Less than 1 year
1–2 years
2–5 years
5–10 years
10+ years
Drop your answer + a quick tip for beginners in the comments 
Trading #StockMarket #Investing #DayTrading #Trader
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Tip: Don’t trade.
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yes dont trade . i agree that
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Dont do Manual trading.
Learn Backtesting.
Create a strategy with atleast 1.7+ Profit factor for past min 4 yrs.
Only take trades as per strategy ie Mechanical trading.
Keep refining strategy every 6 months.
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Been in the game 2 years only! 
Remember some algo backtesting & execution provider (can’t recall who) claiming 40% of their clients were profitable. If true, that’s definitely stacking the odds in one’s favor. 
But there are exceptions like me, both my algos (intraday vol & positional futures) were failures. 
10 year backtests, monte carlo, hand coded backtest & execution engine, the works… 
Both failed due to overfitting & regime shifts, the latter of which is notoriously difficult to detect & automate. 
But discretion (mostly non-directional option selling with vol based position sizing) has paid so far. 
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Thanks for sharing your experience frankly.
I can understand the pain. Creating a strategy is not easy. Hundreds and hundreds of variations and rules to try and thousands of optimizations to run. And after all this, a self doubt that “have i curve fitted my strategy” is real.
However, I have realised that if certain self imposed thresholds and yardsticks are kept in place, then the odds of winning are heavily on our side.
Yardsticks like -
- Accurate input of all transactions costs involved. Plus Slippage.
My brother in law and i create strategies together. He once coded a strategy that gave 2+ Profit factor. On paper it seemed fabulous. But that was until transaction cost AND slippage was added. The moment those were added, strategy made no money and lost entire capital in less than 100 trades.
- After Costs, a Minimum of 1.7 Profit factor is Must.
I had once a discussion with someone who has written a book and has been earning through algo trading for years. He advised me that minimum 1.7 PF is mandatory to maintain the edge in live after all the risks are deducted. Below it never put real money on it.
- Dissecting Profit Year by Year.
Every year should be profitable. If a strategy graph shows 60-70% profit concentrated in one year, that is a red signal. The strategy will be difficult to continue if adverse regime starts. The variance is okay. Some years could be 2x profitable than others but concentration is a red signal.
Three small experiential sharings. 
My personal journey was that i started with discretionary trading. Earned well in starting but then the difficulty to put stop loss led to giving back much of what i earned. Before i go from green to red in PnL, i decided to stop and shift to learning backtesting and algos. And that was the best decision of my life.
I ended my discretionary career (in positive) and currently continuing my algo career (for now, positive).
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Good tips but I had modeled all this in. Even made sure the thing worked through multiple regimes - pre-covid, covid, and post covid. Failed Performed poorly post late-2024 correction. Guess I just have the worst luck. 
# Intraday vol trading - 2015-2024
Cumulative PnL (INR) = 8184136.69
Max drawdown (INR) = 350244.90
Max drawdown percentage = 3.80%
Max DD peak date = Feb 15, 2022
Max DD trough date = May 13, 2022
Max DD duration = 87 days
Max DD recovery date = Jul 05, 2022
Max DD recovery duration = 53 days
Win streak (days) = 18
Lose streak (days) = 9
Max profit (INR) = 89437.65
Max loss (INR) = -36955.64
Reward/risk ratio = 2.42
Number of profitable trades = 2000
Number of loss trades = 1082
Win rate = 64.89%
CAGR = 35.51%
Calmar ratio = 9.34
Sharpe ratio = 1.85
YEARLY RETURNS (ROI)
------------------------
2019: 40.82%
2020: 20.74%
2021: 58.18%
2022: 29.05%
2023: 15.94%
2024: 39.87%
What I’ve realized from all this is that rules are necessary but you also have to know when not to follow them. Hence the discretion part! 
I would help you out, but please stop spamming this on every thread, even adjacent ones! 
You’ve already created a thread for this, spamming it in other threads does not help your cause! 
Ohh so sorry for that, i thought it would go in the personal message
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Your stats are showing a lot of green ticks. If i understand correctly, your PF too was 2.4 after considering for accurate transactions costs and a minimum slippage of 2 ticks.
In this case, I would check these things -
-
Is there any deviation between how strategy works in live market vs backtest? Deviations like repainting, calc at every tick vs calc at close, if run on futures then the values in percentage aren’t accurate, back adjustment on vs off and so on.
-
Is the code logic not working as intended in live markets?
Getting these things thoroughly checked by an AI could help. A lot of times our code is wrong. It has happened with me.
And if all these was good, I wonder how long did the poor performance lasted? Was it forever or limited degraded performance period? If it was limited, truly luck wasnt on your side when you started. Initial luck matters a lot as anyone who starts out in a drawdown phase is less likely to continue until the best period starts.
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Intraday vol regime changed.
Or in other words, I got the short end of the sequence of return stick.
No worries, I’ve found a suitable trading style elsewhere!
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2–5 years
Tip: Selling is necessary to be profitable in the long run and is not as bad or takes as much capital as people tend to think. Yes, there is no dopamine induced high with 1L+ profit in a single trade, but at least you keep ending in green, and in worst case scenario a 1 week level drawdown.
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1 year