ORB Accuracy Rate 59% but Can't Make Money

[KSFO 2]

Folks, I have been testing ORB for 5 weeks for now and real money for 2 weeks. The accuracy rate is 59% but I still can't make money. This is what a typical day looks like. What should I do now? Yes I have Kyle's hotkeys.

So for today, the journal shows $25 loss. But I actually lost $69 with commission.

 

 

[Justin 264]

Hard to say without a little more detail, but in general you're going to need your winners to run longer before taking a partial.

I remember finding it hard to trade ORBs when trading with a size that small. Because it's harder to scale out with any significant impact on your P&L and your commissions will kill you.

Your mileage may vary, but one thing you could try is when your entry breaks in your direction, move your stop up to break even without taking any partials. This way you can protect yourself if it reverses before hitting 2R or whatever level you're looking for.

[sawtooth500 33]

I'll second what Justin said. You're being loose with your stops, and quick with your profits. It's something every trader struggles with, but you need to train yourself to be tight with your stops and let your winners run. 

Here is a technique that has really helped me personally when I'm already in a green position - I pretend I'm not in the position, and I pretend that I'm evaluating it as a new trade in the direction that I want to go (long/short). For this example, I'll just say we're green in a long position. I'll ask myself, pretending I'm not in a position:

Would I enter right now? If yes, then hold. If not, then why not? If I won't enter because the trade will probably continue to climb, but it's already made an initial move so I can't get in without a good risk/reward, then hold. If I don't enter because I'm simply uncertain as to whether it will continue long or not, then I consider a partial. If I don't enter because it looks overextended, or it MAY reverse/pull back, then that's a good time to do a full exit. 

Hope this helps!

[Justin 264]

12 minutes ago, sawtooth500 said:

Would I enter right now? If yes, then hold. If not, then why not? If I won't enter because the trade will probably continue to climb, but it's already made an initial move so I can't get in without a good risk/reward, then hold. If I don't enter because I'm simply uncertain as to whether it will continue long or not, then I consider a partial. If I don't enter because it looks overextended, or it MAY reverse/pull back, then that's a good time to do a full exit. 

I like this mentality @sawtooth500! Very nice 👍

[CliffG 31]

Thanks Guys for the advice.

I think i'm more or less in a similar position, but have not yet gone live.

I've been testing tons of trades (trying to locate my edge), I feel most comfortable with ORBs (2/5/15min) and abcd (which quite often come about as part of my original ORB trade). My most successful ORB is 5min. I've been testing as if I was going live with small positions ($20 risk), but am too quick to try and lock in profits and worried they will come back on me.

So my question, should I scale up to more accurately represent 1% risk to see if my outcomes are just as good? Or do something else?

(FYI, I've only been using chartlog since Wednesday, so I had more data before this, and I was hitting maybe 80% green trades, but with similar P/L outcomes).

 

 

Edited June 19, 2020 by CliffG

[Rob C 826]

4 hours ago, KSFO said:

Folks, I have been testing ORB for 5 weeks for now and real money for 2 weeks. The accuracy rate is 59% but I still can't make money. This is what a typical day looks like. What should I do now? Yes I have Kyle's hotkeys.

So for today, the journal shows $25 loss. But I actually lost $69 with commission.

 

 

I had the same issue for many months when trading ORBs. I would have to be at 65% win rate to be profitable even though I always stuck to my stops. I am profitable now even though I have a win% around 50%. These are the changes I made.

1) Make sure your R is completely fixed. If not this causes two issues. Unsure how the subconscious does it but you will continuously see on the big winners you took too little risk and the big losers too much. Also, it is very difficult to analyze your trades if the R is not fixed.

2) Do what you need to do to control FOBW (Fear Of Being Wrong). I instinctively would take a partial way too early so I could lock in a winner. Now I try to set the partial profit locations (at least the first one) before I take the trade. Still it took me almost a year before I had the discipline to wait to 1R before I take the first partial.

3) Move stop to B/E after first partial. 

4) Analyze journal to determine which ORB is best. One minute in time between ORBs can be a completely different strategy. I found out I was poor on the 1/2/5 min ORB and was good and the in between. So the 30sec, 1,5min and 3min ORBs are my best.

5) This is the change that finally placed me into profitability for ORBs. Add a few cents to your stop. I kept missing huge runs by the price dropping and taking me out by a penny or two and going for a 10R run. I kept telling myself it was a coincidence there isn't an algo going to my stop and taking me out. But after a 100 or so times I realize that is exactly what the algo is doing. Because I have set my stop in the same place as the other 10,000 or so retailers. So we all can be taken out at the same penny or two because we all chose to have our stop 5 cents below VWAP or something like that. So I added a couple of cents to my hot key. I still choose the same stop as always but my hot key makes the stop a couple of pennies deeper. Same for my B/E stop key I added a a couple of cents. Now, at least half the time, the price drops just misses my stop and the stock takes me with it on its big run.

[CliffG 31]

8 minutes ago, Rob C said:

I had the same issue for many months when trading ORBs. I would have to be at 65% win rate to be profitable even though I always stuck to my stops. I am profitable now even though I have a win% around 50%. These are the changes I made.

1) Make sure your R is completely fixed. If not this causes two issues. Unsure how the subconscious does it but you will continuously see on the big winners you took too little risk and the big losers too much. Also, it is very difficult to analyze your trades if the R is not fixed.

2) Do what you need to do to control FOBW (Fear Of Being Wrong). I instinctively would take a partial way too early so I could lock in a winner. Now I try to set the partial profit locations (at least the first one) before I take the trade. Still it took me almost a year before I had the discipline to wait to 1R before I take the first partial.

3) Move stop to B/E after first partial. 

4) Analyze journal to determine which ORB is best. One minute in time between ORBs can be a completely different strategy. I found out I was poor on the 1/2/5 min ORB and was good and the in between. So the 30sec, 1,5min and 3min ORBs are my best.

5) This is the change that finally placed me into profitability for ORBs. Add a few cents to your stop. I kept missing huge runs by the price dropping and taking me out by a penny or two and going for a 10R run. I kept telling myself it was a coincidence there isn't an algo going to my stop and taking me out. But after a 100 or so times I realize that is exactly what the algo is doing. Because I have set my stop in the same place as the other 10,000 or so retailers. So we all can be taken out at the same penny or two because we all chose to have our stop 5 cents below VWAP or something like that. So I added a couple of cents to my hot key. I still choose the same stop as always but my hot key makes the stop a couple of pennies deeper. Same for my B/E stop key I added a a couple of cents. Now, at least half the time, the price drops just misses my stop and the stock takes me with it on its big run.

I really love your last point, about setting the SL just a few cents below or above the 'standard'. That's something I can try myself. Thanks for the tip 🙂

[Justin 264]

12 minutes ago, Rob C said:

I still choose the same stop as always but my hot key makes the stop a couple of pennies deeper.

Now this is one hell of a nugget! I like it @Rob C!

[KSFO 2]

On 6/19/2020 at 11:21 AM, Justin said:

Hard to say without a little more detail, but in general you're going to need your winners to run longer before taking a partial.

I remember finding it hard to trade ORBs when trading with a size that small. Because it's harder to scale out with any significant impact on your P&L and your commissions will kill you.

Your mileage may vary, but one thing you could try is when your entry breaks in your direction, move your stop up to break even without taking any partials. This way you can protect yourself if it reverses before hitting 2R or whatever level you're looking for.

Hi Justin, is there a script for the hot keys to move the stops to break even without partial? Thank you!

 

[Justin 264]

2 hours ago, KSFO said:

Hi Justin, is there a script for the hot keys to move the stops to break even without partial? Thank you!

 

Hey! Yes here it is:

CXL ALLSYMB;Route=Stop;Price=AvgCost;StopType=MARKET;STOPPRICE=AvgCost;StopPrice=Round2;Share=Pos;TIF=DAY+;Send=Reverse;

[hailchaser2 185]

There are a bunch of great replies here, I agree with all of them as well.

 

@KSFO What is your Risk per trade? Where are you taking your first partial? 

I try to not take any partials until trade reaches 1R. I struggled with this, and still do sometimes. I'm getting better though, and it's helping my daily Rs.

 

[KyleK29 260]

I had this same problem when I first started out. There's a delicate balancing act between how you handle the ORB trade, and not all ORB's are created equal. Some will only reach maybe 1.5 to 2R before pulling back/reversing. Others will run all day. Many will hit 1R and then reverse (especially on choppy days).  What I adjusted was how and when I started to scale-out on ORB trades. If you scale at 1R everytime, you may hit on many (especially if you immediately set to B/E to protect those profits), but it greatly reduces your overall-profit potential. This is why you're "winning" (again, not a good metric) but still losing. If you figure out how far on average these usually run and adjust profits accordingly, you can fine tune your profit-taking to be more efficient. Some metrics to keep track of that assist in this (and I may possibly do a seminar on advanced metrics for optimizing if there's enough interest) are:

- Highest / lowest price you saw before the position closed.
- Highest / lowest price that was seen before the stock crossed your initial stop price (even after a trade has closed out) before market close (usually doesn't come to that, but sometimes a stock trends all day. I have a timelimit where I cut it off at a 90min window).
- **highest / lowest price are not side relative, so they're literally the highest and lowest prices you've seen.

For example, I analyzed my ORB trades and figured out that on average they'd run about 2R in my favor, so instead of scaling 25% at 1R and more at 1.5R like I was initially. I started scaling 10% around 1.5R and 20% around 2R. This dropped my accuracy to around ~40%, but my PnL shot up considerably. 

 

Edited July 17, 2020 by KyleK29

[evan 17]

On 6/29/2020 at 3:20 AM, peterB said:

@KSFO

success rate means nothing itself without (context and) proper partialling/exit strategy which shall be the part of your trade already when you enter the trade.

regarding comissions, they are eating you with small account but try to ignore it. take it as the price of trading. there is not much you can do about it, just focus on good trading.

i have the same experience with ORBs, they are tricky because they are many times only scalps for very few profit for me. My success rate is around 40% but still overall profitable but some months are just red - see below. Try to partial 25% of position at 1R and let it run to 2R 3R. If you are successful with identifying them to 65% the solution for you could be to take bigger wins or minimize losses. Bigger wins can be achieved by more patience or better entries. Less losses can be achieved by better entries or more patience with not taking every ORB you see. For me it is best if the ORB is combined with an ABCD pattern. If there is no pullback during the first 5 minutes, i dont take it.

 

also for me ORBDs are way more profitable than ORBUs so maybe try to take ORBDs instead of ORBUs to see if it is the same for you.

 

Hi Peter,

What's the software you're using there for the Setup Performance Reports?

[evan 17]

Thank you, sir.

[Jesse 8]

I looked over my journaling yesterday and there were a lot of trades where I took a few partials, moved my stop to break even, then it came back to stop me out. So I decided to do the math and my red day would have turned to a green one with $70 extra in P/L($15 risk) if I had just set a all out at 2:1. I am going to try this method next week and see how it goes. Has anyone else gone this route?

Edited August 29, 2020 by Jesse