When to enter? Does it even matter?

16 sept. 2021

With value investing everyone knows: Buy when there is blood in the street, when a good company has a P/E ratio of maybe under 10.

But with currencies, other than the advice "50% to 61.8% fib" and a whole lot of troll "buy every bottom sell every top with the magic indicator or magic drawing on the chart" there is no common knowledge.

We can look at this recent example where the price dropped, went sideways, and then dropped hard.



We could keep looking at winning examples when selling or buying at the top of these bands or ~61.8% retracement



The only way to know how good they are is by backtesting a large number and writing down the stats.

But are there other ways to enter?


Rather than write an entire novel with chapters I will simply go through a list of screenshots











Some say it doesn't matter where you enter...
It does and it doesn't, depends what you mean by that.


First




Second




Third




Fourth




Fifth




Sixth




Seventh




Eight




Ninth




Final




This is all simplified to make my point, or points I guess.


So you can't just say "entry doesn't matter". People that tried trading, failed, got into "holy grail" safe good boy passive S&P in the last 70 years averaged bla bla bla wake me up, they're the ones saying this. Oh so it does not matter if they buy a stock at a P/E of 8 or 280?

Of course it matters!!! Entry matters!

BUT where you enter EXACTLY does not matter. I'm not sure how to put it, but go through the examples and you see what I mean. Sometimes it matters, but even if you miss it there are other ones, and these entries are going to be at least a small area "of opportunity" anyway. Well it's more complicated than a "yes" or "no". There are plenty of ifs. And plenty of ways to approach this.

Look, Warren Buffett bought too early or later and sold too early all the time. And? Most famous investor in the world. Is there an optimal super entry that gives better results than anything else? Statistically there has to be one, so yes. If we spend ages making stats and we find it do we know it will remain this particular one? Probably not... Can we find it without it just being hindsight bias? Probably not... Would having the mighty perfect entry (I didn't say find every exact bottom, that's not actually possible) make a big difference to our results? Lol you might go from 20% returns to 20.5%. Probably even less.


The endless search for the holy entry newbs seem to all be obsessed with... Fool game. It's same as with video games, Starcraft, Lol, Dota, W3. Or chess... Newbs go "I will farm for 40 minutes full eco ignore military, full Nasus q, full catch his pawns, I'll be a monster and they'll see", 15 minutes later "Ok tough guy just wait late game you will feel sorry", 5 minutes later "Victory!" or "GG easy noob", 1 minute later "Report Nasus useless afk trash ebay account". Haha I laugh every time.
They really make all the same type of newbie "late game" and "magnet logic" mistakes, 80% of retail FX goes into "day trading" because "hey I figured out I'll get more trades and therefore grow my account faster duh", "Hey you can't lose if you don't sell", "Hey I have this brilliant martingale average down", "Hey wassup wassup wassup I found a trick", "hey if I go for lots and lots of little wins, take my profit fast I'll win small but very often and scale", "hey if I run conservative robots that only return 1% but I run 500 of them...", "hey if I add all these conditions". What a circus.

Miss the good old days. Can't humiliate noobs with trading their account is secret, they open their mouths when they get lucky then vanish, and it's not a 1 v 1 or 3 v 3 or whatever it's a 1 v whole market. Even if we cooperate and share ideas it's still a 10 v 10 million or idk. There is however the "bull vs bear" thing. But the Bitcoin bulls from 2018 from 15k to 3k almost all left (losers) and the few ones that stayed pretend they won (or they're too dumb to figure out they were on the wrong side of the market). S&P 500 bear tears are pretty delicious at the moment by the way.


You both can say entry matters and entry doesn't matter and be mostly right. Don't waste too much time trying to perfect it. Calculating max risk, probabilities of drawdown, when to exit, when to hold, when to add, how to trail, correlations, those are at least as important as the entry. What I can say is entering very early, far from the stop, out of fear of missing out is bad, and entering very late for a giant risk to reward is greedy and bad. Around 50% retracement is often a good compromise. Stats will help choosing areas and price action (stats such as: over the past 10 years on breakouts would it work out to enter in the big red candle? How about on the previous low? How about 61% fib when the price reacts near the previous low? Etc).

Entry doesn't go alone, for example when you average in a sideways within a trend well you'll want to move your stop each time you add according to your average price. That's a whole other subject. Coming up with a whole strategy even simple and even once you sort of understand the markets and have the basics of price action is still clearly going to take a couple hundred hours at best... Just writing this took me a little over 2 hours, and I rushed it, and I obviously don't start from scratch I researched all of this. Just writing an intro like this about entries and stops and targets and trends and pullbacks and breakouts and timeframes and risk and all the other stuff, not even with stats, that alone probably would take 100 hours by itself. How long it takes to convince yourself to hold winners and cut losers and quit a gambler mentality however = infinite time, just quit now you'll save time (thousands of hours!), investing is not for you.


Oh and finally, an entry "signal" is a joke. You don't go from 0 to 100 "wow this would be a great buy because of this entry", that's beyond ridiculous. You are supposed to be watching something before getting in and waiting on certain conditions to enter (pullback after breakout), never heard of anyone that had "entry signals". When George Soros went short the GBP it was "because of the entry" but he had a whole theory. The "entry" wasn't a magical signal it's simply he was close to the floor, well ceiling, and had a big RR with big odds! And he explains how "I was selling weeks before", he actually "dollar cost averaged" as I explained. He didn't wait for a certain magical point, he wasn't greedy waiting for a 1 pip stop.