Congrats, nice reading about a winner journal that hits the kill so efficiently rather than the usual hard luck hit & miss shambolic stuff which is all too common unfortunately. Nice work.
When I first started making half decent coin via trading, what was most satisfying back then was knowing that the hardware expenses etc was finally paying off and that I could afford to not feel guilty about spending even more money on trading infrastructure, like desks, monitors, data, more computer gear. These days all that is behind more or less, just every now and again will replace a bit of aging equipment. My trading these days sits in a type cruise mode (keep touching wood) where not a lot of activity takes place, am always reminded and aware that efficient trading is boring, continual rinses and repeat. My satisfaction from trading income these days is in the knowledge that as a retiree, no other income, little luxuries in life are affordable and no need to lie awake at night thinking about a dwindling bank account. Am aware though, our lives sit on a very fine thread which can snap at any moment.
Good to hear it @themickey. About a month ago I was considering two different paths. One where I would get another "day job" and use the technology I built for my own trading. That would have put things on a more cruise control path. The other option was to stay fully committed to this game and license my software and offer algo trading related consulting services. I chose the latter which meant a much bigger effort in terms of getting my software in a state where it can be commercially available. I should be releasing my software next week and will post a link in this journal. Good times!
Re-calibrated my strategy portfolio so I am now risking 1.75% of account balance per trade vs. the previous 2.25%. Also, going to cash out about half the winnings from the past two weeks ($15,000) to pay Uncle Sam and help fund my startup. My goal is for this to be the only withdraw from my trading account besides paying taxes for quite awhile.
The equity curve is misleading because the backtest increases position sizes as the account grows and in the simulation the trade sizes would never happen in the real world. In other words the strategies would quit performing because of capacity issues way before the top of the equity curve. I find it more useful to see in percentage terms how the account grows over the course of a year and the max drawdown percentage in a year. That is shown here.
Nice! On average, how many contracts are you holding at one time ... or what percentage of your balance do you have invested at one time? I'm just trying to get some idea of your risk.