In the first post I mentioned that I’m using 600 trading systems. Of course, I wouldn’t take all the trades as it would be way too many to keep track of. During demo trading (the first half of 2023) I scored the signals based on the sum of the scores of systems that give “Buy” signal for given stock. This worked beautifully. I also liked the fact that it gave me so many signals – I could miss one here or there and it didn’t matter.
But recently I’ve checked correlation between in-sample trading and out-of-sample for various metrics. This is shown in attached file.
Two highest correlations are for final account value and bars-in ratio. (Bars-in ratio is just percentage of bars when a system has a trade opened. So 10 markets with 100 bars history would be 1000 bars. If a system has a trade opened in any 10 bars then bars-in ratio would be 1%).
Back to why I decided to trade only 5 best systems (based on in-sample performance):
The top 5 systems' out-of-sample average account value is around 38 times more than initial value (in other words, an average profit is about 3800% since 2018). More interesting is the sum of bars-in ratios: it’s just 26%. That means, that on average I will have invested only about a quarter of working capital. Unused capital will probably go to some ETFs, bonds or something similar. Of course, it’s possible that I will get more signals and I won’t be able to take them all, but I’m not worried and I’ll decide what to do when it actually happens.
This also means there are some changes to my position sizing: each trade is now about 2000 PLN. With 5 systems it means I can take about 10 trades for each system. Right now, I have around 20 signals so there is room for more.
I will slowly exit old systems at my discretion (or when actual exit signal comes) and I will replace their trades with trades from new systems.