I have never used marketsim, all I see is a button for "6 months" and "last month". Can you not plug in "36 months" and look at the results? Thanks again for sharing.
optimisation and walk forward testing is the only way to put more substance beneath such short tests IMO. peace
So, you are looking for a reaction, or "dead-cat" bounce after a large (one day) sell-off. I agree that a longer timeframe would be beneficial when looking at the results. Please let us know how it turns out. Glancing back at the daily chart of the QQQ over the past 4 years, I can see several examples of this working. But, I also see some where it did not, and the selloff continued. What would your stop be? 10%. 15% if your winners outnumber your losers by a big amount?
Most likely not, even without testing the system past 6 months, the market was in a different phase 6 months ago. I would say that this system would only be good if the markets 200 day moving averages were in an uptrend like they are currently. 6 months ago this wasn't the case. The point is no one system will work for all market conditions. Even scalping's effectivness can deterorate like currently with the thin spreads. Got to adapt. If you only have one tool in your arsonal you can pretty much say to the market "Thank you, may I have another" and blow out. :eek:
You are correct, instead you can go back to that actual date on a timeline and track your trading strat. As far as backtesting goes yep 6 months. SUits my needs for now thinking of switching to TradeStation but I need to explore version 7 more I am hearing mixed reviews. The good thing about the market sim place is that they have so many dam indicators, I load it up just to learn the ones I havn't heard of.
Did I get this right? This is a *one* month test of this April, which was a great month for longs, and the "Buy Approach Criteria" is: close is between 20 and 80 Average Volume(90) is above 50000 Close dropped more than 6 percent over the last 1 day The "Sell Methods for exiting" is to sell after a gain of 10%. No stops. So the system catches falling knives, without stops, entering at whatever price the market open offers, and may linger in trades that only range, or sell before the full profit potential is realized (Did you notice how your positions gained even more after your profit target?). And for this, you want Mr. Market's meat and cheeses? Ah, the power of cheese. This is reminiscent of the Motley fool's "Mechanical Investing" strategy.
Might have some similarities, you even said it was a great month for longs, so why not use a bullish strategy. You can either like the system or not I just liked the results and wanted to share them. Better than most of these negative P/L resulting stratagies around. As for the "you could have stayed in the trades longer" statement, yeah say that after the fact, I could look at your trades and find many that kept running too that you missed the top on. Don't be greedy take the profit and bank it. You could apply stops to this system, or keep exits discretionary. 10% is more than adequate when your in a bull with only one leg, and if you look closely you have to get out of one trade before you reentered another. In conclusion its just a system I toyed around with, and I wanted to share the results because I thought they were interesting. If you got anything better to say or share, share it, if your just going to ridicule, you can shove it. :eek:
And another thing look at Jay's post. http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?threadid=17580 he mentions pullbacks, IMO not a bad strategy right now.