Maybe if you have a great strategy when you back-test and do all the number crunching....and even fairly 'okay' in live trading but of course with the occasional blow-up. Maybe your "trigger" signals are too numerous? Maybe just focus on the "bigger trend" that your chart and timeframe are telling you? I find that many of my biggest losses come from when I get to get smart (for an dumb person) doing real-time chart analysis. Me. I'm going to experiment with only looking at 1 timeframe. For nearly 20 years I've always had a multi-time frame POV but let's see....
I personally find staring at the mountain top from afar is better, rather than actually being on the mountain, Perspective makes a huge difference, rather than relying on all the common, standard, so-called indicators out there, There's so much bs and noise and nonsense out there, and your own mind can be your own worse enemy in trading, When you view a past, hindsight, chart.....what do you see.....You See Clarity, If only....you can maintain that clarity during trading.....you will be rich, Stare and question, stare and question, stare and question, stare and question.....why something, a chart, moves the way it does,
One of the biggest hints that I ever had in one book I read, (I forgot the name of it, sorry) is that time frames might mislead you in the sense that a trend might be defined in different time ranges than what we normally look at. We are all used to look at 5m, 15m, day, weeks, months and so on. But what if a better time range would be every 9.5 days, and that exact division would reveal a clear trend pattern or reversal? With a bit of scripting, you could get 1 min datasets and start dividing them in sequential time ranges until you see a clear chart that defines that market. That hunt for the exact time frame is one of the best task you can spend your time on, even better than backtesting a technique. You could be surprised of some shapes that appear when you start dividing the market into odd time-frames. As in it was too obvious when you see it but it was always hidden on the most common time frames.
Been there, done that. 1 and 5 minute work for me. No need to re-invent the wheel. Above signals are based on lol indicators. RSI and Stoch (although not using default settings). Third one a standard reversal bar definition is used.
I truly believe that trading strategy "makes" the profit. Your overall psychology/mental demeanor "keeps" the profit. Let's be honest, if you just plot a 10 and 20SMA on the 5M chart and do simple buy when 10SMA > 20SMA (vice versa) with a R:R of 5pt:10pt, I'm sure the backtesting of a few years will yield good results. The trading strategy is the easy part. The trading psychology is the tricky part. I gotta get my shit toegther.