Fully Automated Stocks Trading

[murray t turtle]

Did a little retrospect recently on my automation. Flat this year but capital was preserved and still managed have no 2 negative months in a row. Couple of new strategies launched in March did well. Automation failure cost me around 5% early in the year. An adjustment for one strategy was done during peak DD, in next 2 days original version bounced back but new one didn't, another 8-9% down the drain. This is pretty normal stuff. No excuses just facts. No individual event like that could be fully avoided but if they happen one after another, as they occasionally do, it feels more significant than it is.

Watch out for those periods. That is when worst and irrational decisions tend to be made. Eg. rushed strategy changes, stop/start decisions, discretionary trading etc. Step out of it, analyze each event independently, see if you would have done it differently, learn from it, make changes only if needed and move on.

Right now everything is working as expected. Every now and then I do have time to do a deep dive to reflect on making things even better. Been way too busy with business and life for that recently. Perhaps this summer.

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Looks good , even 2022.
I was taking to a Realtors helper today. I wonder why the Realtors magazine went out of business in 2022, to few home + land listings [for sale], I asked her??.
Even though that county is low population; she said , by the time people got the magazine , properties had already sold Another RE/MAX Realtor told me/people preferred the internet, rather than the magazine+ he had so few properties for sale it was shocking.

 

[ValeryN]

%%
Looks good , even 2022.
I was taking to a Realtors helper today. I wonder why the Realtors magazine went out of business in 2022, to few home + land listings [for sale], I asked her??.
Even though that county is low population; she said , by the time people got the magazine , properties had already sold Another RE/MAX Realtor told me/people preferred the internet, rather than the magazine+ he had so few properties for sale it was shocking.

Thanks.

True to the magazines situation..

Are you in Canada yourself?

Real estate in Vancouver was pretty depressing for the buyer for over decade.., probably more like 3 decades. 5-10 offers competing was common, as well as rich asian folks showing up with cash offers without conditions. Right now it cooled to the point where you might be the only offer or one of 2. But prices didn't budge much. Properties seems to sell ~1-2% below ask vs +5-10% over ask normally. Perhaps sellers are in a denial mode and new interest rates didn't set it yet in their heads. 30y mortgages now have become 55 years, which is max here on existing loans. One more raise will trigger monthly payment increase not just interest eating it all up. Then there will be much more pressure to sell fast in a quarter. Time will show how bad it gets.

Old timers will probably laugh, but as a new buyer, being not seasoned with "high" interest rates, it does feel discomforting how much $ premium I am paying to maintain home loan. But tons of learnings come out of this, there is nothing like learning thru doing. Love the learnings part.

 

[murray t turtle]

Thanks.

True to the magazines situation..

Are you in Canada yourself?

Real estate in Vancouver was pretty depressing for the buyer for over decade.., probably more like 3 decades. 5-10 offers competing was common, as well as rich asian folks showing up with cash offers without conditions. Right now it cooled to the point where you might be the only offer or one of 2. But prices didn't budge much. Properties seems to sell ~1-2% below ask vs +5-10% over ask normally. Perhaps sellers are in a denial mode and new interest rates didn't set it yet in their heads. 30y mortgages now have become 55 years, which is max here on existing loans. One more raise will trigger monthly payment increase not just interest eating it all up. Then there will be much more pressure to sell fast in a quarter. Time will show how bad it gets.

Old timers will probably laugh, but as a new buyer, being not seasoned with "high" interest rates, it does feel discomforting how much $ premium I am paying to maintain home loan. But tons of learnings come out of this, there is nothing like learning thru doing. Love the learnings part.

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Canada?? I live South of Seattle;
way south, between Nashville TN + Atlanta Georgia. But like to try to figure out any RE market/love the learnings.
WOW ,55 year loan/ but that's much, much, much better than rent. That sounds like adjustable rate loan/ and that figures with sky hi prices.
I checked Vancouver RE prices this year/line chart. And multiyear Uptrend.
Except condo prices [as a group] did a bit of a roller coaster.
But I figure Vancouver market is like USA /people pay up + pay up on waterfront property+ mountain view property.
Based on MLS, contracts.....; good news + bad news for August Vancouver buyer[zolo ca= source]
Average[all maybe] sold price $1.3 million, wow. Price down -[10% down for quarter].
Peak average FEB,MARCH $1.5 million peak price,2022.
Don't know if that's US or Canada $$ ??

 

[stochastix]

Yep I've been doing pretty good with options. All that studying fractal math since 2007 paid off

 

[stochastix]

Correct we are two different people but I love learning just like ValeryN does. And you have to be willing to do, and take measured risks. I don't know why it took me so long to figure out this was my specialty that I'm good at

 

[felix_arb]

@ValeryN Are you reinvesting your account profits and always taking a similar percentage of risk relative to the account value?

 

[ValeryN]

@ValeryN Are you reinvesting your account profits and always taking a similar percentage of risk relative to the account value?

For a number of years I’d only add to that account, this year started withdrawals. Position sizes are constant as a % of account. They changed over the years mostly towards reducing individual position risk.

Generally, I’d say if withdrawals represent insignificant portion of account it seems like the right thing to do to me to make them. Thus realizing some benefits of trading today. Plus we don’t live forever after all.

 

[ValeryN]

Feels great when systems make money on days like that. No longs carried into the weekend in main account but had pretty large long exposure during the day. Yet pulled couple of % in profits overall.

 

[ValeryN]

Some random things that can impact PL either way:
-609.84$ on ANF due to a worse than expected fill after a gap. Made less to be precise.
+3,867.97$ extra on NERV because shares became available later in a day, by then price was much better than my entry point.

Not all random things are that good. Couple of days outage early the year cost me tens of thousands. More of a bad luck, those things can be either way. There was a hosting provider problem and auto-recovery didn't handle it well while I was on vacation. It's impossible to handle all possible failures in code. Knew that can happen but price of hiring a person to watch this plus other risks it introduces are not worth it ATM. So no changes.

Activity picked up, 258 trades on main account in August, few % up for a month.

Went "backwards" with hardware about ~month ago. Ditched DigitalOcean cloud hosting and picked up refurbished HP EliteDesk Mini for 150$. I've been in the cloud way too long, was curious to compare. Loving it so far. No random network issues, dedicated CPUs are much better, memory is very cheap. Not a call for everyone to go on premise by any means, but for a small project seems to make good sense. A buddy of mine is running 4 x Dell PowerEdge from home for his tech startup, very memory greedy, 100+ cores and around 1 TB of memory for ~6-8k USD plus pretty reasonable electricity bill. That seems like another weird case when it might worth, not too many developers involved yet.

What are you running your (automated?) trading setup on?
What are the things that mess up with your otherwise stable trading time to time?

Val

 

[HobbyTrading]

What are you running your (automated?) trading setup on?

I am using an (old) NUC5i3, running Ubuntu. It is supplied by an UPS to overcome power cuts of short duration (up to approximately 4 hours of capacity). The NUC has a very low power consumption, which helps to extend the period that it can be supplied from the battery in the UPS. Only if the power cut would be longer than the UPS capacity, and if I were on holiday, then the computer would switch off and not able to restart itself. Which, in my case, is a very rare possibility.
I run IB Gateway and my client Java software on this NUC: I start it on Sunday evening and let it run until the next weekend. During the weekend I let Ubuntu do its software updates etc, and then restart Gateway. I use Dropbox to copy files to my desktop computer and my iPad, which makes it possible for me to review log files anywhere around the world.