'' Gary,

The bottom line is really simple. The only thing that really matters at the end of the day is what works for YOU. If Zoe is successful in automation, more power to him (although why is he replying to this thread?). If you are successful in discretionary trading and feel you can improve your trading with the aid of hypnotherapy, more power to you for doing so.

Since Zoe did bring up automation -- in my experience, of which I have quite a bit , traders tend to run to automation as a cure for their shortcomings as a discretionary trader. I've been there, done that. I've seen it over and over in others, too. For me personally, I feel fortunate I broke the cycle and returned to being a discretionary trader. All the time and energy I was spending on the never ending tweaking of settings and indicator values, and optimizations... it hurts to think about. Naturally, the only thing that really matters at the end of the day is what works for YOU. For me, automation was almost like an addiction. I was consumed by it, having so many systems, so many indicators, tweaking settings, using four computers to backtest on, etc. Ridiculous. I'm not Goldman Sachs. To make things worse I was using NinjaTrader, so the results were pretty worthless anyway. One day I woke up. It was like deciding to quit drugs and then committing to it with all your energy. It felt good to move on. I feel like automation is a short-cut for many. There are no short-cuts in trading.

Anyway, I didn't mean to get off topic by responding to Zoe...

I feel like you are 100% doing the right thing, and in fact I am very interested in doing it myself. I am not a perfect trader, such a thing doesn't exist. I know my strengths and weaknesses. I know what causes my heart rate to elevate and when I tend to make stupid decisions. While I try to overcome these obstacles on my own through mental training and discipline and experience, I welcome having a professional help me.

In my eyes, a hypnotherapist is just like a personal fitness trainer. One is for your mind, one is for your body. Trading is not about brute force. More is not better. That is why I think so much of what determines profitability is directly controlled from within your mind, and happens without you consciously making decisions.

Anyway, I'm rambling and quite tired. I should have gone to bed already I hope you'll share your experience and your journey with the hypnotherapy.

Mike
"

The above i sthe copy of the Mike's reply to Gary and hypnosis thread. I guess this is question for Mike or anyone else that did this. Mike mentions about ' usefulness ' of the Ninja test results. Why is that ? I have noticed the same thing, and got burned heavily first time by it. Build the 'boot' had excellent results on backtest and paper, started real and kaboooooommmmmm, never came to the bottom of it. Now i am using ducas copy and have a little boot written fully on my own even indies, and testing is much closer to the real results. I love ninja cus i am developer from my old life and enables me to use .Net to code, without any stupid limitations of other scripting languages implemented by some of the platforms... but i did notice following issues:

1) Ghost trades appearing from nowhere, think corrupted db has something to do with this
2) backtest's useless lot's of mistakes and misalignment signals/entries/exits.

Wonder why. otherwise love the platform.

Regs

sinisa 

The above i sthe copy of the Mike's reply to Gary and hypnosis thread. I guess this is question for Mike or anyone else that did this. Mike mentions about ' usefulness ' of the Ninja test results. Why is that ? I have noticed the same thing, and got burned heavily first time by it.

I thought that looked familiar as I was reading it, then realized you were quoting me.

If you are asking me why I think backtesting is useful or not useful, then that is too broad a question and I don't have dozens of hours to type a reply.

So maybe you can ask a more precise question.

Mike

Nope, i am not asking the religious question about back testing. I though i sensed particular dislike or problem that you have discovered that is specific to Ninja Trader platform and back testing engine. Example of that, i have tested data feeds and ended up having corrupted database when i actively switched between primary and backup feeds even on the same broker/provider. That in fact has caused what i called 'ghost trades' to occur, which are trades with no record of ever being entered into by code, but have been executed and hanging around.
Or issues that i had with optimizer, where large configuration pool, caused framework to fail and leak overloading memory and never releasing, which in turn than corrupted the data and yadi yadi yada....
I have ended up having the db of my own tracing and recording everything that occurs preventing some of the issues. So i guess i was more implying if there was any specific or technical reasons why you have suggested that rather then general question on validity of back testing/ optimizing...

Hope this clarifies it