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Is the spreadsheet something above and beyond the workshop, or is this something central to what Kevin teaches? In other words, are all of his students writing and using spreadsheets like this?
From the looks of it, @risingfire took concepts from the class and created his own spreadsheet to suit his needs. He is a pretty astute programmer/developer. I have some similar spreadsheets, and I am always willing to share what I have, and/or help students create their own versions. The more knowledge of Excel (pivot tables, macros, charting, etc.) the more we can do.
For the workshop, I keep the spreadsheets fairly simple, and those that want more can just ask.
Thanks, gumdr0p. I began live trading again last October, and it has been a much better experience than when I began trading before that. I stopped trading sometime around March last year and spent the Spring/Summer/Fall sim trading. I should have done that first--but I was so confident that I was ready and that the strategies that I and others (from the club) were ready to go.
As you'll glean from my posts, some of the strategies should never have been traded, and the ones that were good suffered sizable drawdown. Just bad luck/bad timing, but enough to trigger my fear response and throw self-confidence out the window.
I watched a set of strategies recover and then perform over those months and got a handle on my fear response so felt i was ready to re-enter the fray in October with a set of strategies that I had been monitoring now for several months.
Oct and Nov were profitable -- I was up 18%. Then Dec ate virtually ALL of those profits and took the portfolio down to 1%. Fortunately I was not as reactive as earlier 2015 and was able to re-assess both my own tolerance levels and the reasons for such wide fluctuation in performance. I decided that, although a couple of the strategies had a proven track record for performance/profitability, that they just weren't for me. Too volatile for my blood. So I turned them off.
By the end of Jan, my trading account is up 8% (accounting for closed positions only) and current trades are showing profit (but, of course, who knows what will really happen until the positions close).
So I've learned that I am one of those people who would rather a high success win rate rather than lots of losses (i.e., low win rate) with infrequent big wins -- even at the sacrifice of some profit. I would rather sleep better at night and make less money than sleep less and make more.
Yes, I am finding that, for me, the value of Kevin's workshop has been in the concepts and methodologies that I am able put into my own mental framework. My programming expertise has been both a asset as well as a hindrance. Kevin is much more comfortable with "fuzziness" and strategies that may have several inefficiencies in them. I think this "fuzziness" is important to being successful in trading as it creates "breathing room" and adaptability for market changes that a tightly-fit strategy simply cannot cope with. It also allows the space to be wrong and be okay with that.
My programming expertise makes me a bit of a perfectionist -- or perhaps the other way around. And this is just not a good way to approach trading as there is no perfect model in trading. So I've been trying to learn from Kevin and his more relaxed, successful approach.
Now with that in mind, Kevin gave a "booster" workshop last summer where he walked us through the development of a strategy real-time. The strategy idea he used came from Michael Harris' book "Short-Term Trading with Price Patterns" published back in 2000. Kevin had tried several price patterns in the book that Harris had applied to ETFs. Kevin applied these to various futures' market and found one that had pretty excellent results in unleaded gas.
But my "structured mind" was really bothered by this. How can a price pattern that was derived from the ETF QQQ work well with the futures RB? It seemed to random to me. But then again... need to be willing to be more fuzzy.
And I was really intrigued with Harris' work with price patterns, as some of my strategies were based on time-honored price patterns in the market. So I bought Harris' book, subscribed to his blog and am currently working on a price pattern system that synthesizes Kevin's workshop methodologies as well as Harris'. I hope to have a beta of this system running in another month or two, feeling that it will be more in line with my own trading style.
So there's the update! Meanwhile, current v1.0 system strategies are running and performing well.
The Harris-based pattern system I developed works great finding price patterns, but I have not yet found a satisfactory method of pattern selection that would have a true edge to trading. I have tried all manner of methods, from cross-market verification, various correlations, backtest results, etc. Finally I put the project on hold and have simply been trading strategies that use Kevin's methods that scour various sources, from books to Internet to magazines, etc. This has been yielding good results. While I think that machine learning approaches can also yield good results, I have not managed to find a way to separate the "random luck" of those results with "true edge" results.