Good luck, I hope it goes well, if it doesn't work I'd suggest don't give up, it just may need tweaking to improve. Attempt to think "Is this algo built on logic?", ie as example for intraday it would be levels such as Open, Close, High, Low of today and yesterday etc etc, these are points of logic. Also long term SMA levels which the crowd may use, 200, 100, 50. These become pivot points for maximum reactions. Illogical coding would be things like, Moon phases, "Price is bouncing", Elliot Wave levels, Bollinger Bands etc etc
I don't use MA's in any of my algos but my wife uses them in her charts (she uses no algos) and wife is a serious (lucky Asian?) money maker at trading.
Hello themickey,, Luck is not needed, I do not believe in luck. I am not tweaking a damn thing. I am not coding a damn thing. If it does not make money for the month of August and/or September, I am throwing the algo in the garbage where it DEFINETLY belong. Fuck open, close, high and low of the day. Fuck open, close, high and low of yesterday. Fuck SMA Fuck Pivots. Fuck coding. Fuck Bollinger Bands Fuck Elliot Wave levels And Fuck Algo trading development with a big fat horse dick. I can easily make money clicking the ES, I do not need an algo, I am just running something for free cause it was given to me for free. As I have said 10,000 times and counting, algo development is dumb, stupid, and a complete waste of time. No-one can build an ES algo that makes money every month and the algo can scale from 1 to +25 ES contracts year after year since 2015 to today and make a million dollars every year. So what's the point of algo? Waste of time. FAR easier to click. My friend, wants to prove me wrong, so he gave me an algo, I shall see.
Many years ago I was a pedestrian waiting at traffic lights at a busy intersection and I saw a $50 note which was dead smack in the middle of the crossroad flick up in the air a couple of inches, with cars whizzing by both ways. When the Pedestrian light said "cross now" I bolted over quick smart to beat everyone, and pocketed the money. Winning, was that luck or skill?
Something doesn't add up. If this guy is your friend and wants to prove you wrong he can just show you the algo working in real time? If it is a HFT algo making 1000s of trades per day then he should be able to show you at least one day of it running on his server and printing money for the day? Did he do that? If not, then it sounds like your friend is trolling you! An algo that trades 1 ES lot 2000 times a day pays $8000 in commission and fees per day ($4 x 2000). $2 million per year per lot. With exchange membership and volume discount you might be able to halve that to $4000 a day/1M a year. Above numbers are for just 1 ES lot making 2000 trades per day. So scaling to 25 lots, it does look like the algo will make over a million per month and over 12 million a year!!! , but only for your broker and the CME
Price is dynamic, so a trader’s decisions should be too — not rigid or mechanical. You can’t trade on signals alone because a single signal is never reliable confirmation. Moving averages are just historical, meaningless averages, yet algos lean on them heavily. Mean reversion is too rudimentary. All algos really do is automate incompetence. The only way to consistently make money is through adaptive, discretionary trading.
Most Algos might not be as consistent as a good human trader, but when an Algo is in a money making phase it will out trade most humans because you can trade larger size with an algo than most humans can psychologically handle when trading discretionary. By a factor of 100x or more.
Im just guessing but I think it is much more likely you got suckered into buying some snake oil and paid some charlatan for the Algo and are using a 'friend' as cover to hide the embarrassment of falling for a scam
Are you talking about scalps that a human literally can’t execute fast enough to profit from? That’s not a psychology issue — that’s a speed/ability limitation. I could agree that an algo’s only real-world edge is in those kinds of scalping situations where execution speed is everything — but what edge is that really, when you’re going up against institutional algos that pay for queue priority and can front-run fills?
They say facetiously everyone trading a bullmarket and making money is a genuis. Those currently longterm trading/investing/buying and holding within the gold market, are they genius or lucky?