"It's a shame that none of this back-and-forth is helping Frost with his trading dilemmas " That's because he's just a college kid, with no real-time discretionary trading skills, trying to treat trading like a video game. It's not. First, learn how to be successful. Then, you try to teach your successful techniques to a computer. There's a very good reason why the military doesn't take the best XBox shoot-em up players and put them into real battle situations: their decisions aren't based in reality. You only have one life in reality.
What about asking the computer if one technique is successful? I think it's time and money consuming to learn it by yourself.I would probably not be here if I had decided to test all my ideas with real money.
or if you are really tricky. teach the computer the basics of learning. and let it figure out successful techniques on its own. in that case the system will obviously be limited by the size and the specifics of the grammar you give it. not that i personally do that.. yet.. for now I just play the market like a video game.... works well
Just to clear a few things up about my past trading experiences. I opened up my first trading account in june 2004. I have been purely a discretionary trader up until just a few months ago...And for the past year I have been a very high frequency discretionary intraday trader...... While I may not have the years and years of experience that some have... Its not like I have come into this completly bilnd either as some of you have assumed
It has NOTHING to do with Technophobia. I am running my trading platform on a 6 monitor setup on a dedicated computer, a separate laptop with additional monitor for order entry all over a secured wireless network. There's more to it, which is why I pay people to do this stuff, but my post has nothing to do with being afraid of technology. The point was that putting together a computer program to do your trading for you is a very difficult task that very few will actually ever achieve.
If you can perfect it, then YES it is worthwhile. My point was that very few have the time, money, skills, patience, etc. to actually let a computer program do what you want it to do. (note - see this thread - Bot is turned off, changed, etc. fairly quickly). And the reason is that in the end, a human being is ulitmately deciding what happens with the BOT. So no matter what, there is always human interference. Always. I guess that is what I was trying to get at - these bot's are controlled by humans, so you never fully get rid of the human 'interference' side of the discussion. So, with that being said, I would rather be in the trenches every day myself vs. just watching as a spectator and then letting my emotions interfere. Which is what happened here- Frost changed/adjusted and then finally turned the BOT off. Did the Bot tell him to turn it off? Nope. His emotions did.
While that's true, I think the timeframes depend on different situations. For example, our system took about 3 months of dedicated work once we had developed our algorithm, which took about 10 months of on again off again testing and research. However, right now the system is running completely independent of outside human interference. If you're in the trenches every day emotion affects trading. Even after years of experience I still find myself getting angry etc in some trades. The key is to get as quickly as possible get to the point at which you have the confidence and the mathematical research done to allow you to leave the bot on all the time and simply watch the results. You are right - it is not for everyone, but I believe that it is at least worth trying. If you give up before you have started then you have truly failed.