I know a person who maintains that discretionary trading yields superior results to mechanical methods because the human mind can be trained to understand the ever changing market mood and it is always more important to be on the right side of the next price move than anything else. This info was passed on to me by an intraday ES Trader. Any form of testing becomes a waste of time and energy. Hope this helps
Interesting. You KNOW someone and he/she told you. But you haven't provided the feedback in first person... But hey... I'm getting a weird vibe here... I have nothing against discretionary trading. I do it and I have a good reason to believe that there is not much of a different if you exclude the technological part of it. Really... the past 2 replies are interesting. We have discretionary traders reading the automated trading forum, and non-believers providing 2nd hand info in the Automated trading forum... Why did you care to reply in here? Does dissing on automated trading make you feel any better with how you trade? Or not testing? I need to remind you... I trade both and able to do both (It is the internet and your buddy's a real life guy... so my credibility has nothing relevant, except for the context of my post and your premonition)... Anyways... interesting.
No problem. No offense taken. Though, if there is any chance of giving you the slightest consideration of being a bit accepting / understanding / listening towards systematic trading: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=2495946#post2495946 It's what I posted a while back in my journal that I don't feel like running any more... It's the internet and I hope that people stay somewhat skeptic so that they actually take some time to read and understand, rather than just take things piece by piece to what they like to agree on... but it's one way to look at things... Really...
âBut hey... I'm getting a weird vibe here... I have nothing against discretionary trading. I do it and I have a good reason to believe that there is not much of a different if you exclude the technological part of it.â - excellent, that was the opinion I was after. âReally... the past 2 replies are interesting. We have discretionary traders reading the automated trading forum, and non-believers providing 2nd hand info in the Automated trading forum... Why did you care to reply in here? Does dissing on automated trading make you feel any better with how you trade? Or not testing?â - Iâm not a discretionary trader. I have fixed set of rules though I trade manually. Certainly can be automated though. Am not religious about either automated or discretionary trading, both have pros/cons and ultimately needs to be weighed/considered/decided by the individual/group trading the assets.
A very fair comment, but I simply don't care what consideration is given to me. This is the net and specifically this is ET
So... this is going to be my final post in this thread, especially the final post, in terms of how I've been posting studies. Reason is they're not verifiable and after a few interactions with other posters (who I know are legit) seems to be having the same "opinions" about how ideas about systematic trading are approached. The tough part is that if I want someone to verify the results I've posted, I have to give out the source. That's the last thing I want to be doing. So I've been thinking of writing some simple / proprietary Excel/VBA code that can be shared for studies that can lead to a trading model. Anyways... this is my last test results that I hoped to provide to ET that is "not conventional". The posted xls has 2 parts. The top part is a trading model that exposes a specific tendency (X) and it allows a single parametric input. It's been profitable for 3 years. The bottom half is the actual distribution of the frequency in which a tendency's value occured. So... what I did was... I took the distribution of a specific year, calculated the parameter based on that year's distribution and applied it to the "tester" and ran it on 2009 data. In another words, I would take the value of how the market's tendency X performed in that year and out-sampled using 2009 data. * The model uses Moving Averages and the test data was S&P 500 (intraday). (No sizing or Risk Management measures, only simply ones... )That's all I'll say... Anyways... no more posts for me in this thread... Time to code some VBA... (of course, when I have time... and my VBA codes are sloppy...)
Ummm... I'm going to stop posting in ET (again...) due to professional issues... I'm going to brag because I was able to charm Goldman Sachs into having me trade for their rich asssss(in-house) to make my ASSS a lot bigger. (Yeah... so hate me and envy me!!!) One last word: Flaming is good in ET. It's a good barometer for who's legit in ET.