Got my fingers burnt!

themickey

themickey

I've written my own autotrading system which shows positive expectancy on testing and I am relatively new at trading it.
A couple of days ago I had it supposedly sitting on standby so as not to take any trades and during the day while at work the system placed a long trade at the very top of the day.
As I was leaving work I received a phone call so instead of driving, sat and chatted for 30 minutes making me even later getting home.
When I walked in the door I was down $1500.
Man was I shitted to put it mildly.
There was a small glitch in my formula which I hadn't spotted in spite of all my backtesting.

Conclussion: Several, but one which seems to come back at me often is that errors in trading are a large reason for many of our losses.
Funny how errors often cause a loss and not a win.

Anyhow, the loss really shook me up, I tried revenge trading during the night, all night in an attempt to regain my loss.
Result;another smaller loss and totally buggered at work the next day.
Went to bed at 6:30PM last night to recoup my energy.

Just thought to share, I hope to learn from this and remain positive.
Ps: Don't tell me about revenge trading, I know I was an idiot but no pain, no gain (in the lesson department of the brain)
 
Quote from Random.Capital:

Error in design, or error in implementation?
More...

The system design is great imo.
I have a piece of the formula which is an emergency kill switch 'go flat'
It takes me out of a trade but what I wasn't aware of it it had a hole in the formula which allowed a trade in.
Took a minute to find and a minute to recode and fix, but 'oh the pain'. :)

I had the formula running during the day with kill switch on, alas.... :(
 
Quote from themickey:

A couple of days ago I had it supposedly sitting on standby so as not to take any trades and during the day while at work the system placed a long trade at the very top of the day.
More...

welcome to software. this might help
http://www.murphys-laws.com/

dont ass-u-me. turn off anything you dont need
 
Quote from themickey:

I've written my own autotrading system which shows positive expectancy on testing and I am relatively new at trading it.
A couple of days ago I had it supposedly sitting on standby so as not to take any trades and during the day while at work the system placed a long trade at the very top of the day.
As I was leaving work I received a phone call so instead of driving, sat and chatted for 30 minutes making me even later getting home.
When I walked in the door I was down $1500.
Man was I shitted to put it mildly.
There was a small glitch in my formula which I hadn't spotted in spite of all my backtesting.

Conclussion: Several, but one which seems to come back at me often is that errors in trading are a large reason for many of our losses.
Funny how errors often cause a loss and not a win.

Anyhow, the loss really shook me up, I tried revenge trading during the night, all night in an attempt to regain my loss.
Result;another smaller loss and totally buggered at work the next day.
Went to bed at 6:30PM last night to recoup my energy.

Just thought to share, I hope to learn from this and remain positive.
Ps: Don't tell me about revenge trading, I know I was an idiot but no pain, no gain (in the lesson department of the brain)
More...
cheap education
 
Quote from Random.Capital:

Error in design, or error in implementation?
More...
Neither....just lack of robust testing.
Also, having a "go flat" kill switch is not enough.
The switch has got to also cancel all open orders, and stop all future new entries.
 
I'm not a system trader but it would seem simple enough to rig up an email connection to alert you of trades unless you are doing hundreds a day.
 
You don't mention a "forward test" ... if you are not doing these, add them to your process before you trade "live" ... and run them for long enough to ensure you can build a decent picture of how the strat behaves against real data ...

Quote from themickey:
I've written my own autotrading system which shows positive expectancy on testing and I am relatively new at trading it.
A couple of days ago I had it supposedly sitting on standby so as not to take any trades and during the day while at work the system placed a long trade at the very top of the day.
As I was leaving work I received a phone call so instead of driving, sat and chatted for 30 minutes making me even later getting home.
When I walked in the door I was down $1500.
Man was I shitted to put it mildly.
There was a small glitch in my formula which I hadn't spotted in spite of all my backtesting.

Conclussion: Several, but one which seems to come back at me often is that errors in trading are a large reason for many of our losses.
Funny how errors often cause a loss and not a win.

Anyhow, the loss really shook me up, I tried revenge trading during the night, all night in an attempt to regain my loss.
Result;another smaller loss and totally buggered at work the next day.
Went to bed at 6:30PM last night to recoup my energy.

Just thought to share, I hope to learn from this and remain positive.
Ps: Don't tell me about revenge trading, I know I was an idiot but no pain, no gain (in the lesson department of the brain)
More...
 
Quote from syswizard:

Neither....just lack of robust testing.
Also, having a "go flat" kill switch is not enough.
The switch has got to also cancel all open orders, and stop all future new entries.
More...

+1.

So true, and even my implementation of this is half-assed. I rely on my broker's risk management functions too much. This thread should inspire me to really clean up some of these issues.

(One frustration I have as an individual trader is that I have to watch the trading and then go program when I have the energy to do it. To test new features (even safety features) is a chore. To keep a separate instance of my trading platform with all the same features, I have to shell out yet another platform fee + another round of subscriptions. So features get rolled out much more slowly than I'd care for, although I may just need to bite the bullet and pay out the fees. And most brokers just don't have decent off-hours testing facilities.)
 
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