Hi Big Mike traders. I'm a software programmer by day and a futures trader/strategy writer. I wanted to put together a forum to accomplish a couple of things, one is to document the best use of each strategy and to run a few simple test on a strategy to see how well it preforms in predicting the future direction of the market.
My friend and I debate about the validity of any indicator to provide useful information. Especially when used by the computer for automated trading. Opinions on both sides are welcome.
In order to test an indicator, I need to start off with a strategy that jumps into the market at a random point, places a stop loss and profit target at equal distances away from the entry point. I'll need to account for commission and slippage when I do this test. I'll need to verify that I have statistically valid unbiased exit so when we introduce an indicator, we'll use that unbiased exit to close the trade. If the indicator did provide a better average enter point, the strategy should have a winning percentage of trades and trade profits.
Some indicators are easy to program against like moving averages, but other indicators are not are intuitive. I'd also like to solicit traders who use specific indicators and show us how they use the indicators to enter a trade. A follow-up on this post could be another post that always too the same entry points, but used various techniques to exit the trade.
I will be using Ninja 7 for the strategies that I will develop but other are encouraged to jump in with strategies on other trading platforms.
I will also get this thread seeded with a couple post to see if I can generate other traders/programmer interests.
Big Mike has start several threads with very thought provoking ideas, and after a half dozen post he wonders if he's reaching anyone. But because of his persistence others eventually find time to join in. Hopefully that will happen here too.