering information standalone - 1 trade
-Didn't see pattern standalone - 2 trades
The way this is achieved is just some easy filtering magic. I make a new equity curve add the one tag like not gathering information and add a widget tag to filter out - didn't see pattern - so any married tags will be removed leaving the standalones.
Next we add dual tags on in the series setting to see the combos of both.
That would be 6 trades combo.
So 9 total trades losing a total of $5803.96
all but one trade was a red star out of those when I apply the remove red star filter....
Hmmm. So trades I knew were shit just lacked good information or I didn't see. Okay but in between my yellow and green star trades I'm still down -$5392.40 so where the fuck are those loses coming from? Man I should of wrote this in a blog so you can see the filtering process. I'm really beating on
tradecraft.club right now attempting to squeeze it.
We should isolate the MFS tags I've talked about in prior posts.
So with a master page filter removing red stars and the outlier tag. I can see right off the rip 3MFS is really kicking my ass at -$6784.98
I thought this was an issue. I even mentioned I wouldn't trade it today but I did at a 4 sample size losing -$2398.74 today alone. A 4 factor which historically does well lost me -$1396.56 today at sample size 1. Needless to say it was simple a good loss. But I'm afraid that a lot of trades were "good losses" seeing how my green stars lost money. 5 factors dominated today at $2097.82
Between 2 days of trading with no outlier and no redstars:
-6MFS $956.88
-5MFS $2097.82
-4MFS -$832.80
-3MFS -$6784.98
SHIT I CAN'T ADD MORE PHOTOS!!! Ugh we're going to blog format. Fuck X. I'm in edit mode and this should allow 4 photos.
Okay so there's a handful of management issues on 3MFS losing -$1948.74
4 sample size of green star 3MFS was -$4836.24 which tells me maybe 3MFS just wont fucking cut it?
If I filter out red stars, outlier, and 3MFS I'd be up $1375.34 in 2 days on 12 trades
by no means impressive.
The green stars would yield $2811.58
Why are the 4MFS sucking those usually do well?
3 had management issues and the other 2 were green stars but one was just an unlucky loser. On the management issues it was a combination of exit issues. 2 won and I needed to hold more on those and the other loser I held 2 long.
Just nuanced trade specific stuff.
Conclusions.
So I think it's a lot of issues. Not one. Kind of like an airliner crashing. It's usually many things going wrong not just one. An orgy of issues here.
A lot of the times I can go "oh I know EXACTLY what the problem is!!!"