I went through something similar with Frosty a long time ago... Just trying to shut down the noise... for potentials to focus on...
What does this mean? What would a "model" of a contract consist of? It has a current price, a multiplier, a minimum price increment, an exchange where it's traded, etc. -- is that what you mean by its "model."
:eek: LOL. He means the specific product, symbol, market... Amazing how much illiterate people can be...
But what's so hard about that? Isn't that info. available from the broker? Don't you have to know those things to get quotes and place orders?
Hey no problem... "Modeling a market" or "Characterizing a market" is a form of technical analysis that professionals engage in, in order to try to find a tradeable edge...This is done BEFORE putting money at risk. The simplest explanation I ever saw in a book was "The mathematics of technical analysis" by Clifford Sherry. Before you go out and buy it..you will need to have a background in math. You might want to get your ducks in a row first... For those that do have a background in math, "Expert Trading Systems" by John Wolberg is pretty good. Also the books by Pardo "Testing and Optimisation of Trading Systems", and by Acar and Satchell "Advanced Trading Rules" will eventually get you where you want to go.. I hope this helps. Steve
<i>#1: Forget whatever you saw in historical backtesting. That's a fallacy. Forward live-trade results are upside down. That is reality. Your bot configuration is not even remotely near robust enough to run profitably in real time, especially on an intraday basis. Long story short, what you see right now is what you'll continue to get. Skip the details and trust me on that fact. Or you will inevitably trust the result of a hemorrhaged account in the end. #2: Forget about writing an intraday trading bot, period. That is beyond the scope of most retail traders to perfect. #3: Bot writing = trading is equally hard mentally & emotionally as discretionary trading. I've done plenty of both, so have many others here. The fantasy of letting the computer print money in automated fashion while we remain detached from the process is pure folly. I think you have experienced quite a bit of that fact by now, and others have watched the ride in sympathy as well. I no longer bot trade and never will again myself, but it's one choice trader's have to operate in this profession. Now you realize bot trading is every bit tough in every way AND costly education in real $$ as discretionary trading is.</i> = -$4,600 purchased an education. What did we learn? We learned what not to do... in this case a specific bot that simply doesn't work. Those $,$$$ spent moved us away from failure, but did not move us one iota closer to success. Make sense? For the <b>money spent</b> we did not glean one iota of knowledge or information that can move anyone forward toward consistent profitability. Knowledge, education and experience in the markets all come at a price. How much time and money success will inevitably cost is unknown and variable to all, but none escape that reality. Many of us here have paid five and six-figure tuitions attending the school of hard knocks. That's what it took to get where some of us are today. Be grateful frosty paid a mere fraction of the dues some others reading (and writing) these words have in the past. == As a discretionary trader, my performance today was poor. I picked up +2.5pts ER by 10:30am and quit until the afternoon session. In my absence, the market made beautiful swings down & up several times. I returned to the screens near 2:00pm, got chopped out of a few trades that ate my morning gains and left me at $0 for the day. Worst-case scenario, not so bad. I caught +2pts of the end-day squeeze on five contracts, and that ended my session. A mundane to below-average performance relative to market opportunity presented in the charts. In other words, there was a lot more profit opportunity present than I captured while absent the screens. Ceste' la vie. What's the difference between me, the profitable posters tonight in P&L 2007 thread and any automated bot? Discretionary traders are flexible, bots are not. A mechanical bot is in reality a very inefficient method of trading. Plainspeak, any system must be curve-fitted to profit from a certain market behavior or condition to a greater degree than losses accrue during unfavorable market conditions. That's like driving down the middle of a highway while focused on keeping the vehicle out of either roadside ditch. A discretionary trader by comparison <b>with knowledge and skills</b> is akin to a sportscar driving the speedlimit or beyond in the given lane, deftly negotiating each twist & turn. Discretionary trading is not an art, not a gift and not outside the scope of anyone to succeed at. Some of us work longer and harder to reach consistent success than others, but anyone can learn to succeed as a discretionary trader. The same is certainly not true for system traders. Skill sets involved for that are far above & beyond what most of us are capable of creating. Plain & simple. Of the two, bot construction is far more difficult than mastering discretionary trading. I think frost learned a lot about that here, and others did the same in vicarious fashion. Money spent = lost on this experiment brings us no closer to profitable consistency as a trader. Best wishes on the forward steps ahead in this professional journey we all take.