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

kevinmr,

So the fact that IB had widespread problems today with their quotes freezing up was my fault? I am not blaming them for what happened, if you read my post I said in the end I MUST take responsibility for what happened...... I only stated that the REASON I had to take over manually had nothing to do with my bot or system, it was because of their widespread quote freezes today. In the several months I have been running the system, this issue has not presented itself.. there is nothing I can do in those situation except liquidate, which is what I failed to do today.
 
Quote from kevinmr:

WRONG! It is not the brokers fault. You will never become a good trader if you do not accept 100% responsibility for your P&L. Your system is so far from ready for primetime. I have never read a journal with so many excuses for failings.
Frosty, you are torturing me!
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Yeah, I know.

That's why it's being called a Soap Opera :p .

Just sit back and continue to enjoy the show, we all might learn something yet.

JJ
 
Quote from kevinmr:

WRONG! It is not the brokers fault. You will never become a good trader if you do not accept 100% responsibility for your P&L. Your system is so far from ready for primetime. I have never read a journal with so many excuses for failings.
Frosty, you are torturing me!
More...

hmm. part of being a good trader and system designer is being able to look at a good / bad trades and being able to understand what made them good or bad, in order to improve in the future. in this case, the fact that the data feed stopped working and the system was unable to exit the position normally is most likely the reason for the bad trade.

blindly accepting responsibility for bad trades is not advantageous if the responsibility doesn't actually lie with your system, you'll just waste time trying to debug an issue which doesn't exist on your system.

was it wrong for the system to 'assume' that IB would provide error free service which is what he pays for? maybe. I dont believe so, im not going to code conditions into my system to make sure IB doesn't sell 200 GOOG when I ask to buy 1 ES, because thats not what I expect from their service.

the blame for the initial problem lies with IB, now that we've accepted the most probable cause of the bad trade, the next step is to learn whatever lessons there are to learn from it, which for my system is to put checks in to make sure the data feed hasn't frozen.
 
walter,

I also need to put some checks into my system.... It took me way too long to even realize the quotes had frozen because I don't check on the bot that often....

Comming into this I KNOW that I will be remote 90% of the time the bot is trading, but i always have quick access to a computer when I need to do something remotely for it...

So, what I believe I will do is put in some code that if I have not received a new tick in 5 minutes, to send me a message on my cell phone alerting me.. at this point I can connect remotely and see if the quotes are down, if so, my protocol needs to be imediately click liquidate assuming that is at least functioning...
 
Quote from frostengine:

kevinmr,

So the fact that IB had widespread problems today with their quotes freezing up was my fault? I am not blaming them for what happened, if you read my post I said in the end I MUST take responsibility for what happened...... I only stated that the REASON I had to take over manually had nothing to do with my bot or system, it was because of their widespread quote freezes today. In the several months I have been running the system, this issue has not presented itself.. there is nothing I can do in those situation except liquidate, which is what I failed to do today.
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Accept my apology frosty. I do forget this is your first time up at the plate.
My advice still stands. Your system is far from ready for primetime and you should shut the system off and list the different issues you have come across in the past weeks and formulate a plan of attack to alleviate each one.
In the real world, not in this semi-real world we call ET, no one wants to hear excuses about why you lost money that is not directly related to your reasons for being in or out of a trade. No one cares about a quote-freeze issue.
Like myself, a number of ET'ers have already been down this path and believe it or not understand what you are going through. I would estimate 80-90% of the code in my ATS is related to exception handling, data integrity, feed outages, etc....
 
Quote from frostengine:

walter,

I also need to put some checks into my system.... It took me way too long to even realize the quotes had frozen because I don't check on the bot that often....

Comming into this I KNOW that I will be remote 90% of the time the bot is trading, but i always have quick access to a computer when I need to do something remotely for it...

So, what I believe I will do is put in some code that if I have not received a new tick in 5 minutes, to send me a message on my cell phone alerting me.. at this point I can connect remotely and see if the quotes are down, if so, my protocol needs to be imediately click liquidate assuming that is at least functioning...
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Frost - here is a crude implementation done for a different trading platform. It involves a piece of custom code and a purchased utility program:
http://users.adelphia.net/~rlscott1/Trade_Station/Update_Monitor/Help.htm
http://www.spartacom.com/products/winbeep_features.htm
This will at least give you some ideas for implementation on your own platform.
 
Quote from frostengine:

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.......
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1) The API passes status messages. Just use them in your trade decision code:

System Message Codes

Code
Description

1100
Connectivity between IB and TWS has been lost.

1101
Connectivity between IB and TWS has been lost - data lost.

1102
Connectivity between IB and TWS has been lost - data maintained.


2) Quotes always come back for me. Maybe you need a "Pop up Window Closer?"


My autotrader has been stable and in the market for a couple years now. It is possible...


Good trading to all. :cool:
 
Quote from Wayne Gibbous:

1) The API passes status messages. Just use them in your trade decision code:
..

My autotrader has been stable and in the market for a couple years now. It is possible...
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How long did it take you until you could give your system unsupervised?
 
Quote from walterjennings:

How long did it take you until you could give your system unsupervised?
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From day one. But note that I took very small positions during the initial trials.

BUT, I took MANY hits because of code and logic screwups. It took a while (6 months?), but the market managed to find all my f-ups! And why is it, that I never got lucky and MADE money from a messup? :(

Of course, there are probably a few more hidden problems...

Still, I have a bad problem with dinking around with the trades. I KNOW the system will do better than my pitiful trade-picking, but I can't help it.

Luckily, I haven't managed to mess things up too bad. It's a good thing I have to just start it up and go to work. If I was able to sit there all day and watch it, no telling how bad I'd screw it up! :p
 
Quote from Wayne Gibbous:

.. And why is it, that I never got lucky and MADE money from a messup? :(
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because they arnt referred to as mess ups if you make money, they become 'undocumented features'.
 
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