Frosty's auto-trading bot goes live with REAL money

The day has ended, bot totaled +$541...... This puts my total after I forget, i think 23 trading days at +$165.. so I am now back in the green at least.

I know I am going to be angry when I backtest and see what I should have made.... just estimating I think the real total should have been around +$900... I will post back after the market closes and I run those tests to know for sure.
 
Quote from frostengine:

johnnyman,

Good point... I do feel like that sometimes.... I sucked as a discretionary trader, and my bot seems to be a lot better trader than I ever was, so why try and give it directions.... just let the bot do it's thing.

With that said, the bot should liquidate soon, and i'll have today's total.. and then in 30 min i'll backtest the day adn see what I SHOULD have made....
More...

Good idea. I have to learn (even now) that the bad comes with the good. For example the bot position was $2000 in his favour and now it's about $1600 - in my heart I say "why didn't you punch out at $2000!!" but my mind knows that picking tops and bottoms is almost impossible. So I have to be content.

I am a fairly good discretionary trader, but I was a NYSE guy. The bot trades other things like equities (although I still consider it in infancy as far as capital goes) on the NASDAQ. With NYSE going hybrid it's a different game and I'm having to adjust. We all have to adapt, and the best way is to take your failings (emotion, speed, second guessing) and eliminate them via the bot. If your backtesting is accurate have faith. Good luck for the rest of the week man!!
 
Quote from frostengine:

johnnyman,

Good point... I do feel like that sometimes.... I sucked as a discretionary trader, and my bot seems to be a lot better trader than I ever was, so why try and give it directions.... just let the bot do it's thing.

With that said, the bot should liquidate soon, and i'll have today's total.. and then in 30 min i'll backtest the day adn see what I SHOULD have made....
More...

I find that both my bot and I trade similarly. The problem I have is exit strategies. I know how to limit losses and pick excellent spots, but letting profits run has been my problem for well over 2 years.

The automation angle lets me get an average performance number and sleep better, but I think there is some sort of odd psychological hurdle I have to overcome. For example, I had 2000 shares of AMD the day it went up 12%, but I only managed to get a portion of that because I exited too soon. Believe me, I feel dumb about that. My bot would've gotten knocked out too.

I feel like if I can knock off this one problem, my life will be set as far as having a base income. Given that my objectives are simply to be free of the burdens of employment, anything over top of $50,000 of self-employed pre-tax income is just icing on the cake.

That being said, if you care to fork the thread and discussion automated exit strategies, I would love it. ;-)
 
Backtest showed a profit of only $644 today... so therefore I only cut out about $100 in profit from the results... so not as bad as i feared.... ;) GREAT day either way.....
 
Hey Frost,

I'm not sure if you are aware of this but if you are using IB's API to get their data feed then you are not getting every tick that trades. IB uses some kind of aggregate snapshot method to deliver their data.

So if you program has specific threshold numbers to execute trades then there is the potential for it to trigger late or not at all.

Just something to consider when comparing real trading results vs. backtesting.

Good luck!
 
Quote from trada101:

Hey Frost,

I'm not sure if you are aware of this but if you are using IB's API to get their data feed then you are not getting every tick that trades. IB uses some kind of aggregate snapshot method to deliver their data.

So if you program has specific threshold numbers to execute trades then there is the potential for it to trigger late or not at all.

Just something to consider when comparing real trading results vs. backtesting.

Good luck!
More...

iv heard of this is an issue with IB. iv also heard that signals that try to send every trade will have issues in high volitility and start lagging the market (esignal). do you have any suggestions to deal with this problem.
 
uh oh... Ib's data feed went nuts today..... it appears my quotes must have frozen up a while back.. so the bot has no way of making any decisions... looks like the only way to get the quotes back is to restart TWS....... I am turning the bot off for the dya, they gotta get these issues resolved.....

I am currently in a short in ER2 that the bot lost control of do the data outage... so I am now trying ot decide do I just liquidate and take the $200 loss it has... or do I hodl it out and try to trade the method manually until I see the exit and then shut down for the day....
 
Quote from walterjennings:

iv heard of this is an issue with IB. iv also heard that signals that try to send every trade will have issues in high volitility and start lagging the market (esignal). do you have any suggestions to deal with this problem.
More...
When markets go into "fast" mode, I've seen most of the data feeds either lag badly or crash. This includes ESignal, Quote.com, and Tradestation. I'm not positive, but I believe most of these data services rely upon Comstock, a wholesale datafeed vendor.
If you are serious, then you need reliability of a direct exchange feed thru Trading Technologies or some other premium vendor. It'll cost you though !
 
frost. does your system have checks to see if the data its analyzing is valid? ie. at least 1 tick every 30 or 60 seconds over its memory. unfortunately I forgot to add these checks to my system and unable to update my live version until the new revision is completely tested. I just hope that IB's feed does'nt cut on and off in such a way that it will confuse the bot into taking bad positions.
 
No it has no checks for that...

I am ready to break something at this point.. I am so pissed off at my self its not even funny.. By the time I realized the quotes were frozen I was down only 200.... and I could have closed the posiotn, but instead I decided to why not just hold it.. well now i'm down $700 and still havent closed the position because I am in disbelief.. this is why I DONT TRADE manually..... Can't believe I let this happen, wiped out my good days I had, and this isn't even the bot's fault
 
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