There are really two questions here: What works (if anything), and is there anything you can buy that works. I don't have a lot of confidence in purchased systems, but they can sometimes be a starting point in your quest for a system of your own. I autotrade stocks, but I have not found anything [yet] that works with index futures. I am just starting to think about spot forex. Good luck!
Oh....You are "thinking" about trading Forex for those easy 10 pips a day, you are a little behind cabletrader's 7 day trading record. Looking at all those daily 10+ pip moves on the currency charts and ACTUALLY capturing the 10 pips in real trading are entirely different.
Hey you know to be honest with you forex-forex does have a point here. You have to be very skilled, focused and disciplined to consistently be able to take money out of the market to such a degreee that you can average 10, or 13.5 or 15 or whatever pips per day as a retail trader. It's not something to trivialize and make light of if someone is still finding their way. I
CableTrader: My experience has been in stocks for the last 15-20 years. I caught the REIT wave for about 60% of its run and then went on to three nice years in Canadian Trusts before the Halloween massacre created by the Canadian Finance Minister that badly damaged the sector when too many bigcorp competitors were getting too much heat from their investors for not performing as well as the trusts. Though I am completely out of CanTrusts now (leaving the US private equity takeover artists to finish the beheading/carcass cleaning job), the experience was quite instructive. On the year end analyses of the results I found that a little better than half of my returns came from currency gain. So I chucked all the company analysis (80% of my work) for a pure, double up currency play. (I use IB Ideal for cash forex. The CAD spread varied from 2-8 pips and the AUD only 1 or 2 with much larger liquidity.) I split about half my total equity between CAD and AUD cash forex in early April. That was 10% forethought and 90% luck. On drops, I hedged with futures as an experiment and it worked quite well. I was up about 80K on those two positions and then I didn't pay close enough attention in Nov and ended up with a 35% drawdown. Arguably, October was a spike, but still my inattention and lack of a rigorously formalized system caught me with my pants down. I found that I overtraded/overhedged to boot. I really didn't have the needed amount of time to commit to it since I am wrapping up my job for a March 1 retirement date and really didn't watch it properly. I need to get my plan/act together to do this right in 08. I like RWK's plan of automating the setup search process, but having the final barrel roll performed by the pilot in the cockpit. Trade timing is also an issue. Many times this year the London market open (3am eastern)produce violent changes (100+) pips in the Aussie. Getting banged with multiple alarm text messages at 3-5am is unhealthy for the long run (and is part of the impetus for my curiosity about 10 consistent pips per day and being flat at the NY or Tokyo close except for rare circumstances.) Going forward, I am searching to find the breakover in timing that renders the algo/big trader short term trading price noise ineffectual in impacting my gains so I can trade shorter time frames and produce statistically significant, consistant profits while reducing my overall number of trades. To me, trading only within NY/Tokyo mkt hours protects you from thin mkt shenanigans, but to really rack up the pips it seems that you have to go beyond holding during a single session. (Certainly you have to have a much larger tolerance for drawdowns. The danger is not having a formal exit and tanking for weeks like I did in Nov.) Part of me really likes the interest rate the Aussie yields, but the volatilty in the exchange rate causes some major valuation changes that can make you gulp with 2-4 contracts on or its cash equiv. Cash Forex also has the tax disadvantage of getting hit at ordinary income rates (except for special circumstances) as well as trade reporting complexity. Futures profits have a 60/40 split for longterm/shortterm capital gains irrespective of hold time as well as not having to report trade by trade events. So I lean to trading futures down the road, (but holding cash in AUD is still rewarding far above the Greenback). I want to arrive at time/corporate independence by March 1. After 30+ years at bigcorp, I need to do my own thing...and get it right. Finding a consistant timeframe/automation system to offer me trades to take is my current quest. I have made so good progress, but it seems that I have much farther to go than I realized. Thus this thread... Best Regards, T200K
Giles117: I too develop with AMIBROKER. I have used AMI for about 6 years now and am hard pressed to find an easier to program system...though I wish it could display autotester trades like NinjaTrader including stops. Ninjatrader's wizard mode doesn't offer enough flexibility for what I want to do and C-sharp is 10 times more verbose than AMI AFL. (Plus I want to trade, not learn C#. Also, NT didn't have the ability to do remote alarms like sending an email to my cell phone on an alert. ) I have run into some alarm problems with AMI, so I backtest in AMI but use Quotetracker for stable trendline alarms. That improved things somewhat, but I still am chasing alerts that have no trade opportunities with them. Making that leap is where I am having the most difficulty now. What are the time frames on your swing trades? Were you out of the market late this year to have avoided the big overnight swings? Best Regards, T200k
NT's backtest is pretty. LOL. I like the lines that show winning and losing trades. All My reasons for sticking with AB after testing NT for a nice little while. I use 15, 30 and 1 hour periodicities I was IN overnight hence my grabbing 300 pips and 150 pips respectively. Bottomline. I Love AB. AFL is Extremely easy to learn. Tons of examples of code. Even the AT code I have implemented works flawlessly. Herman Helped me fine tune it..... SmartQuant has my attention, but the need to learn c# turns me off. At least ninja allows you to roughly develop a system, and there are enough user systems out there that can be easily retrofitted.
Giles117: Your multiple timeframe (15m, 30m, 1H) suggestion is the second time that popped up in this thread. Are you waiting for all three timeframes to signal a buy? What indicator(s) do you use to make the cut? Best Regards, T200K
Nah, I use one to confirm. It depends upon the volatility of the pair. Ex. During the summer I was doing EURUSD at 15 min then it shifted and I need to go up to 60 min.
How many times did you watch the infomercial? Please tell me you are kidding me using this platform! el surdo