1% a day consistently: possible?

Discussion in 'Automated Trading' started by stephencrowley, Feb 16, 2006.

1% a day consistently, no down weeks: possible?

Poll closed Feb 21, 2006.
  1. Yes

    58 vote(s)
    47.9%
  2. No

    63 vote(s)
    52.1%
  1. Fair enough. But when it comes to trading, may I suggest that you try not to let yourself be either limited or misdirected by the thoughts and beliefs of others? Especially when you don't know the validity of the source. Against this background, however, be advised that you are looking to immediately place yourself in the top 0.1% of traders with the performance numbers you're talking about. Just something to think about.

    P.S. I just made up that 0.1% number, but I'm guessing it's probably optimistic.
     
    #161     Feb 20, 2006
  2. How do you know when to re-activate the system after encountering a stop-loss?
     
    #162     Feb 20, 2006
  3. After stop-loss I won't trade for the rest of the day. I'll pull in all the recorded data for that day (3GB/day usually) and take a peak at the model to see how/why it broke down. It shouldn't happen that often in theory as I re-estimate all parameters over a rolling 1-week period.

     
    #163     Feb 20, 2006
  4. You NEVER stop trading after a stop-loss, because a stop-loss is part of the trading system. You have to take ALL the signals that are generated by your system. If you don't do that the testing that you did before starting to trade has no statistical value at all.
    Maybe you miss the biggest move of the century after your stop-loss was hit.

    Many traders develop and backtest a system and take the results of the tests as the picture of what will happen in real trading. But once they start trading they don't trade as they did in their simulation. So the real results are completely different from the testing results. Most of the timles results are worst because of the different behaviour in real trading.
    You never know which trade will be good or bad, otherwise you would only take the good ones. Therefore you have to take all the trades.
     
    #164     Feb 20, 2006
  5. Perhaps that is true of directional trades, but mine don't fall into that category. My stops are designed such that if they are ever hit then it means something fundamental has changed in the things I'm trading and I should re-evaluate the model before resuming.

    Also, limiting drawdown and being consistent is more important than catching massive swings. The things I trade barely move at all but they move consistently.

     
    #165     Feb 20, 2006
  6. I guess many traders usually would not think a system like this a FULLY (developed) automated system.


    :confused: ???
     
    #166     Feb 20, 2006
  7. Why would it not be 'developed'? Also, why the confusion? Manual intervention can only screw things up if you start to see patterns in nothing. Our brains are wired to see things that aren't there, reasoning, logic and stats can help you decide when if something is real or not.

     
    #167     Feb 20, 2006
  8. Since your backtesting has not encountered any stop-loss yet, how do you know (what's the underlying theory?) there will not have consecutive losses after the very first one?


    If it happens, how often?
     
    #168     Feb 20, 2006
  9. I can't give away the underlying theory without giving away my strategy.

    Basically, I won't get stopped out many times in a row because the 1st time I'm stopped out the model will be reestimated with data from the day that I got stopped out, and also with data from when the model worked fine. The models output will be consistent with all the data it observes and if it isn't stable across days then it will tell me so and I'll have to find something else to trade.

     
    #169     Feb 20, 2006
  10. How much lead time (Hours, days or months? ) do you need to modify the system due to this kind of fundamental changes?

    How many times did you modify your (Dynamic/ Constantly Updated) system during your backtesting?
     
    #170     Feb 20, 2006