I have been very busy for the last couple of months, and only updated the RAPA website with the system's live results.
That said, the system has had mostly losing weeks since the beginning of July, and as of Monday this week my account was back to break-even, with 24 losing trades in the last 31 trades.
Even though my system stop was not reached, I felt I would suffer more of the same if I kept trading it as is, and given the pace of losses (-12k for just the last 4 weeks) that system stop could be hit in a couple of weeks, or less, and there was no point continuing in the same fashion.
Over Monday/Tuesday I took a clean-sheet approach, and did the statistical analysis all over again, paying special attention to not mix variables in the patterns definition, and to not define the patterns narrowly - all in all, trying to *not* over-fit the system.
The other thing that I did, was to decide on using a reasonable size stop at all times, even when the performance in backtest is about 20% lower that way - but I have learned over the past 3 months, that stops are just there to assist when the market goes out of the usual for an extended period of time.
That new version yields on the 6 years backtest only 60% of the P&L of the prior one for about the same number of trades, but it's forward testing performance on 2013 is in-line with the last 3 years (2008 & 2009 are way above the average, and 2007 well under the average), and the current drawdown only started a month ago, and is of lower magnitude than with any prior version (it is currently quite less than the max historical drawdown).
All in all, I think this new version has better chances of long-term success, so I decided to switch to it, which I did at 2:30am on Wednesday. The first couple of days with it are certainly encouraging, with 5 wins on Wednesday, 1 loss + 1 win today, up +3185 for these 2 days, while the prior version had 2 more losing days.