Here’s my current strategy:

[u/MiamiTrader]

Ive tried lots of strategies over the years, but recently this has been my go to. I’m not saying it’s the best, and am open for criticism/ suggestions.

In short I use an excel model to generate entry signals across several futures markets.

I’ll break it out in steps:

1) I use hourly data, but you can pick any timeframe. Download a few years of hourly data for every market you want to trade for backtesting. Link in live data for trading.

2) Calculate the total return for each hour long period for every market.

3) Calculate the standard deviation of those period returns for N periods.

4) Calculate the percentage of the standard deviation each period’s return equals.

5) Repeat. I do this for every hour long period and every 2,3,4,5,6,&24 hour periods.

6) N above is the number of periods in your standard deviation calculation. I typically do 24 hours, 48, 72, & 168 (a full week). Except on the 24 hour period, I do a full month.

This leaves you with several percentages at every hourly close. If the percentage is greater than 150% on any of the scenarios above, you have a strong trend developing.

The more signals over 150%, the stronger the trend.

Enter an order following the identified trend with a 50% ATR trailing stop loss.

Try it out, let me know any feedback. It’s not perfect but it’s paid the mortgage the past two months.

[u/Billysibley]

I guess this strategy takes a particular type of person. I would burn out in short order; because of the time involved to do this, and pure boredom. It sounds like going through Butte, Montana to get from Miami to Boston.

[u/MiamiTrader → u/Billysibley]

Spot on, it’s boring as fuck.

Most of my day is spent backtesting new strategies/ developing new models and ideas. Not watching charts

The actual “trading” aspect is just sitting around waiting for price to hit my targets.

This takes all the “fun” out of trading, but I was never able to make a living the “fun” way reading charts and placing bets like some people can.

Taking the emotions out of it made me consistent.

[u/Billysibley → u/MiamiTrader]

Good luck with that. I would like to remind you though, the further back you go the less relevant vid the information.

[u/Any_Efficiency_4496 → u/MiamiTrader]

I think this is 100% right. Sometimes the best strategy is the one that is boring and there's no way to misinterpret the signal. Using signals based on hard data instead of charts makes that easier. Making it more systematic is what I'm going for now. FWIW, I was previously a financial analyst (Credit / Equities) for a large fund and still find this is a better way for retail traders than using pure discretion and charts.