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Not a great week but made new highs on the equity run up and new highs on the account. I am happy with the trading even in the current financial market environment. Both the financial and grain markets have been making some big turns on the daily charts so I am happy to be staying positive through this big volatility. Looks like potential trend changes coming in both markets but I will let the system tell me what to do.
5/17/2021: Current real-time account equity = $10,152 (2 trades open)
I am so happy that yours momentum algo is working good, I was starting to develop a similar approach, taking a momentum daily/weekly algo for stocks and trying to apply it to futures trying to not overfit but damn I cannot come up with anything good in backtest. Can you please explain the engine of your momentum algo? Is it something like high>highest(hig,var ) for the longs? Did you used look inside bar at one minute for backtesting?
you have the micro cl contracts coming later this year and the points will be 1/10th of an actual cl so only need 2 ticks or cents to break even. which is great!
i really like ho wyou waited for an expected drawdown in demo or back test to start tading. i thought of that before but never really thought.. hmmm.. what if i run my algo in demo and when it is a big drawdown thats when i will actually trade and min eis intraday so that may work for me a lot actually. good posts
If I may. Just because they are not equal does not mean you cannot balance them out in your portfolio.
You just need to use some measurement of volatility of each in relation to other.
You mentioned corn. And I know you said the NQ as well.
Ahhh those are brutally different beasts.
But... for instance if you take the average ATR of say 14 days of BOTH then multiply that by a dollar amount you will have a way to "equalize" the risk of both.
Clearly the NQ "moves" more than corn. Movement multipled by their respective tick sizes will give you your numbers.
So say the NQ's dollar ATR for the last 14 days is $5500 and CORN's is $880.
Ok. 5500/880 = 6.25. Rounded down you should traded 6 CORN (plus 2 micro corn?) for EVERY 1 NQ.
Of course it's not going to GUARANTEE anything BUT if your goal is diversification (the ONLY holy grail in trading) then that again is a good way to trade ANY markets together.
Plus with the addition of the micros it gets even better! You can't trade .5 of a contract? No but if your strategy strategy calls for .5 you can buy/sell 5 micros.
Maybe this is obvious and your system is totally different I don't know?
Also I love the idea of turning the system on at the worst drawdown. Jack Schwager talks about that in his hege fund book. Smart move!
Missed the update last week due to being away from the trading desk. Remote monitored and all trades fired correctly. Was actually great trading the last couple of weeks and made being away a lot less stressful. Markets trended nicely and had a very clear turnaround in grains that the system traded well.
5/31/2021: Current real-time account equity = $10,702 (0 trades open)
Yes I found that on the forum. I am really excited about this addition as my system has been trading CL very well but I have been missing out due to QM being too leveraged. I will definitely be trading the micro CL contract as long as there is enough liquidity. It shouldn't be too hard to find 1 micro though.
Yes waiting for a drawdown gives a better chance of not giving up on the system too soon. The system very well may continue down from there and break but that could happen anytime. The flip side is you may miss out on a big run-up. I think it depends on the system. I noticed mine had very nice normal drawdown levels so it was easy to spot that it might be a good idea to turn it on. If you only have a drawdown every few months due to trading larger timeframes, then it may be hard to wait.
I am not looking to give away much about the system currently as I do not even know if it is sound in all market conditions. The backtesting shows a nice steady equity curve and that is what I am hoping will continue but its still too early to say if I have something that will be usable even through the end of the year. I can tell you that it is as simple as can be and all entries are stop market orders so no need for inside bar backtesting (I did validate this).
I have been developing and testing for about 5 years now and it took me a long time to find something that worked for me so keep working at it and you will get there. Also, even if I gave away some of the details of the system, most people will not trust it and end up losing money. I know this first hand. Until you build it yourself, you won't be able to trust it and trade it correctly.
Thank you for the response. This is a good way to look at diversification. I haven't really looked too closely at the overall balance of the portfolio yet. I built the system based on 1 full size contract and since I do not want to allocate the capital to the system yet in order to trade that, I planned on trading 1 micro contract of each. The problem with that assumption was that not all micro's are created equal. So I may have blown up the system just by having 1 oversized micro in the portfolio and one market could break the system.
Instead of using the ATR I used the maximum drawdown of each individual market in the system as a baseline to say whether it was a good pair. Just because you have an ATR difference doesn't necessarily mean you have a risk difference. For instance, my max drawdown on NQ and CL may be $10k, but if I convert that to micro's my max drawdown on MNQ is $1k and QM is now $5k. That is not a good pair anymore. I would need to trade 5 MNQ to 1 QM to match my current definition of risk from my system.
There are probably 15 different ways to look at this but I knew at the time that I had made a miscalculation and could not trade it as originally planned. As I am able to scale up this will be something I will need to dig into.
The idea of turning the system on during a drawdown just kind of fell into my lap as I had been watching the system for a bit and realized I was undergoing a drawdown. I knew this would kind of be a make or break moment of the system so I took the leap and it worked out. Never know what the future is going to bring though so my fingers are still crossed that I made the right decision.