Fully automated futures trading

For what it is worth, IB reported my January 2022 "time weighted rate of return" to be 5.4%. At the end of the month did I have 26 open positions. I am monitoring 56 instruments, but usually have about 25~30 open positions at any one time. I don't use any dynamic optimization or risk overlay functionality.
I don't have a detailed analysis of which instrument or asset class contributed how much to the monthly return.
 
Not related to carry, but to volumes again (if that's ok?): "NYMEX Aluminum Index" (ALI) has a very weird volume distribution, some days in the month reach 2,000 contracts while other have zero trades (e.g. Jan 27,28 in Mar 2022 contract), open interest seems pretty constant though..
Does anyone know what's the deal with this instrument, is it ok to trade something like this? (especially worrisome if my automatic trades fall on one of these zero-volume days)
 
Kernfusion said:
Not related to carry, but to volumes again (if that's ok?): "NYMEX Aluminum Index" (ALI) has a very weird volume distribution, some days in the month reach 2,000 contracts while other have zero trades, open interest seems pretty constant though..
Does anyone know what's the deal with this instrument, is it ok to trade something like this? (especially worrisome if my automatic trades fall on one of these zero-volume days)
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Not sure, but if you're trading automatically you shouldn't be submitting orders if, for example, the spread is too wide or has insufficient depth.

Rob
 
globalarbtrader said:
Not sure, but if you're trading automatically you shouldn't be submitting orders if, for example, the spread is too wide or has insufficient depth.

Rob
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oh, right, Bid-Ask spread is another check that I'm actually doing (the system will not trade if the spread is above some value I manually define for each instrument).
And by depth I guess you mean that the number of contracts on the top of the book (opposite side) should be equal to or above what I want to buy or sell - that I'm actually not checking at the moment.. Although I almost never trade more than 2-3 contracts at a time, mostly just 1..
 
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Hi GAT,
I know you’ve got a home garden office. I was wondering how you get the internet in your home garden office? Did you lay an ethernet cable, use a booster or extender or something else? I am considering a garden office too.
Thanks!
 
AvantGarde said:
Hi GAT,
I know you’ve got a home garden office. I was wondering how you get the internet in your home garden office? Did you lay an ethernet cable, use a booster or extender or something else? I am considering a garden office too.
Thanks!
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Discussed here
https://qoppac.blogspot.com/2019/09/building-garden-trading-office.html

It's about 180 feet from my router to the office, so an extender wouldn't have cut it. So I laid an ethernet cable and also a phone line (probably some way of multiplexing them, but beyond me!).

GAT
 
Those of you who run IB Gateway 24/7 with sunday login, have you ever encountered any problems? Is it running reliable, or do you have to close/restart manually sometimes?
 
blink18 said:
Those of you who run IB Gateway 24/7 with sunday login, have you ever encountered any problems? Is it running reliable, or do you have to close/restart manually sometimes?
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I don't recall ever having to manually interfere during the last 4~5 years. The only times I had to restart it was when a power cut rebooted the computer.
 
blink18 said:
Those of you who run IB Gateway 24/7 with sunday login, have you ever encountered any problems? Is it running reliable, or do you have to close/restart manually sometimes?
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To me, it happens that every 2-3 nights it gets stuck with some errors when trying to re-login automatically (it spits out some ununderstandable message only some genius programmer could come up with).

After so many years still a buggy piece of code.

Let alone that, IMHO, there should not be any necessity to restart an application every night, if written with a minimum of professionality. This is just very poor design, IMHO, and probably use of some lousy libraries.
 
fullautotrading said:
To me, it happens that every 2-3 nights it gets stuck with some errors when trying to re-login automatically (it spits out some ununderstandable message only some genius programmer could come up with).

After so many years still a buggy piece of code.

Let alone that, IMHO, there should not be any necessity to restart an application every night, if written with a minimum of professionality. This is just very poor design, IMHO, and probably use of some lousy libraries.
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I agree with you but I'm surprised to hear this. Like others, I've not had this experience. If anything over the last 8 years plus of using the product it's actually got a bit more stable over time.

GAT
 
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