sky: if you're that good just program a system that highlights double tops correctly and that would prove your words.
>5% a year? How about >12% every day, on average, over 647 trades in 3 months? Would that be OK? http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=1749889#post1749889 Besides the winner, there are 90 more profitable EA's, out of 605. Eliminate the ones probably due to luck - with too few trades, flaky equity curves or unacceptable statistical profiles (under "Reports") for one reason or another - and you still have at least a dozen ATS's worth a closer look. I would suggest that might be a better use of your time than poker bots.
A chart is basically just a represention of a series of numbers. You can convert the criteria that a "keen eye" uses to find chart patterns, into a numerical filter to find the same patterns.
heh no i dont WANT a 5% return trading bot, was just curious if such thing existed. Looks like the research is much further than expected, what i like about trading bot from the limited reading done so far is they have very good apis hooked into various trading platforms, while the poker bots are a pain in the ass to hook to any online poker game. I was literally doing pixel mapping using vb to get it to click on buttons. anyway next question, where can one find some standard bot strategies to get started and some ideas, i am assuming they are quite different than human trading strategies like scalping, trends etc...?
Don't assume anything, jusst backtest backtest backtest and watch the markets to get ideas of what to backtest for.
One strategy I'm playing around with is buying CAD futures at a set time - or within 90 minutes - every trading day with a 20 tick ($200.00) profit and 200 tick stop. The risk/reward ratio is 10:1 and isn't as bad as it might seem at first glance, since a 20 tick movement in either direction is very common. So far with about 7 paper trades and 3 live trades I have a 100% success rate. 9 positions were closed within 5 hours and one took over 24 hours to get that 20 ticks. This could easily be automated and the time of day is key here for entry, which I won't reveal. One thing that I don't like is that one bad trade will wipe out 10 trades, I might reduce the 200 tick stop to 150 or even 100.
I've actually programmed quite a few strats for people... i would never expect a strat someone asks you to program is actually profitable
Have a look at Wealth-lab.com for thousands of examples. Whether they work or not is a different story, and you can automate with that software if you are inclined. The key is these bots aren't scalable. One system with moderate float = excellent returns, HOWEVER 1000's traders with millions = $0. pneuma