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New to the board and just spent a while reading through from start to finish.
thanks for your honesty Kevin, been a good read. It's tricky watching a system go live after all the testing and seeing how it performs. I'm currently in the live SIM trading for my first system, it's good fun so far.
For me personally I couldn't handle this particular system, trades are way too infrequent for my tastes
Here are updated charts, etc through April 1, 2014.
The system is seriously underperforming expectations. It is not trading nearly as much as its historic norm, due to lower volatility of EC. I am going to keep going with this, per the plan detailed at the beginning of the thread.
This whole thread does bring up an interesting point - you can do everything correctly during development, and things still might not go as planned. I kind of compare it to an Olympic athlete. He or she trains and trains, and then when the competition is held, a lot of factors can help or prevent that person from winning. He may have done everything correctly in preparing, and still lose.
Of course, one could argue that this system was nowhere near Olympic athlete caliber to begin with!!!!
This week (one trade in particular) was a good one... now the performance is at a point where the overall account is underwater only because of position sizing. If I have traded just constant size throughout, I'd be up about 10%.
Of course, this week's performance also exposes the weakness in this trading system - it needs big winning trades to create positive performance. Without the big trades, the system is blah. And, we have not had many big trades since going live. Only 2 trades about $500 profit, with Thursday's win by far the biggest.
When volatility returns to EC, I suspect we will see more big wins, and more trades in general.
Overall the account is still down about 6% from start. This is mostly due to position sizing (when I traded 2 contracts, I had quite a few losers). Note if I had traded a single contract the whole time, I'd be up about 17%.
I'm curious: how many of you would still be trading these systems live? And, why or why not?
Be as blunt/brutal as you wish. You won't offend me. There is no right or wrong answer here, just fodder for discussion purposes...
I would have some difficulties. I would consider it a lost of time and money. Obviously my answer is based on some assumptions, ie, you depend on it to live and have no other income.
i will follow the initial plan . But as a further rule I would probably stop the program if maxdd become a newer number and start to revise all the strategy structure.
Further I saw that the equity line has a dangerous and slow movement. Have you considered to put a switch refered to the volatility?
Good points. If this system was your only source of income, you'd be better off volunteering your time at a soup kitchen (and if you'd continue trading this system probably soon enough you'd be on the other side of the ladle ).
In your trading, do you depend on one strategy/market to make a living?
I use to try to do just that - I'd look for a super tremendous strategy that by itself would be sufficient. Eventually, I found that was nearly impossible (at least for me).
So, I diversify systems, markets, etc. That helps a lot. But even then, this system is not "carrying its weight" compared to what it should do.
It is nice having a civilized conversation here, as opposed to the drama at another forum, right @coccigelus ?
Stopping when the max historical dd is hit is a pretty good stopping point, even though many people say "your worst drawdown is always in the future." So, I sometimes use 1.5 * max dd.
Just for reference, based on 1 contract, the historical max dd is $3,265. Since I started trading live, the max dd on one contract has been about $1,800.