My real account is over $30k. The $5k is what I use to compute risk (and position size) - multiple positions can be open simultaneously. The other day I had $50k in four positions but the risk was just $200 since each position has a $50 stop loss and all positions are closed at the end of the day. Of course one position lost almost $100 due to horrific slippage, which is why I am testing with live bullets at this stage - to find out things like which stocks have bad slippage. Thanks, Chabah
Attached is a shot of my new-ish channel system tracking NTRI. Don't worry about the buys and sells too much - my actual orders don't fit so well because I was trading it using a different strategy. I think it looks pretty cool - of course strong trends make it so! It can get pretty chopped up in a flat market, unfortunately.
Have you considered swing trading? Is there some reason - other than better margin - for trading intra-day? Suss
The original ideas were to eliminate overnight exposure and allow sharing of funds across many stocks trading the same system. However, due to problems as described, it looks like I will be in overnight anyway so yes, swing trading does make sense. Right now I am looking at using 120 minute bars (or maybe 130 to avoid partial bars), which is not quite swing trading. As an update, one reason for the automation is that I have a normal day job and can not monitor stocks during the day. Also, I just have a preference for automation over discretionary trading due to the psychological factors. One big concern I have with TradeStation right now is that a lot of my short orders are not getting filled. If I can't make money on the short side, I might as well just go long good stocks and spend my mental efforts elsewhere (I have a side business and a job, after all). Thanks for the comments, Chabah
Hey Chabah, Your thread and a few others have done a pretty good job of exposing me to the upside of automated trading, but I only work with derivatives. Here's a thread that I found while looking into it on google. BioComp Systems, Inc. Maybe they have something of interest to you. Regards, JJ P.S. You've got to realize that this Bull Run cycle isn't going to last forever, and if you can't SHORT with confidence do to technology problems, you're going to miss out on a substantial portion of your potential opportunity in the coming years.
I have been running my trend system for about a week now, and I think it looks pretty good. This system is based on fairly short term trends using 120 minute bars. So far the big winner has been NTRI, and as mentioned I missed a couple other nice winners that failed to get short. The system is running even right now, so no worries about my account getting drained just yet. I have been busy with the new baby and some other things, so not much research aside from evaluating stocks to add to the trend system. I need to be careful not to exceed margin limits - I am not sure if there is a way I can artificially limit my account to 1-to-1 instead of 2-to-1 (intraday) - that's something I'll need to do to avoid any problems when running 12 or 16 stocks. Happy holidays, Chabah
Chabah, Congratulations on your newborn. I'm looking forward to seeing some more resullts with some real money. Alex
In case you are following along, I am pretty much just letting my system trade. I have 14 stocks using the trend following system. I recently added Heely's, which is a new issue and has no backtesting data. Other than that, everything shows good returns for the last 12 months and 24 months. I continue to have this shorting problem with TradeStation. My buddy trades 80-100 stocks with TS and only has problems shorting 4 or 5. I have I think 6 now (including Heely's) that won't short. 6 out of 14. That is really weak but what can I do? For now my focus is on my other business and I plan to just let the trading chug along. I will post my 1 month numbers and continue to provide some updates. However, nothing too technical coming up since I am not doing development. Happy New Year, Chabah
The trend following system has been doing pretty well, just killing Nutrisystem (NTRI) and Apple (AAPL) on their recent runs. Heely's and others have also made their contributions. Attached is the equity curve of ALL my trades since I started last November. Keep in mind that the first 60 or so were with my now defunct rectangle breakout system; the trend system is actually up over $1500 or so. Enjoy, Chabah
I have also attached the performance summary - obviously this includes a lot of older trades, but I am trying not to cherry pick.