Status Report
After fooling around with the eASCTrend Deluxe+ system for a couple of weeks, watching their videos, reading their material and remembering how to work it, I developed a very simple but somewhat carefully crafted protocol to test its ability to trade stocks successfully.
In summary, this is what I did with several mid-to-high-beta stocks' daily charts:
1. Followed Ablesys' advice in setting the parameters as best I could, per their many videos;
2. Backtested/optimized the system for 2 years starting from June 2003 to June 2005;
3. Kept the optimized parameters fixed and tested the system forward for all of August and half of September 2005;
Repeated the process with 30 minute charts of those same stocks, but backtesting/optimizing for about 2 months (July and August 2005) and testing forward for 6 trading days into September 2005.
In all cases, the system failed to deliver the strongly positive results that I was expecting for the forward-testing period.
Another thing that has developed recently is that the system seems to occasionally freeze - without any visible problem with the eSignal data. Of course, this problem alone would make me think twice before I tried to use their AOE feature to trade automatically.
Understandably, my current plan is not to start trading it unless I find a big hole in my thinking and results so far.
Bummer! Oh well - live and learn!
After fooling around with the eASCTrend Deluxe+ system for a couple of weeks, watching their videos, reading their material and remembering how to work it, I developed a very simple but somewhat carefully crafted protocol to test its ability to trade stocks successfully.
In summary, this is what I did with several mid-to-high-beta stocks' daily charts:
1. Followed Ablesys' advice in setting the parameters as best I could, per their many videos;
2. Backtested/optimized the system for 2 years starting from June 2003 to June 2005;
3. Kept the optimized parameters fixed and tested the system forward for all of August and half of September 2005;
Repeated the process with 30 minute charts of those same stocks, but backtesting/optimizing for about 2 months (July and August 2005) and testing forward for 6 trading days into September 2005.
In all cases, the system failed to deliver the strongly positive results that I was expecting for the forward-testing period.
Another thing that has developed recently is that the system seems to occasionally freeze - without any visible problem with the eSignal data. Of course, this problem alone would make me think twice before I tried to use their AOE feature to trade automatically.
Understandably, my current plan is not to start trading it unless I find a big hole in my thinking and results so far.
Bummer! Oh well - live and learn!
