Reasonable profit factor

[mrbeanbag]

I have spent a lot of time refining strategies but the best profit factor I can achieve is about 1.7 . This is for one stock going back 6 months using 1-min charts with about 1000 trades (the data is pretty messed up too).

I have no idea if 1.7 is good or poor, what do your figures look like? Thanks.

[NinjaTrader_Bertrand]

Hi mrbeanbag, hard to put a 'good or bad' sticker on that one figure alone, this is a reasonable figure for a start, depending on how much drawdown you need to tolerate, I personally look for 2-3 to have more room for realtime deviations along the way...John Ehlers published a good TASC article on that called 'Systems Performance Evaluation', you might want to google if for it, I believe he also posted it to his webpage.

[r2kTrader]

1.7 is very nice. Ideally you want a win percentage that is close to 50% and you have to pay attention to your largest winner and loser. Throw them both out and then look at your data. Under your performance, look at the daily profit and weekly profit and then find out where your drawdowns were and make sure that profit factor wasn't made because of 1 good month.

You have a LONG road ahead of you. VERY LONG. Get ready to invest literally thousands of hours ;-)

Is it worth it? Let's put it this way. It is not for the frail. It's for the stubborn and confident. And that still doesn't mean you will make money.

I would suggest you start simple. Focus on 1 good trade that you can get 2-3 signals a day on. Set your profit loss and take the signal. The rest is money management and the brain. If you have emotional issues, trading will help you uncover them ALL. You will learn more about your shortcomings than you ever wanted to

I have spent a lot of time refining strategies but the best profit factor I can achieve is about 1.7 . This is for one stock going back 6 months using 1-min charts with about 1000 trades (the data is pretty messed up too).

I have no idea if 1.7 is good or poor, what do your figures look like? Thanks.

[fastcar]

You have a LONG road ahead of you. VERY LONG. Get ready to invest literally thousands of hours ;-)

...If you have emotional issues, trading will help you uncover them ALL. You will learn more about your shortcomings than you ever wanted to

+1

fastcar

[NFT-Trader]

I found the paper Evaluating Trading Systems By John Ehlers and Ric Way very informative. Thanks