Losing Model Trade and Trading Badly

The downside didn't last long... Model switches back to long this morning. The short trade lost the model 0.4%. Due to bad timing - closing my long at pretty much the low point of the down move and going short, I gave back almost all the profits I'd made for the month so far. As a result, I have gone back to trading just one contract until I can get my act together properly.  So, back to Stage 2 of the process, after attempting Stage 3...

The NQ equity curve so far this year (starts at net profits from previous years):

The problem with tactical trades is that I then need to follow the market to see whether to open or close a tactical trade. But they're not necessary for getting a good long term return from the model. It probably would be better to diversify to trade more than one market first instead, as that will result in fewer losing days if the correlation between the markets is low. So, I did recently start to build a model for oil again, though I was a bit stuck in coming up with good decision rules so far.