Welcome to NexusFi: the best trading community on the planet, with over 150,000 members Sign Up Now for Free
Genuine reviews from real traders, not fake reviews from stealth vendors
Quality education from leading professional traders
We are a friendly, helpful, and positive community
We do not tolerate rude behavior, trolling, or vendors advertising in posts
We are here to help, just let us know what you need
You'll need to register in order to view the content of the threads and start contributing to our community. It's free for basic access, or support us by becoming an Elite Member -- see if you qualify for a discount below.
-- Big Mike, Site Administrator
(If you already have an account, login at the top of the page)
Here is a quick update from the first hour of my VX strategy that I'm trading live today:
Tradestation stinks > my strategy wasn't working at all for the first 30 minutes
I had to reboot my laptop to get the strategy to work....just another day with TS
I don't think the strategy would have generated any trades, as the day started with a down trend and a reversal hasn't happened since before the opening bell
No trades yet, but setup is happening within the next 20 minutes....we are approaching an all-time low again for this instrument.
As exciting as yesterday was in sim, today is the complete opposite. Happy days are here again, if you are trading ES, NQ or YM. But whatevs, as the kids say these days.
Nothing happened today. Seriously. I did not have a single crossover, thus no entries. All of the volume was used up in the downtrend this morning, so now we've bottomed out and will likely stay in or around there for the rest of the day.
Given that this strategy struggles with entries and exits in low volume, I've shut it down for the day. As I mentioned over on @snax's journal, there is no need to trade just for trading's sake. I also don't want get stuck in a position over that weekend and be on the wrong side of a gap up/down.
Today's Results:
0 Trades
0 P/L
I am disappointed, especially after yesterday's busy sim trading day. I counted about 55 trades yesterday, which explains the +$3k day.
Today was just one of those happy market days, with a good jobs report that blew the lid off the market. I could have entered at some point, from a discretionary perspective, but >> "that move wasn't my move".... and ....this is an algo journal (no cheating).
Next week:
Try strategy again Monday, live
I'm done here for the week. I hope you all have a restful weekend and I'll see you all Monday!
I'm learning that these happy market days can be some of the hardest to trade, because it doesn't really seem like there are any obvious opportunities to enter and then you look up and the market has gained 16 points since the opening bell. Add the occasional wood-chipper chop-action thrown in randomly and it can be very difficult to find the right opportunities. But 16 points have passed so now FOMO sets in! Very tricky.
Your strategy is showing potential, I hope it continues to do so. Have a great weekend!
FOMO can be a killer, but we've all been burned by it at some point in our lives, whether in trading or otherwise. I have had some time to think about Friday. Because I still so new to trading the VX, I did not trade Friday afternoon, as mentioned. Mainly, I don't know how volume behaves yet. There would have been some entries shortly after I turned off my strategy and there was enough volume to support the trades my strategy would have taken. But I resisted the temptation to restart my strategy late in the day. Because FOMO is a cruel mistress.
I am disappointed that I didn't pick up any trades, but I don't want to have remorse over a hasty decision. I am practicing mindfulness to get to that place of peace while I wait.
My strategy does not execute well live. I had some wins and some losses, but the losses outweighed the wins. The biggest issue is having orders filled: it just isn't happening, even with a ton of volume. There is a huge discrepancy between the orders that should have been filled and those that actually did get filled.
Here are my three big problems:
Strategy report doesn't match sim, which doesn't match live. That is normal, but the differences are exceptionally large (a couple thousand dollars large)
Tradestation does not have a market replay feature like NT or SC, so I cannot playback yesterday to see how my strategy would have performed
There is an execution problem within the code: where a condition occurs maybe 3-5 times per day, it is actually generating 8-25 entry signals per day. That was fine in sim, not so fine live.
This is not all doom and gloom, but for now I have to shut this strategy down. It has so much potential, but is worthless if I cannot get in the market. The glimmer of hope is that I can manually trade the same strategy, by watching the indicator. Manual trades somehow appear to go in faster, probably because my limit price is usually the current price. However, the main idea of the strategy is to have the machine to do the work.
Not charts for Monday kiddos. I'm super swamped with other activities this week. I'll do my best to update, but since my strategy is not working properly, I'll sit on the bench. If I have time, I will try to tinker with the strategy, but that is probably not going to happen.
I'll try to update as I go along, but I cannot promise anything.
Ugh. Getting a match between sim and the strategy backtest does not really concern me (sim is notorious for having issues), but if you can't get match between strategy backtest and live, you are dead in the water.
It could be an easy fix, or maybe the strategy will have to be abandoned. Hard to say.
The key (for next time) is to develop a strategy that you know will work the same in backtest as in real time. I learned how through trial and (lot of) error...
Thanks for the feedback. Sim and backtest were pretty close, actually, it was the live that diverged the most. I'm actually not surprised that it did not work well. I can still use this strategy for my signals, but I think it may be best served to manually make the entries. There is definitely opportunity, I believe.
VX has, usually, 2-3 good moves in a day. This week has been a little weird with the trade war talk and the tug-of-war that fear and greed are having, but I benched myself after Monday. I need to work through some things with the code and then retest.