The recent discussion has brought me to share one more aspect of our trading system we explored earlier. As a refresher - the trading system was this moving average crossover on the EURUSD exchange rate for the past 10 years. Basically the whole point was to show that by taking an incredibly simple system and by consistently applying it to the financial markets, you can extract superb profits in the long run. Additionally, we explored the pitfalls of human thought and how you really must be able to sit through a string of losses to ultimately profit.
An aspect of the system we have not covered is the max favorable excursion. We discussed max adverse excursion, which is basically on average how much every trade went against you before the close of the trade (either for a profit or for a loss). Max favorable excursion is similar in that it is how much a trade went in your favor on average before closing (either for a profit or for a loss).
The reason we did not discuss max favorable excursion is that a true trader should be focused more on risk than return. You should be scrutinizing, analyzing, and quantifying every aspect of risk, financial loss, and ruin that you are in danger of experiencing. Only after we have accounted for and understood the risks of our system should we move on to learning how to deal with a profit.Below is the chart of the statistics of the moving average trading system. Look at the MFE (located near the bottom) and the average trade (located near the middle). Once you have examined these figures, join me in the paragraph below the picture.
The MFE (max favorable excursion) for our system was 2.65%. This means that on average in every single trade (either a profit or a loss), you were sitting on a 2.65% profit at some point. The average trade is the average result of every single trade of the system: .37%. See the disparity here? Let this sink in...imagine you are trading this with $1,000,000. On average, in every single trade, you were up $26,000 but at the end of each trade, you averaged a profit of around $3,700. You were required to have the discipline to sit there for days watching over $20,000 of profit slip away on every average trade.
Well, you say, we know the MFE, why don't we just take a profit every time we are 2.65% in the money? Here's why - notice our largest trade in the data above? 12%. If we took a profit at 2.65%, we would never have had held this trade to completion. This one trade alone accounted for nearly 1/6th of our total profit. Additionally, there are a few other large trades that accounted for the bulk of our profits. By cutting these short, we would more than likely be trading a losing system.
The conclusion of this matter goes right back to the beginning - without consistency, confidence, and discipline, the odds are strongly against you in trading. Even with these things, you only have a small chance of making money in the long-run. You must have the discipline to sit there and watch your profit dwindle away.
If you are sitting on the 18% profit that those who stuck with the system are holding, you need to skeptically look at this number and know that if this is the end of the trend, you will make less than this.