I only have 3 months of data, but here's the equity curve on backtests of 1m intervals. Since the system looks at multiple stocks, it cycles between different products so the %'age of time in the market for any one product is not very long.
The system exercises no position sizing and just executes 100 share transactions. I was hoping the equity curve would smooth out with the liquidity-analysis code tacked onto the Nov and Dec data, but it seems to make little difference. I was hoping I could fine tune removal of liquidity with the Level-2 information, but it seems like that doesn't make as much difference on the equity curve as I would have hoped.
In other words, I really wasted a lot of time writing code that didn't need to be written.
Part of the problem may also be that I have a sort of hybrid-backtesting system that relies on external DLLs and also the garbage that is E-Signal's EFS. I also think the adaptive tick filters and filtering systems are wonky too. The sheer pain involved in getting to the state where I am now makes me think I won't have much of a FULLY automated trading system that looks like something I can be proud of for at least a good 6 months.
This is the system applied to NTAP (NASDAQ), is highly speculative, and seriously unwieldy. I don't know if I have enough capital to finance this strategy, and this equity curve is for the initial non-aggressive version of the strategy I want to roll out.
<img src="http://www.losingtrader.com/images/ntap_hf.jpg">