FRTA
Forterra, Inc
stock NASDAQ

 **“never sell…at a loss” and “no stop losses”**
Simply put, both of those are guaranteed to lose money. Big Money wants the conventional wisdom to be to use stop losses, which is how they get their liquidity. They have access to level 3 data so they know where all the stop orders are and they manipulate prices to scoop them up. (Google "stop loss hunting".) Get to know this subject well, and don't be their victim.
Selling at a loss is an admission that there's a fault in the strategy's *execution*. If you have successfully stocked the pond you're fishing in, there's no reason to dump a position if it's not showing green right away. (There will be rare exceptions of course, and I expect to run into one or two over time, but so far, this strategy has worked well.)
**"And unfortunately, your results seem too good to be true"**
... the snapshot I shared is indeed my *sim futures* account. Allow me to share some results from my *live margin* (stocks) account.
This account has many, many more trades in it than the futures I previously shared, going back to the early days of my platform development, and the implementation wasn't adequately matured until mid June, which combined with off-strategy investments in TSLA which resulted in fewer trading days the last month or two. More on TSLA below.
When you look at these results, keep in mind that most of the trades before late April were manual or experimental in some way so I haven't included them. I took a break from using this account for automated trading when I figured out how to use the sim accounts for testing, so from May on most of the activity is in the sim (margin and futures) accounts, but I did run the platform on the live account when I had the opportunity, after mid-May.
For application of the "never sell at a loss" rule, see the early trades for T, MP, HAL, ENS. These trades took weeks (and in the case of ENS three months) to turn green, and there were many days in the interim where most of were deeply red. Succumbing to fear would have been very costly. I stuck to the rule and every one of those turned green.
As of this afternoon, my live margin account is up 64% with 21 days traded and a 91% win rate. More about that win rate under the TSLA discussion.
Finally, note that there are six positions still open. One is TSLA; the other five have limit sell orders in place and I expect those to close (at their target profits) in the coming days. (btw "FRTA" in my Notes column means "Full Round Trip Auto", meaning the traded started and finished hands-free, but this is true for all but a handful of my non-TSLA trades since May; the only exceptions have been when I adjusted the limit price of some sell orders to better align with support levels.)
Finally finally, I should note that my entry criteria wasn't fully refined until the second or third week of August. (This is really obvious in my sim margin account trade history.) Since then the average duration of a trade has dropped drastically, and I haven't experienced any of those multi-week positions like I did early on.
**About that TSLA**
If you look closely at the snapshot you'll notice that a number of rows are hidden. All of these are manual trades in TSLA. Four of those trades resulted in $17,524 in **losses** when, on May 9th, I discovered a costly bug in my software, and 700 of my TSLA shares sold at market. (Bug since fixed!!!)
There were other TSLA trades at a profit, more recently when I (manually) closed 600 shares at a $30,382 profit. So keep in mind when you look at the account's current equity that \~$22k of the realized P/L is from manual TSLA trading. But the rest is virtually 100% automated.
Note that if you discard the May 9th "accident", the win rate for this account is 100%.
https://preview.redd.it/tgnkkxjk0fpf1.png?width=874&format=png&auto=webp&s=749fb6724d3f1d1c3ae22ff6928c5e7df00c5db5

 **“never sell…at a loss” and “no stop losses”**
Simply put, both of those are guaranteed to lose money. Big Money wants the conventional wisdom to be to use stop losses, which is how they get their liquidity. They have access to level 3 data so they know where all the stop orders are and they manipulate prices to scoop them up. (Google "stop loss hunting".) Get to know this subject well, and don't be their victim.
Selling at a loss is an admission that there's a fault in the strategy's *execution*. If you have successfully stocked the pond you're fishing in, there's no reason to dump a position if it's not showing green right away. (There will be rare exceptions of course, and I expect to run into one or two over time, but so far, this strategy has worked well.)
**"And unfortunately, your results seem too good to be true"**
... the snapshot I shared is indeed my *sim futures* account. Allow me to share some results from my *live margin* (stocks) account.
This account has many, many more trades in it than the futures I previously shared, going back to the early days of my platform development, and the implementation wasn't adequately matured until mid June, which combined with off-strategy investments in TSLA which resulted in fewer trading days the last month or two. More on TSLA below.
When you look at these results, keep in mind that most of the trades before late April were manual or experimental in some way so I haven't included them. I took a break from using this account for automated trading when I figured out how to use the sim accounts for testing, so from May on most of the activity is in the sim (margin and futures) accounts, but I did run the platform on the live account when I had the opportunity, after mid-May.
For application of the "never sell at a loss" rule, see the early trades for T, MP, HAL, ENS. These trades took weeks (and in the case of ENS three months) to turn green, and there were many days in the interim where most of were deeply red. Succumbing to fear would have been very costly. I stuck to the rule and every one of those turned green.
As of this afternoon, my live margin account is up 64% with 21 days traded and a 91% win rate. More about that win rate under the TSLA discussion.
Finally, note that there are six positions still open. One is TSLA; the other five have limit sell orders in place and I expect those to close (at their target profits) in the coming days. (btw "FRTA" in my Notes column means "Full Round Trip Auto", meaning the traded started and finished hands-free, but this is true for all but a handful of my non-TSLA trades since May; the only exceptions have been when I adjusted the limit price of some sell orders to better align with support levels.)
Finally finally, I should note that my entry criteria wasn't fully refined until the second or third week of August. (This is really obvious in my sim margin account trade history.) Since then the average duration of a trade has dropped drastically, and I haven't experienced any of those multi-week positions like I did early on.
**About that TSLA**
If you look closely at the snapshot you'll notice that a number of rows are hidden. All of these are manual trades in TSLA. Four of those trades resulted in $17,524 in **losses** when, on May 9th, I discovered a costly bug in my software, and 700 of my TSLA shares sold at market. (Bug since fixed!!!)
There were other TSLA trades at a profit, more recently when I (manually) closed 600 shares at a $30,382 profit. So keep in mind when you look at the account's current equity that \~$22k of the realized P/L is from manual TSLA trading. But the rest is virtually 100% automated.
Note that if you discard the May 9th "accident", the win rate for this account is 100%.
https://preview.redd.it/tgnkkxjk0fpf1.png?width=874&format=png&auto=webp&s=749fb6724d3f1d1c3ae22ff6928c5e7df00c5db5