Discretionary Trading

Still working through Robert Carver's book and one of the things I've got from the focus on Systematic trading is that I don't want to entirely neglect a small discretionary trading portfolio.

It's good to put some of the macro and technical analysis to the test, and I'll be sticking to the scalping approach on just BTC, ETH and SOL for now.

There'll be strict risk management and i'm aiming to take 10-15 trades per month and monitor the balance weekly.

Although I've only started with $100 of test money I'll simulate a $1000 portfolio with 1R being $5 or 0.5% of the simulated balance. Some of the advice I value says to strip back a lot of the extra indicators but i want to keep my eyes on volume, price action and some reference to short term moving average crossovers.

With this ETH trade I basically entered on a lull when I was optimistic that the price was going to continue to recover after the low, and although I didn't exit the short term top I took some profits above the exit price, which was on a downward mini-trend and not optimal. For the scalping time scale where you don't want to spend too many days out of trend it might be necessary to consider a trailing stop to lock in profits.

A similar thing happend with this BTC trade, as although I caught a good move upwards I could have been better to close with a trailing stop closer to or above $86k rather than $85, as it had gone on to touch $87k, although I was hoping for a move to $90k.

Caught a small move on SOL for 26% in total and will be standing pat for the end of the week-- got one remaining position on ETH for 1R, with a tight stop in place. The worst this first week can close is +35% on $135, any moves later today or over the weekend could improve that.

For me, the key is risk management and cherry-picking the short term positions. We'll see if we can get the trading balance towards $1000, but it's not going to happen overnight.