The usual question: how is it possible?

When you've made a $million and a half after tax and it's in the bank and your account is replenished with another like amount and you're making $100k/month on average I'd say you'd cracked it.THEN I permit you to feel guilty maybe once in a long while.

You beat my edit but I was just going to add that this thread does smell a little of h.....y.
 
Quote from lynx:

This thread is getting really weird.

No stops, doubling up on losses, hate smileys, "going to amsterdam", etc.

Who hates smileys?

Sounds like you're all a bunch of freakin' hippies. But wait, you hate smileys so that can't be it. I have to admit that I'm totally stumped here.

I'm pretty much putting all of you on ignore.

This is for you, travis: :D :D :D
More...

LOL!

At least we aren't flaming each other (yet)
 
is this right...? I know for a fact what you said is incorrect. And you know it. You can deny this as much as you want. Users who check our your other posts will also notice that truth is not exactly your virtue.


Quote from tickzoom:

Nobody, whatsoever contributed to any of the open source prior to going private. It was originally built entirely by myself. Later, it was opened to the public for a few months and the only contribution were users who tried it out and reported installation issues (fixed) or other suggestions for enhancements (some added others still on the list) or defects (fixed).

Interestingly, at least a dozen people contacted me all excited about the quality of the code and wanting to contribute, but they never did. Not a single one. Most of them signed and faxed an agreement guaranteeing it would always be open source to them if they did contribute something. But nobody did. That's why I dropped the whole open source silliness for the public. It took up too much of my time without any contribution.

Now, in contrast, the paying members have contributed significant code.

Go figure. It's kind of funny how several people bash TickZoom for "imaginary" contributors who got stiffed. Hilarious!

Let them complain for themselves. Why spend your time complain for non-existent people?

I mean this with all respect. You must just be misinformed.

Wayne
More...
 
buddy, there is NOTHING whatsoever magical about stops. They are just one out of many elements when backtesting ideas and trading live. I dont know what kind of show you try to put on but a stop is nothing else than a rule to exit a trade in the same way than an entry is nothing else than a rule that gets the system into a trade. Nothing magical about at all. Stop making your product sound esoteric.

The entry rules and exit rules give 100% the same results when coded into my backtest platform than what I get when I simulate the very same strategy in Excel. So, not sure what you are trying to say.


Quote from tickzoom:

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
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your sales "techniques" are very obvious. Every time someone criticizes your comments you in turn sandwich the critique with 3-4 long posts to make sure other users have a hard time to find anything but your posts, happened many times...

Quote from tickzoom:

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
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Folks,

I used ignore this time.

However, I still went and checked the subversion logs to verify my memory served me correctly in case somebody has a valid claim.

And, it turns out that one person did make a one line code change as a contribution. Here's the log:

Revision: 27
Author: danyBoyCh
Date: 8:52:38 AM, Thursday, January 29, 2009
Message:
Change the storageFolder member access form private to public.
----
Modified : /trunk/TickZoom/TickZoomTickUtil/TickUtil/TickReader.cs

That's the only contribution from when TickZoom went public on January 26, 2009 until March 23, 2009 when a paying member began contributing.

Then on May 08, 2009 another paying member began contributing.

Those are the only 3 contributors to code until this moment.

Enough said.

DanyBoyCH has still rights based on his Contributor contract if he wants them but he hasn't been heard from since that change.

The rest of the users prefer not to commit changes but just post a ticket with a defect the found and fixed.

Sincerely,
Wayne
 
About martingale. Someone mentioned in relation to adding to losers.

We're not discussing martingale.

Martingale by definition has you adding to losers without limit in order to win 100% of the time. That runs the risk of a losing streak long enough to wipe out your capital.

However, adding to losers with a limit is quite different. It means you never run the risk of going broke.

To make it work you have to at least do the following using the law of averages.

1. Decide at what price level to enter a trade.

2. Decide at what price to start adding to a loser.

3. Decide at what frequency to add by time or by price level--price is better.

4. Decide at what level you will take a loss (to avoid the martingale downside).

5. Add on filters to avoid entering or doubling during outlier events.

6. A really efficient trick is to "throttle" how fast you add to losers based on the velocity of price change.

7. If you're smart you will make many of these strategies that capitalize on different market conditions (trend, conter trend, chop, channel) that are non-corrolating and then trade them all at the same time to get a smoother equity curve.

Number 7 works because the nature of the market and idea answers to 1 - 6 vary during different market conditions.

That is FAR from being a simple martingale or even a modified martingale.

And it sounds similar to what travis is doing but he may not have gone all the way yet.

It's not easy to do all of this in discretionary trading. And it's even harder to code up rules for this in most platforms. I originally built TickZOOM for myself to handle this type of trading very simply. Since that's how I trade, that's why I enjoy this thread so much.

Plus I got all the ideas about this strategy over time from tips on elitetrader so it's nice to give back.

There's always nay-sayers or people who can't figure out how to do it correctly and say it never works. That's sad but a reality.

NOTE: Just like travis, I don't make enough to retire to the Caribbean yet from this strategy mainly due to the fact you have to use limited amount of your account balance so you have enough to add to losers and my account balance was small to begin with. Plus I decide not to go the route of using OPM (other peoples money).

One area of interesting research is how to handle winners. I'm finding that gradually rather than abruptly closing a position seems to work better but not using it live trading yet.

Sincerely,
Wayne
 
Naysayers that respectfully explain their objections are fine.

Superficial people, who just criticize without explaining why, without suggesting a better solution, and often without even fully reading what they are criticizing, go straight into my ignore list. They are easily spotted by their short posts (usually one or two sentences), and by their use of smileys.
 
One more clarification.

We all "use" stops in trading--at least an emergency stop.

However, it's a mistake to use stops in historical testing unless your platform handles them properly.

If your platform results with stops match how you do it in Excel, then you're probably fine. But I know for a fact that the EasyLanguage based systems like TS and MC handle stops less than ideally so be careful if you really understand the issue. The others non-EasyLanguage that I tried also handle them traditionally. So keep your head and open your mind to doing the homework carefully.

Start with the raw trades without stops applied. Dump to Excel, calculate the profit, then apply a loss limit and recalculate.

Then apply the same stop loss to your strategy in the platform, rerun and look at the results. If they match excel, you're probably fine.

Sincerely,
Wayne
 
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