Day Trading, Forex or Currencies Back Testing - A Way to Improve Your Trading Score
You can draw some useful parallels between running a
business and Day Trading, Forex or Currencies trading.
For instance, most successful businesses keep statistics
on everything from their conversion rate, to their
average dollar sale, to the number of people that come
in the door. Businesses do this to keep on top of how
they are doing on a day to day basis and businesses
must first take score before begining to improve on that
score. Using a Day Trading, Forex or Currencies back
testing plan in your trading works exactly the same way.
Now that you`re looking at Day Trading, Forex or
Currencies trading as a business, you need to learn
some valuable statistics about your system so you can
improve it`s performance. You would use a Day
Trading, Forex or Currencies back testing method. You
can`t improve your system unless you have something
to measure it against. How could you expect to improve
your trading unless you knew what it was you were
looking to improve? You can discover these
measurements and other valuable information about
your trading system, by using a Day Trading, Forex or
Currencies back testing plan.
There are two ways that you can use a Day Trading,
Forex or Currencies back testing plan to back test a
system. You can do it manually, which can be a drawn
out and labour intensive process, or you can do it with
the aid of some software packages. Unfortunately, I
recommend you do it by hand when you first start out.
You`ll get a much better feel for your system, and you`ll
understand exactly how using a Day Trading, Forex or
Currencies back testing plan works in all its intricacies.
Once you have the Day Trading, Forex or Currencies
back testing plan and the in depth knowledge, you could
look at finding a software package that does it for you.
There are a few major statistics on your Day Trading,
Forex or Currencies back testing plan that you need that
you will uncover through back testing. The first statistic
you need to become familiar with is the R multiple
principal. R stands for risk, the risk you take on any trade
when you enter the market. The R multiple of a trade is
the ratio of the profit or loss compared to the amount of
money risked to make the profit or loss.
Therefore, if you risk $200 dollars in your initial
purchase, and you make a profit of $1,000, you have
made five times the amount you risked in the trade. You
have an R multiple of five. This statistic gives you a
good idea of the relative size of your profits to your
losses. You can compare the average size of your
winning trades with the average size of your losing
trades.
The next statistic you`ll find useful is your win to loss
ratio. This is how many times you get a winning trade in
proportion to how many times you get a losing trade.
For example, if you had ten trades, four of those trades
were winners, and six were losers, your win to loss ratio
is simply four to six. This is your hit rate; you`ll get 40%
of your trades correct.
With these two simple statistics, you can calculate the
average size of your profits and of your losses, multiply
these figures with your win to loss ratio, and calculate on
average how much money you make with every dollar
you risk.
For those of you who think this sounds like a too much
work, particularly using a Day Trading, Forex or
Currencies back testing plan that you need to do to
uncover these statistics, consider this scenario: Imagine
yourself trading a system that you knew had a win to
loss ratio of 60/40. You made profit on every six trades
and lost one out of every four. How do you think you
would feel, where would your confidence level be, after
you traded the system for a little while and you received
a string of 11 losses in a row?
Now, you know that this system has a win to loss ratio of
six to four. Would you have the confidence to open
another trade if your system brought up another buy
signal after getting 11 trades wrong?
Unless you use Day Trading, Forex or Currencies back
testing plan to back tested your system, I doubt that your
confidence level will remain high. That trading system
may be a fantastic profitable system. However, since
you didn`t use your Day Trading, Forex or Currencies
back testing plan to back test it, you don`t know that
historically this system received up to 13 losses in a
row, but was still profitable.
Here`s another point you may not have picked up
unless you used your Day Trading, Forex or Currencies
back testing plan. Once you`ve set your money
management rules and you begin to trade, you will
likely experience a string of losses. Countless times,
I`ve had clients who get disheartened by this fact
because they don`t understand the nature of setting
good management. If you`re adhering to the rules of
cutting your losses short and letting your profits run,
because you`re cutting your losses short, those trades
are going to last for a shorter amount of time.
This means once you begin trading the odds of getting
losses early in the game are much higher than getting a
winning trade. This is particularly true when you
consider that many successful trading systems run on a
40/60 win to loss ratio. However, you will never know
the intricacies of your system unless you use a Day
Trading, Forex or Currencies back testing plan and back
test it.
Using a Day Trading, Forex or Currencies back testing
plan, will help you to understand what works and what
doesn`t. It will give you the statistics to gauge the
effectiveness of your trades. It fills in your scorecard, and
allows you to make improvements. But, you shouldn`t
simply believe everything I`ve told you. Instead, you
need to prove it to yourself by using some Day Trading,
Forex or Currencies back testing plans and back test
your system.
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