The usual question: how is it possible?

[tickzoom]

Quote from asiaprop:

Bring forward the hard facts instead of BSing around how its some "homework" to figure out what your ware does vs. others.

That's comical. You brought forth imaginary facts without evidence and then turn around and call the kettle black.

Anyway, about the stops:

TickZoom primarily is for advance users who already know this kind of stuff.

There's no way to understand the problem with stops unless you compare to doing it in Excel versus whatever platform yourself.

Simply put, money management trades of any kind, stops or limits, when done wrong always create additional trades that were never in the original sample of trades and usually they harm the results--often dramatically.

When compared with properly handled stops, they always perform better.

Travis confirmed his success excludes using stops.

Rather than complain and criticize. Why not do the homework and figure it out yourself? You'll understand and appreciate it more, right?

It doesn't take more than a few hours to get the "Eureka".

Wayne

 

[tickzoom]

Quote from asiaprop:

so do stops of ANY kind in pretty much every other testing platform worth looking into (Smartquant, Right Edge....) Your way of advertising your products is so creepy, unbelievable you have any customers at all, your comments raise pretty much every red flag there is.

I'll grant you that. I'm not an "advertiser" accustomed to all the marketing tricks out there.

I'm just a trader and software developer telling it like it is.

When I say things like "most of the popular platforms" it's because I have tried many but not all of them and wish to avoid naming them specifically.

The real key is to just try it out yourself as described in my last post and see if they work like they're supposed to.

It's pretty straightforward to dump the entries and exits into Excel (without stops) and then apply stops in the platform and do the same in Excel.

You'll see a very serious difference in the results.

Again, it's simply because the platform stops create additional traded never in the original sample which virtually always harms the results.

I'm done with this topic.

If people don't want to do their own homework, how will they ever succeed at trading?

You may laugh at my advertising and marketing abilities (I certainly do) but people keep signing up for tickzoom trials and generally they're the experienced type of traders who already know what I'm talking about and understand it.

Wayne

 

[tickzoom]

Quote from travis:

Also, regarding tickzoom, it sounds great, but as I said in another thread to Edbar who was telling me about the advantages of his software, there's only so many things I can try before being too tired and therefore becoming inefficient. After 12 years of working on this, I am so tired that I don't feel I will ever change broker or platforms (TWS, Excel and TradeStation is all I am using).

You're 100% correct. And people I know who are successful and even running hedge funds often use those exact same tools until they can afford either the time or money to look for a better, less manual solution.

It sounds like you're still doing a day job. In that case. I definitely recommend sticking to what you've got that works until you can either quit the day job and upgrade your skills or afford to hire someone else to do it.

That's how it goes in the progression to complete success.

Wayne

 

[tickzoom]

Quote from tickzoom:

That's why I dropped the whole open source silliness for the public. It took up too much of my time without any contribution.

FYI, it's still open source just not to the public. Only to trial members or, of course, paying members.

Wayne

 

[tickzoom]

Travis,

You sound like you seriously have figured out what it's all about. Things change as your account size grows.

Most never completely free themselves from "working" as traders even after quitting the day job.

It's because the market is always changing. Their account size changes which further changes the rules around trading.

Those "breather periods" that you're in right now are nice where you just watch the account growing.

Eventually for one reason or the other that will change and put you to work again for a while.

But it gets better over time as your confidence and skills grow. Just like anything one does in life.

Have fun. I'm signing off this thread. I didn't intend for it to get into a TickZoom discussion per se.

Sincerely,
Wayne

 

[TraderZones]

Quote from tickzoom:



Most never completely free themselves from "working" as traders even after quitting the day job.

I don't think people who work are always slaves or to be looked down at by traders.

1) Obviously, you are running a business that is different from trading for a living, so you are working for a living

2) Few traders make a longterm, lucrative living with good stats (Sharpe, Profit Factor, max DD). And for most people, a good paying job with benefits is worth far more than they will ever earn trading.

3) Some of the people working like their jobs. Some tolerate it. Some hate it.

4) Working or not working is a personal choice, and the attitude of "slave to your job" is uninformed. Far more people here on ET are slaves to the delusion that they wil be in the 5% or so who make modest to large sums trading. 100% of the people expect they will wind up in the top 1-5% category (like college BB/FB athletes). Go figure. They usually wind up losing years and tens of thousands of dollars before going to get an "enslaving" job.

5) I think the smartest are the position traders. You don't have to stare at a screen 6+ hours a day trying to scalp. giving up half the gains just in commissions/slippage/trading costs. They can work or not if they want, depending on their profitablilty.

I consider staring at a screen all day as the worst kind of slavery. I would be bored out of my skull staring at 5 monitors and trying to figure what 10+ instruments might do a few minutes from now. If you can do it on a minute chart, you can probably also figure out how to do it on an hourly or other chart - and trading costs are a much lower % at that level.

6) But seriously, few traders make a killing - the rest of the traders are slaving away trying to figure out how the few did it.

if you trade and are relatively happy fine. If you work and are relatively happy fine. If you do both and are relatively happy, fine. Everyone else is at least somewhat "enslaved."

 

[tickzoom]

Agreed TraderZones:

In one job, years ago, I did house calls for tech support. Most of the clients were retired and looking to setup their PC to communicate with grandkids.

None of them. Not a single one was happy about being retired and not working anymore.

It was depressing but interesting to meet people who were personally known to former presidents and nationally recognized (this was around Washington, D.C.). They mostly wealthy and capable of travel, members of the board for various corporations but generally unhappy about the situation.

Work is very satisfying if you enjoy it.

I personally have been in situations where work wasn't necessary several times in my life. In addition to family activities and volunteer work, I always gravitated back to working or creating software since I really enjoy that kind of work.

Outside of that I study languages. I'm fluent now in French and Spanish as well as my native English. Working on Chinese now.

Having flexibility is the biggest advantage of getting out of a job. I find I work more than 40 hours when not in a regular job. But it's nice to do it on my own schedule and easily fit in other activities during the day plus avoiding a commute if you can tele-commute or work from home.

Some people even have actual jobs like that.

Wayne

 

[travis]

Quote from tickzoom:

You're 100% correct. And people I know who are successful and even running hedge funds often use those exact same tools until they can afford either the time or money to look for a better, less manual solution.

It sounds like you're still doing a day job. In that case. I definitely recommend sticking to what you've got that works until you can either quit the day job and upgrade your skills or afford to hire someone else to do it.

That's how it goes in the progression to complete success.

Wayne

That is exactly the same answer I gave to Ed. In another thread, I told him I don't feel like trying new programs because I am working all day long on excel for my bank (With this excuse nobody else does anything - all work to be done on excel comes to me. I am a non-programmer here, but to them I am the "excel genius", because some of them can't even open emails), and when I will quit my job I may investigate on whether to try something better (but I doubt it, because I will be even better at using excel by then). But not if things are already working fine, and if I quit my job, it means they are, so maybe I won't look for other things. Especially if I remember what I said in this very thread - no point in working all your life to make money and improve systems. No way. I will stop working and especially stop sitting all day long in front of the computer screen.

Regarding your "signing off" this thread, it's a pity, and it happens because you didn't learn to use the "ignore list". Great feature. You see, it doesn't matter how well you reply to these evil people being sarcastic, aggressive, negative, or mistrusting in the best of hypotheses. The minute you reply to a degrading post or objection, you are going to get into a bad mood. Whether you reply kindly, aggressively... whether you win the argument... even if the guy apologized... it doesn't matter. The best thing is to not reply and to place the guy on your ignore list. Even more important - place the guy on your ignore list after reading the first half of his first sentence, or better yet if you spot a "smiley" in his post. It's like applying a stoploss. Instead, if you reply, it's like hanging on to a losing trade, hoping it will turn into a positive one.

 

[r4Nd.m]

Hello travis, i'm in the same boat. How is it possible? For me, the key was to understand exactly what i was doing & why it works. I'm not using stocks, but leveraged forex.

Right now i'm developing other strategies & moving profits from my main automated strategy (4 years of development) into other potential candidates, with a goal of smoothing out the equity curve.

Thanks for starting this thread, most of the stuff you read about is how profitable trading & not possible long term, it's good to see there are other exceptions to the rule.

 

[travis]

Leveraged forex, just like me. And I, too, am developing other strategies now (have 33 now, but 7 of them don't work). Smoothing the equity curve, exactly. That is what's been driving me crazy for the past year - the drawdown. For two straight months I double, and then suddenly the next month the systems want to lose everything or almost. Then I get irrational and try to get my money back and I'll lose everything with my discretionary trading (it happened twice already, in one year - I started many threads about it). Then, in the past 6 months, I was forced to understand the concept of "money management", which for me doesn't go very far - I can only understand the kelly criterion (I am bad at formulas).

I am glad you liked the thread. I need people like you and the others to tell me this is normal, otherwise I will be tempted to give everything back in order not to feel like a criminal, like I am doing something illegal, or like it's not going to last (and this will cause me to panic as soon as I see some drawdown)... similar destabilizing ideas that go through my mind, and that lead to self-sabotage.

But thanks to this forum I am always getting a sense of what others in my situation are thinking and experiencing and this keeps me balanced and on track. Other than here and on similar forums, all I hear is people who say:

1) "it's impossible - come on, if it worked, everyone would be doing it".
2) "it's immoral to make money without working".
3) "it's like gambling - you might as well play the lottery".

That's all I hear from normal people.