One of the biggest unknown factors with any trading system is human judgement and intervention. Where I thought I was being prudent to take profits earlier on 2 trades, I ended up instead just reducing the performance of my system by greater than 5%. Nevertheless, these are the benefits of trading a strategy on a live account. There are so many other factors that are outside of a controlled simulation.
Furthermore, the loss on the second trade of 11.3% was quite significant but not entirely alarming. Performance results from simulation from September to November of 2011 was uncharacteristically high and volatile. Also, the average days a trade lasted was 8 during simulation, but so far, it has been 18 days.
