Fully automated futures trading

Discussion in 'Journals' started by globalarbtrader, Feb 11, 2015.

  1. My next blog post will be on this subject, but very quickly:

    - it also works for momentum, although perhaps the intuition makes more sense for mean reversion
    - yes agreed
    - disagree, you don't have to have a min signal parameter and the max signal parameter doesn't need fitting you just set it at some sensible value (in my case twice the average signal).

    GAT
     
    #2171     Jun 16, 2020
    .sigma likes this.
  2. If your maximum position size is a limited quantity then you'll automatically have some sort of filter against noise from your signal. Example: if your position size at maximum signal level is 5 contracts, then 1 contract represents 20% of your maximum signal. All noise which is less than 10% (less than 0.5 contract) will be suppressed and will not result in additional trading. It's a form of quantization. If your maximum position size is very large then this approach could be insufficient.

    Alternatively you could feed your signal through some sort of S filter: small signals will get dampened, for middle sized signals there is a linear relationship from input to output, and large signals get dampened.
     
    #2172     Jun 16, 2020
  3. ... which is related to how I currently deal with limited capital right now (not an S shape)
    https://qoppac.blogspot.com/2016/03/diversification-and-small-account-size.html

    GAT
     
    #2173     Jun 16, 2020
  4. #2174     Jun 16, 2020
    wopr and globalarbtrader like this.
  5. You do need a either some form of minimum signal threshold or a hysteresis of some sort. Most of the noise is random flickering near zero signal - if you going to trade an epsilon amount every time as your signal turns on and off, you gonna pay a lot of TCs.

    In fact, you can think of lower signal threshold as part of your signal processing while your upper threshold as part of the risk management process.
     
    #2175     Jun 16, 2020
  6. Perhaps I should have said, but I have position buffering in place (which is indeed a form of hysteresis). So I won't trade any small change in signal (wether it be from a signal of 0 to 0.01, or from 5 to 5.01) that is less than a certain threshold. Hence I don't need a minimum signal threshold to reduce trading costs.

    Plus, to an extent, this is all academic as a retail futures trader since the forecast has to be pretty strong before you have enough risk for a single contract.

    GAT
     
    #2176     Jun 16, 2020
  7. Kernfusion

    Kernfusion

    How about quantpedia as a source of trading ideas ? Not exactly a Slack channel, and there's still almost 500 filtered strategies to go through, lots of which could be not feasible for one reason or another, so you probably still need to have a sense what to look for in advance..?
    (this thread with all of it's related material is of course the best by far :) )
     
    Last edited: Jun 16, 2020
    #2177     Jun 16, 2020
  8. Makes sense. I have hysteresis built directly into the portfolio formation for cross-sectional strategies, but for single asset strategies I do it directly at the signal level.

    Hmm, I did not think about it but indeed - when I trade a single VIX contract it's epsilon for me while it could be a sizable chunk of the budget for a smaller trader.
     
    #2178     Jun 16, 2020
  9. wopr

    wopr

    As few others have mentioned, this thread *is* the best place for these discussion. Perhaps I was just looking for more distraction, as refactoring this PriceCalculations object isn't too interesting at the moment :)

    I probably didn't explain it well, but I wasn't thinking of discussing trading ideas or strategies (we don't even talk about those all that much here from what I can see), more like for example the discussion that Rob, Same Lazy Element and a few others just had few posts above, seems to me that's a lot easier to do somewhere where there's also proper threading/conversation support.
    But I think we can also stick around here. :)
     
    #2179     Jun 17, 2020
  10. Elder

    Elder

    Perhaps I am speaking above my paygrade, but isn't historical averaging, exp or o.w., a form hysteresis too?
     
    #2180     Jun 18, 2020