Over the past five months, I’ve maintained an 80% win rate, but recently everything fell apart. Between mid-November and today, I’ve lost 20 trades in a row, ultimately blowing up my account.
I didn’t change my strategy or approach during this time. It’s left me wondering: is this time of year just particularly bad for trading, or did I just hit an extreme streak of bad luck?
Would love to hear your thoughts or if anyone else has experienced something similar during this period.
@Riley
Not true about the ‘losing 20 in a row’ theory. I’ve put together multiple profitable EAs based on manual strategies over the years, and looking at the backtest it’s almost guaranteed to lose 20+ at one point or another (based on non-subjective strategies). Any subjectivity or luck could prevent this though.
@Chandler
If you had the slightest idea about how statistics work, you’d understand how improbable 20 losses in a row is… but sure keep believing whatever you want.
Riley said: @Chandler
If you had the slightest idea about how statistics work, you’d understand how improbable 20 losses in a row is… but sure keep believing whatever you want.
I will believe from what I see from hard backtested data. You can believe in a subjective theory.
@Chandler
It literally is. Of course, it depends on plenty of factors…but losing 20 in a row is insanely improbable.
I take 100 trades per year. I’ve been trading for 8 years… let’s say I’ll be trading for another 10 maybe…
All together around 2000-2500 trades.
So far the biggest losing streak I had was 9 trades. And that was already extremely unlikely to happen.
This is not even nearly a big enough sample for a scenario like that to have big odds.
A singular trade outcome is always 50-50, like flipping a coin. Do you know how improbable flipping heads is 20 times in a row in 2500 flips? It’s less than 1% or 1 in almost 500.
@Riley
To be in the trading game for 8 years and think a singular trade outcome is 50/50 is all I need to know you’re talking some BS. You’ve not got the experience in backtested tick data like I do, and let me tell you, 20 L’s in a row is pretty probable. End of story.
No, you were royally lucky when you had that 80% win rate. Markets go from ranging to trending markets and vice versa, so your method works in one market regime; in the other, it goes straight to a margin call.
I call it ‘The walk on water feeling’. If you have win after win, you start to feel you can walk on water and can do no wrong. Reality really hurts.
At first, the less you know is strangely reassuring; however, you start to think more about what you are doing and start to get a thirst for more information, and what you consume starts to affect what you were originally doing. That’s my thoughts. Good luck on your journey.
I am gonna sound like a broken record here (since I have said countless times about fundamentals on here), you need to learn fundamentals. For your case, since you are a swing trader, you need to know the fundamental backings of currencies and why does price even move (spoiler: it does not move from f—ing lines on a chart).
I, myself, am still learning (I am not profitable) and there is a lot of shit to learn. You could be 10 years deep and still learn new stuff.
Learning fundamentals is not just trading when there are high impact news and calling it a day; it is about learning monetary policy, fiscal policy, geopolitics, economic indicators, risk on, risk off, etc.
Even if you are not a swing trader, you need to know this stuff for your bias.
Hollis said:
I’ve heard that it’s easier to trade continuations than reversals.
IMO, a quality reversal setup should essentially look like a continuation, but of the new trend. If it doesn’t (i.e., trying to catch the very top or bottom), then that’s an issue.
I feel like as a beginner that account size is too small for swing trading. Maybe try scalping. I’ve never seen a losing streak that long. Over what period of time did you lose those 20 trades?
.