Presentation Discussion: Many pit traders are continuously in long or short positions much of their day, ‘Always-In’.  On the other hand electronic day traders often spend much of their day out of the market waiting and watching for that ‘right and valid’ entry to a ‘high probability’ trade that will hopefully be one of the more profitable ones.  Three years ago Bill asked himself the question, can a pit trader style, Always-In, rule based, daytrading methodology be developed that will ensure being ‘in’ when the profitable trades occur, especially the highly profitable ones?  For this he knew he needed entry/exit rules to remain ‘in’ long or short a high percentage of the time—including routine reversals—along with effective rules for managing both the winners and losers.  

After more than 10,000 hours of development and evaluation, mostly day-in day-out real-time trade logging, simulator trading and real trading, his answer is yes.  For many months as a moderator in FuturesTalk he’s been describing Always-In features, posting trades every trading day in real or near real-time for others to evaluate, and for the past few months publishing a log of all available trades for the Russell 2000 and Euro currency futures.  This has met with high praise from FuturesTalk members.  Always-In involves the use of trading approaches regularly taught in FuturesTalk combined with uniquely added support/resistance breakout filters, the now famous pink lines, that provide the potential for both an exceptional win/loss ratio and minimal draw downs.  It is founded on a principle, an assertion, and a belief system, all interrelated and built into a trading plan.  

The principle is that no matter what filters you use for entries in rule-based daytrading, you must ‘catch’ some highly profitable trades to significantly offset your losers and to do so you must enter a ‘sufficient’ number of trades—accepted by most traders but almost never taken to the limit of Always-In.  The assertion is that the accepted mantra of ‘letting winners run and keeping losers small’ requires a definitive, easy to apply trade/money management scheme that overcomes any sabotaging effects of ‘trader psychology’—advocated by most traders but seldom set forth in any detail, the Always-In work-in-progress scheme is central for optimizing win/loss.  The belief system is the very heart of a trading methodology—a major differentiator of traders largely ignored or ill-defined but not so in this methodology.  From these foundations a complete methodology evolved with trading tools defined along with rules and guidelines for their use in trade entries, exits and management all of which constitute the core elements of the Always-In trading plan.