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2013-14 Penny stock era (cringe). This was the time I had so much enthusiasm and I naively thought trading was about knowing what price will do next. Trading without stops and getting frustrated when my hunches were wrong lol.
Platform licence for DAS trader
3 Months in Tim Sykes trading room
2 Months in Investors Live
Investors Live Textbook Trading DVD ($500 at the time, now $1000)
Reminisces of a stock operator
£3000 in a blown up account
2014-15 Spread Betting Forex era. Now I'm starting to learn. I understand trading is a game of probabilities, cutting losses quick and maximising profits gains but actually putting it into practice was impossible.
TC2000 charting software
Online Trading Academy Forex course (a whopping £9000)
Every popular trading book you can think of (Market Wizards series, Trend Following by Michael Coval, Van Tharps books etc. Probably cost me somewhere around £300 to £400). I must say these purchases I don't regret. I learn't at least one valuable thing from all of them.
£2500 in trading losses
Anyone here heard about market makers from indicator store? its an indicator that triggers an entry on your preset signals. let me know your thoughts before i spend $500
I purchased a fully-automated strategy from NanoScalper for $1,995. Their customer service is very helpful/responsive but the backtesting has been an issue. It acts as if there's a memory leak which I am told is a fatal flaw. I would love to hear from anyone who has experience with this algo!
Just for curiosity, I looked at the their hypothetical backtest results for CL over the entire year of 2016. They are showing a total of $59,690 of profit on one contract. I also noticed they did not show any commission or slippage. So totaling up the number of trades for the whole year it comes to 8,845 trades. If we use $3.44 commission on each trade, we should deduct $30,427 to account for the discount broker fees (e.g. NinjaBroker). Also with CL, there is going to be some slippage. Assuming a generous scenario (even with limit orders on one side), there would probably be at least one tick or two ticks lost on the target for each trade. I'll give the benefit of the doubt and call it 1.5 ticks per trade. It should be noted that if this is running 24 hours per day, the overnight slippage can end up with even more ticks against you. In any case, 1.5 ticks lost on each trade, would come to another $13,268. Combine these two amounts would be a deduction of about $43,695. So trading 24 hours per day in a perfect running system would be ($50,690-$43,695=)$6,995 on 8845 trades - or about $0.80 per trade.
Not sure if this is what you're experiencing, but I might take pause looking at these statistics.
With regards to the backtesting, if 1 minute bars are being tested as it seems to be, keep in mind that about 43,800 bars are loaded for each month, and 525,600 per year. That's a fair amount of OHLC data to be running a backtest. Not knowing the proprietary code of the company, only makes it more difficult to know for sure what's going on.
The vendor should have provided you with complete backtest statistics (Profit Factor, Win%, Sharpe Ratio, etc.). The vendor should have included commissions in these tests to show you. Not only that, the vendor should also have provided you with LIVE test results for at least 6 months. As we all system traders know that there is a huge difference between backtest and live results (mainly when including commissions).
As I'm sure the vendor didn't do that, and we all, in this forum have been around for a while, know that is very unlikely a vendor would sell a strategy with a Profit Factor of 2.5 or more (I wouldn't!). I've built systems with PF 2.5 or more that failed terribly to produce results Live. If the vendor was able to do that, which is a incredibly hard endeavor, why would he put the system for sale, when you (and all the other buyers) would be entering at the exact same tick and competing for the same fill? That may not be a problem on ES, but would be on several other instruments (and in some cases even on ES!). Also, even an algo needs constant optimization, improvements, settings tailoring, etc... I don't know how someone could sell a 'static algo' that would work in all markets and for a long time... I really wish life was that easy .
So, if I were you, and I hope the vendor gave you some type of money back guarantee, you should run to get your money back. Otherwise, I guess you can write off $2K as a lessons learned.
All the best.
PS: I understand we discussed some of the issues above in private, but I just don't want more people to get involved in these situations before they have complete proof that a system really performs as promised.
PS2: if you want to follow the system trading path, there are some good webinars here on f.io. Look for Kevin Davey webinars and few others.
AL Brooks Videos and Book
Brian Hoffman Trading
James 16
NoBS Basic
PATS Tape Reading Mark
Emini Addict
Emini Mind
YourTradingCouch
LandShark Analytics
This is quite common, with advertised products/services, and surprisingly often it can make the difference between overall profit and overall loss, but one suspects a substantial proportion of the "target market" don't quite appreciate this.
Big Mike, what a great forum you've supported now for many a year. In the last 15 years, the number for me is over 20k. In the last 12 months, I made one mistake for a Reddy-indicator that I no longer use. I paid only 100 bucks for it anyways. I use it no longer and like most indicators, it is slow.