Hey guys, My name is Steve.  I am a long time BBT member.  Over the years, I have tried and failed at day trading probably 3 or 4 times.  I have never gone the traditional path of 'blowing up' an account, but I have never been able to be continuously profitable.  I always seem to hover around breaking even or taking a slight loss.  Where do I fail?  Discipline.  I tend to make a few good trades, and then one bad one that sets me back to square 1. I've decided once again to give it another go.  However, this time my main focus is going to be discipline.  I'll be sharing all of my trades here with the community.  This is mostly to hold myself accountable, but I also hope it provides some value to someone out there. Here are a few rules I am putting in place for myself: I am going to be trading one setup, and one setup only (more on this later) I am going to trade EXTREMELY small.  I am funding my account with $200 only.  Most of my P/L is literally going to be in cents, not dollars.  I don't care.  I am purely making trades to make trades, and not even thinking about the money at this point.  In fact, I have configured ThinkOrSwim to not even show my P&L during trades, and I have my account P&L hidden in the platform.  The only time I will mention P&L is in my journal. Because of the small account size, I will be subject to the PDT rule.  I am viewing this as a good thing.  It will force me to be super selective about what trades I enter.  I expect there will be days where I won't make a single trade if I am not seeing my setup.  If I find that I am really being hindered by 3 trades a week, I may consider bringing my account size up to $2,000 and converting it to a cash account.  We'll see. At the end of each month, if I am not profitable, I will reset my account back to $200.  If I am profitable, I will add another $100 and allow myself to trade slightly more shares. My setup: After failing at day trading a few times, I started to look into swing trading instead, as I thought it may be a better fit for me.  I read a few different books, but naturally gravitated towards Mark Minervini's 'Volume Contraction Pattern' style of trading (essentially just an ascending triangle trend continuation patter).  For whatever reason, this setup just made sense to me more than a lot of others have, and I started to study it thoroughly.  One of the interesting things that Mark Minervini mentions several times is that this pattern shows up and works on any time frame.  I started to monitor stocks during the day on the 1-minute chart and started seeing this pattern show up over and over again.  The best part, it's a setup that unfolds over a longer period of time, perfect for me trading while working a 9 to 5.  Most of the setups come late morning or early afternoon as a trend continuation.  I decided I would jump back in and give day trading another shot using this strategy.  

1 min ORB algo. Here is the backtest for the 1min NVDA Long that I created (R=$200)   I have been mining the data to see the possibility of making ORB algos for the last couple of weeks.  I looked at 1min ORB first using NVDA long direction. There seems to be about 2.5 years of data where ORB setup could be used. I did try and read a few algo books, but didn't find any useful. Some interviews in the Market Wizards books I found very useful for algo trading. The rest of my method I figured out on the way. I have been profitably trading algos on Futures for almost 2 years now. The only issue I have is my algos trigger a trade at most once a week. Not enough. So looking for more setups. So I first estimated my parameters and values based on what I have learned from the mons at BBT. I then backtested only the last 3 months using Ninjatrader and see if a profitable algo is even possible. This time it was, but these results are useless except for feasibility. I then walk through each parameter to see what has correlation. Interestingly enough almost all the parameters have value limits but not correlation. Except for volume, which the larger the better, and the distance from VWAP, none of the other parameters had correlation except for limits. Though not expected, this is great because it means the parameters are robust. Though Ninjatrader has an optimizer, it usually is not very useful since it curve fits too much. So I manually optimize then run the parameters for the last two years and got mediocre data. But that's normal. Then I use something I learn from one of the Market Wizards, where he uses 2 years ago for optimization and runs the algo on 1 year old data to see if it works. So I noticed, when I used the 1st algo version we were in the red about a year ago. So I used the red time period to optimize.   1min ORB profit when optimized on the recent 3 months then back tested for 2.5 years. I optimize for robustness not profit. I use to make spider web plots (in Excel) with each strand a different parameter and thus try and create a large stable sweet spot. Where the parameters could move around and it will have little affect on the stats. There is almost always a plateau like that, but sometimes it is under water. So if I let Ninjatrader optimize it gives an outragius profit factor of 5.7 with a highly curved fitted solution that if you move any parameter, even slightly, the profit drops off fast. My optimization has a modest PF of 1.7. But all the parameter correlation are gone (even Volume and VWAP). You can move parameter values around, even large amounts with little effect. All the parameter values become min or max limits only. Thus these are the edges of the optimization plateau. Here are the parameter limits: Volume > 300K 1min candle body size > $0.60 1 min candle body size < $2.7 Top 1min candle wick size < $1.10 How far above VWAP when initiating trade > $0.20 and < $2.30 Market opening price Gap for NVDA >$ 0 SPY 1min candle close > -$1.00  Essentially, the algo is saying don't take a NVDA Long when SPY is careening lower. The target and stop are loosely optimized, but are not meaningful since I have a separate trade management algo that takes care of that. For this back test I used a 3 to 1 traget to stop ratio. Then I ran it on the full 2+ years. the data you see is above in the opening graph. Below are the numbers.      The max consecutive losers is a little high for my comfort, but its good enough I will start running in sim and create the short version of the algo. Then move on to TSLA, ES and NQ. Thanks for reading to the end. Rob C

answered in the other topic

inlcude/exclude study in scale

this is not an equivalent of the panic. here is why - this will close only the position of currently selected symbol - it does not use market order to exit the position so you can get just skipped it is also syntatically wrong and here is why - you read the $Pos then use Pos which are two different things if you run the hotkey when montage is in focus - if the spread of the stock you want to exit is wider than 0.25 then you can get skipped very easily the true panic will be possible only once DAS will let us to read all the current opened positions from the trades window. hopefully they will make it possible this later this year.  to see how these things work go to https://traderpeter.substack.com/s/dastrader-hotkeys