Troubleshooting Your Binary Options Strategy
Sometimes when you’re stuck in a rut, or suffering a string of losses, you may consider giving up your strategy. It takes a wise trader to recognize the need and be able to quit a strategy but it is not always necessary. Bogdan goes over some of the signs you may need to do this in his article Bursting Your Binary Options Strategy Bubble. Before you scrap it though think about this . . . You’ve probably spent a lot of time learning the strategy, it probably has worked for you in the past, it seems a waste to just give up. Especially if all you need is a tweak in your system to make it profitable again. There are several things you can do to get a fresh perspective without starting from scratch. The first thing to do is recognize that you have a problem and be ready to tackle it, if you’re reading this you’re off to a good start. My first tip, if you are using signal service or following someone else system blindly that is probably your problem.
My Strategy Was Working, Now It Isn’t.
Sometime all that takes is to change your focus. This may mean switching time frames, or perhaps making a minor adjustment to it. Think about your chart like a microscope. You use a microscope to get a closer look at an object. You use the binary options chart to get a closer look at the market. You can focus your microscope on different levels of the thing you’re looking at. If it’s a small organism you can focus on the outside, the inside, the top and the bottom and see it from every angle. Sometimes it takes a few tries to get the focus just right, to get the best view.
The same is true for your charts, the only difference is that price action is alive and driven by people. It doesn’t take much for them to change focus and you have to be able to change with it. If you can’t find trends on the 5 minute charts try the 10 minute charts. If the 30 minute charts are ranging with no clear signs of support or resistance then move up to the one hour charts. Sometimes perfectly good signals don’t play out and you may never find the reason why, until you move up to a higher time frame and see a perfectly obvious line of resistance. Change the focus; it’s amazing the things you can see just by changing the length of the candles and/or the amount of data shown on your chart.
Can’t Find A Signal/Conflicting Indicators
Sometimes when you start with a strategy, hell, even when you have been using one for a long time, it is hard to see the signals. It doesn’t take a chart filled with binary options indicators to create a tableau in which the forest is lost for all the trees. One minute your indicators are giving a classic, almost text book, entry signal, the next minute all you see is a jumble of lines that look like spaghetti. One indicator may be bullish, the other may be bearish, one or the other may be extremely high or extremely low but none confirm the other. In this case it may be the problem is not with your strategy or with the signals, the problem could be with you. If adjusting the focus of your charts doesn’t work, maybe you need to change the perspective from which you look at them. It is not hard to get on a roll with a string of winning trades and then have a string of losses when the trend changes. The trick is to be adaptive and change with the times.
Every strategy and every indicator will give bad signals. This is because, take for instance oscillators like stochastic, they give both bull and bear signals all the time. The ones you take just depend on how you look at the charts. Changing your perspective may mean allowing yourself to consider the opposite side of a trade even if you are certain you’re doing it right. The conflict in the indicators may not be the absence of signals, just the absence of the signals you are looking for. Worse yet, they could be “correct signals”, except what I call anti signals, you know, bull signals in bear trends and bear signals in bull trends. Otherwise known as false signals, savvy traders may call them entry signals. A change in perspective may at least help keep you out of bad trades and at best open your eyes to new profitable entries.
My Last Word
You may need to scrap your strategy and you may not. Before you go to trouble of learning one just so you can throw it away maybe you should trouble shoot it first. It could be that a change focus or a change in perspective or a combination of both may be what you need. The caveat is that sometimes there just isn’t a signal, or a clear trend, it happens more times than you might think. Recognizing that can go a long way toward your sanity as a trader too.