Today's loss was part of the system.. I watched it all unfold in front of my eyes... My emotions said to sell for a -$100.. I could tell the market direciton had shifted.... I spent the better part of the afternoon trying to find a way so that in the future the bot could identify what I saw... but I just can't put it into code.... That is partly why I decided to pull the plug..... the bot needs some sort of way of knowing these types of changes.. I can spot them.. but don't know how to tell the system to spot it..... I think that is the system's weak spot and it needs to be addressed
One idea would be to identify the usual news based market moving times and use tighter stops/go flat at that point. You know the market is going to trend. You just don't know what way. Why stand in front of the train at those times.
Sad... really sad... Random things why I think it failed this time: - You were not enough capitalized - You didn't know when you would stop the system( I think you still haven't hit your historical DD ) - You are too focused on every single trade and it sometimes result in interfering with the bot. - One of the most important to me : You are making too much trades and you trade intraday only. Nothing new but swing systems are much more reliable. Try an optimisation of your different variables. I think you will not get more than 1/3 of the solutions that are profitable on a 5min time frame. - Trading 1 only system is definitely real hard since you put all your hopes on one system. I have almost a constant with my systems that 70 % of my systems will produce gains in the end. If you are trading one only system , you still have 30 % chance of losing money. - I don't know but it seems that your system does not have a real edge. You're following the long term trend but i don't know it can be called a real edge. i hope you'll recover soon. BYE.
Hmmm.....the move from 1:45 pm to 3:45 pm was $1000 per contract....straight up with little retracement.
syswizard, I have no way of knowing if the bot would have been on the right or wrong side of that move. My apt had a power outage at around 12:20 or so... So I do not know how the bot would have performed in the afternoon... Luckily at the time the bot was flat.....
I strongly advise against the use of any trend-fading system for the ER2. The ER2 is known for its powerful, intraday trends which is where I suspect Frost is getting hammered. He mentioned one day where he made $350 per car, and on that day I lost $800 per car. That day happened to be very choppy, which is why I suspect he made money. Yesterday, however, I was able to realize a profit of $1400 per contract, while he lost approximately the same amount. Yesterday was as trendy (both long and short) a day as you'll ever see in the ER2. It does NOT pay to fight the trend for this particular instrument. RoughTrader
syswizard, With all due respect, I have to disagree with this sort of commentary. You assume that one is able to capture the move with 100% entry and exit efficiency, which is of course impossible. You will also note that the majority of the session (excepting the opening downward move) was substantially choppy. Intraday trend followers I think would have considered today a challenging day to make decent money. I definitely think Frost needs to work on his system on two fronts: 1) he seems to be fighting ER2 trends, which is a no-no in my book. 2) for as frequently as his bot trades, he has not arrived at the point where his platform is stable enough to realize his backtested statistics in real time. Frost, I urge you to earnestly reflect on both of these points. In the future, when you start trading on 1 contract again, I would suggest you use something more mature like NeoTicker if you stick with IB, or TradeStation. Either would be fine for small retail e-mini traders. RoughTrader
roughtrader, What stability issues are you refering to?? I had only 3 problems: #1 was a code screw up I made the night before which did not cause any problem, just ment the bot did not trade that day #2 was one day of lost quotes when A LOT of people were having quote problems form IB..... before and since no issue there.. that is to be expected occasionaly though... #3 A freak power outage... I don't see what stability issues my trading platform has..... the auto trading bot has been doing everything correctly