To add a little bit of drama, I'd like to see the bot getting pissed off and start losing on purpose. Or perhaps it could set off a major ER2 crash. Nuclear war is even better.
optioncoach, If I turn it off at +400 then I would miss the days where it makes +1400, its those days that keep this thing profitable... Trader273, That $450 is total for the day, however I only trade 1 contract at a time.... Well the day has just liquidated because its 2;40 central. The last trade today kinda ruined things a bit....I need to get out of the habit of tampering with exits, so I made sure I didn't touch it at all today, even though had I it would have made a few hundred more.... but oh well, all in all still a good day: +$375 If I can get a few more days like this then I can get back in the green.
Just make sure in the future, when you build the actual robot you make it 2/3's scale - that way when it turns on you it will be easier to defeat.
I think you need a small vacation to do some hardcore analysis and tkae stock of the situation. You have not proven your bot can make $400 at times let alone $1,400. On some long trending days the past week or so where you bot should have got you in and stayed long or short your bot produced losses. I think it is a little naive to say you need to leave it on cause it could make $1,400 when your bot has been performing so badly. It is like leaving in the game a strikeout prone slugger because he might hit a 7-run home run in the ninth to win it all. Your first goal is consistency, when you hit that then worry about those amazing $1,400 days which are falling like mana from the heaven.
optioncoach, If I limit the upside, then the bot will not have the big days to save it.. since it has been live with real money it has only had one of those big days.. but in the past several months it has had a lot of those days...... I think its counter productive to limit its upside. At least not without testing the consequences of such an action. The bot WITHOUT my involvment is net positive through backtesting..... The results of limiting the upside has not been fully tested. I cannot say if that is a better aproach or not until I run tests on it. Therefore, it makes no sense to limit the upside until I know one way or the other what its affect on the overall expectancy of the system will be. My guess however is that it will hurt more than help.
I was not making a blanket statement to limit any upside. I was simply telling you today near 3:30 PM at the end of the week to lock in that $400+ gain. You have some bugs that need to be worked out so sometime it its nice to turn the car off and get it up on the rack to look under the hood. The biggest sign for me that something was not kosher was those few days where the ER2 broke out from the opening and trended in the same direction all day but the bot lost money. Those are the days where you can make your $1,400 but it lost. If I were you I would open up the trading history on those days and see what went wrong. I bet those days will be most illuminating for fixing any bugs than smaller sideways days.
optioncoach, Read page 59 of this thread..... There I outlined how the strategy trades... and gave reasonsings why some days such as those will slip by the system.. it trending all day one way does not mean the system will make money... certain events have to happen..... I already knew this limitation.... its the way the strategy works.... Its my believe that a system does not have to capture every big move to be good though, it just has to capture enough to be net positive in the long run