Yes to all of the questions. Currently up about 27% on the year. While it is a work in progress, I am very happy with my setup and the results thus far. I have exceeded my initial expectations which is almost unheard of in trading....you know how it usually goes...."I have $20k and I am going to make a living scalping ES".
Does your program run 24 hours per day, or only during the liquid trading hours? You are reporting great results.
You mention in your trade setups the number of bars after which you will exit the trade, unless stoploss or profit taker have been hit earlier. So if you enter a trade later during the day it could be held overnight before being exited, disregarding the price movements during the night? Are the stoploss and profit taker active during the night? Example: your latest YM trade was related to 30 minute bars, and you keep it open for 8 bars. If you open this at 2PM, it would be held until the next day at around 11AM?
Correct in that the bar count only includes regular session hours. As for the stop and limit orders, they are set to trigger only during regular trading hours. The reason for this it would be challenging to backtest taking signals on regular trading hours data while exiting trades with extending trading hours data and the goal is to have the backtest as close as possible to live trading. I have had situations where price gaps right passed my stop resulting in a larger loss and other scenarios like last night where extended hours trading went passed my stop but price recovered by the morning and the result was a nice win!
That's a clear explanation. Good to see that you are aware that, due to your setup, you could miss taking profit or getting stopped out during extended trading hours. It is a bit of a "philosophical topic" whether all trading hours should be considered, or only a smaller subset of those (and ignoring the rest). You have made a clear choice.
What I have is good enough for now, but I have considered running a separate hedging strategy that trades during all trading hours and can adjust risk taken accordingly based on open positions. That way, my FasterQuant/AlgoTerminal backtest and live results can still line up with the base strategies then I can apply my hedging strategy separately to my AlgoTerminal strategy portfolio.