Many of you may have followed my previous 2 real money auto trading journals. For those of you who haven't, the end result both times was my bot experiencing a huge draw down over the course of a month of two which forced me to shut it down.
Before going live again, I want to work on developing some new strategies. I am trying to get back to basics... I have not sat down and started from scratch developing a strategy in about 2 years... all of my strategies over the past 2 years were all based off of another strategy.. Now I am trying to start completely fresh.
Even my procedure for developing strategies, I want to revamp all of it.
I will be using a modified version of JSystemTrader for all of my backtesting needs.
I have always found it "easy" to find good entries. Well at least the entries seem fine. It is the exits that do me in.
To overcome this issue with exits, I have normally employed a stop and reverse exit.
With this, its not very dificult to find strategies that "work". However, the problem comes in the form of draw downs and massive losses. I do not have the stomach for this type of strategy.
The next typical type of exit is to use a simple stop loss. I have never had good results with this. Perhaps my entries are just not good enough... or something. However, I believe my issue is, although I'm setting a stop loss.... I still do not exit well when I have a profit.
I have tried using traililng stops, however I find on a small time interval such as what I typically trade, the profit margin isn't big enough. Meaning that the trailing stop ends up giving back too much of the profit causing it to be very dificult to turn a profit over the long run..
with all that mumbling said, let me try to get this on the first topic I would like to discuss.
The type of strategy i am going to try and develop will be a 1 minute strategy trading ES. Always flat by end of day.
I believe that the entries I make are "good"... but what is a way to determine this. Since every trade has 2 parts, both an entry and an exit, how can you simply focus on an entry to determine if its a good entry?
The thougth I am thinking of employing is, to set a tight profit target and stop loss. So basically for every entry imediatly set a stop at 2 ATR and a PT at 2 ATR.
2 ATR is a very small window. So my thought is, if an entry is able to generate a profit over 1000 trades taking into account both slipage and commision, then that entry probably has at least a slight edge...
Would anyone disagree with this basic premise?
The way I look at it is, if I can find an edge for sure in the entry, then I can spend time working on improving the exit.
I know I rambled a lot.. hopefully something in here makes sense and we can get a good thread going about system development.
Thoughts?
Before going live again, I want to work on developing some new strategies. I am trying to get back to basics... I have not sat down and started from scratch developing a strategy in about 2 years... all of my strategies over the past 2 years were all based off of another strategy.. Now I am trying to start completely fresh.
Even my procedure for developing strategies, I want to revamp all of it.
I will be using a modified version of JSystemTrader for all of my backtesting needs.
I have always found it "easy" to find good entries. Well at least the entries seem fine. It is the exits that do me in.
To overcome this issue with exits, I have normally employed a stop and reverse exit.
With this, its not very dificult to find strategies that "work". However, the problem comes in the form of draw downs and massive losses. I do not have the stomach for this type of strategy.
The next typical type of exit is to use a simple stop loss. I have never had good results with this. Perhaps my entries are just not good enough... or something. However, I believe my issue is, although I'm setting a stop loss.... I still do not exit well when I have a profit.
I have tried using traililng stops, however I find on a small time interval such as what I typically trade, the profit margin isn't big enough. Meaning that the trailing stop ends up giving back too much of the profit causing it to be very dificult to turn a profit over the long run..
with all that mumbling said, let me try to get this on the first topic I would like to discuss.
The type of strategy i am going to try and develop will be a 1 minute strategy trading ES. Always flat by end of day.
I believe that the entries I make are "good"... but what is a way to determine this. Since every trade has 2 parts, both an entry and an exit, how can you simply focus on an entry to determine if its a good entry?
The thougth I am thinking of employing is, to set a tight profit target and stop loss. So basically for every entry imediatly set a stop at 2 ATR and a PT at 2 ATR.
2 ATR is a very small window. So my thought is, if an entry is able to generate a profit over 1000 trades taking into account both slipage and commision, then that entry probably has at least a slight edge...
Would anyone disagree with this basic premise?
The way I look at it is, if I can find an edge for sure in the entry, then I can spend time working on improving the exit.
I know I rambled a lot.. hopefully something in here makes sense and we can get a good thread going about system development.
Thoughts?
