Maybe You Don’t Need a Better Strategy

[dreambig]

Maybe You Don’t Need a Better Strategy

One thing I’ve learned from trading is that sometimes the problem isn’t the strategy.

It’s me.

You lose a few trades and suddenly you start thinking:

“Maybe this setup doesn’t work anymore.”

So you change something.

Then you see another strategy on YouTube.
Then another indicator.
Then someone posts a crazy 1:5 trade.

And suddenly you’re changing your entire approach again.

I’ve done this more times than I’d like to admit.

The frustrating part is that almost every strategy will have losing trades. Even good setups will fail. That’s just trading.

Maybe instead of constantly searching for something better, we should spend more time becoming better at executing what we already have.

Because a mediocre strategy followed consistently can probably take you further than a great strategy you keep changing every two weeks.

Sometimes the next level isn’t finding a better strategy.

It’s finally sticking to one.

DreamBig

[Fairman]

a mediocre strategy followed consistently can probably take you further than a great strategy you keep changing every two weeks.

Agree, and the practical problem is knowing when a losing run is normal and when the setup really has stopped working. Without a rule decided in advance, every drawdown feels like the one that proves it's broken. One way to settle it is to write the rule before starting. Take your past results, run a simple simulation, and note how deep a drawdown gets in the worst 5% of runs. If the live drawdown stays inside that, it's normal variance and you keep going. If it goes well beyond it, that's evidence for a review, not a feeling. Same with sample size. Ten or fifteen trades say almost nothing about a setup, so a change after two weeks is usually reacting to noise.

[Shadow Trader]

The thing that helped me was splitting losses into two piles before deciding anything about the setup. Every losing trade gets tagged as either taken by the rules or not, and only the first pile is allowed to count as evidence against the strategy.

When I first did this over three months, a bit over a third of my losers were in the second pile. Late entries, moved stops, trades taken outside my session window. The strategy was being blamed for losses it never asked me to take.

For the YouTube problem I keep a parking list. Any new idea gets written down with the date, and it is not allowed near a live account until I have watched it on demo or in a replay for at least 40 trades.

Most ideas die quietly on that list within a week, which is the point. The few that survive usually turn out to be a small tweak to what I already trade, like a filter or a time window, rather than a whole new system.

Did you find the urge to switch came more after losing runs, or after seeing someone else's big win? For me it was clearly the second.

[Shadow Trader]

Fairman, I ran that worst 5% simulation on my own book, and one detail matters a lot. If the input includes trades taken against the rules, the drawdown threshold comes out deeper and hides the very problem it is meant to catch.

Using only the rule following trades from my last 200, I shuffled them into 5,000 runs of 100 trades. The median worst drawdown was 6R and the 95th percentile was 11R.

img_13401_r2.png (48.46 KiB) Viewed 5 times

The illustration plots that spread with both lines marked, plus my live drawdown at 8R. That sits well inside the normal band, so the setup stays and the review waits.

Depth is only half of it, though. A drawdown that stays near 8R for 60 trades is a different signal from one that touches 8R and recovers in ten, so I also record the longest stretch without a new equity high.

dreambig, the YouTube urge mostly faded for me once this line existed on paper. Arguing with a number I wrote down before the losing run was much harder than arguing with a feeling.

What drawdown would make you review the setup, and did you decide it before or during the run? Most people I ask only have the during answer.