Quote from Walther:
Believe me , there is nothing mysterious in systems building anymore IMO, so you are not likely sitting on something you should not ever reveal. remember other party brings experience and capital needed and you definitely need someone with more confidence and more capital then you are possessing right now. They are probably familiar with something similar to your system anyway.
My guess is that your capital is very close to a maximum drawdown, which , understandably , brings indecisiveness to the play.
Good luck and do not give up !
Walter
I agree with all you said above. Yes, I'm near max DD. That is from my discretionary trading which was disastrous over the last three years.
Pscyhological factors that I can think of that are influencing me:
1) The idea for both systems is so simple that many people must use the same ideas, so I fear they will stop working at any time, just like many breakout systems and moving average systems stopped working.
2) My stock universe does not include symbols that no longer trade, so my testing includes survivorship bias. However, the last year seems to support the conclusion that they work.
3) I've become hypersensitive to losses (wish I had had this problem several years ago!).
4) The systems both sustain significant individual trade DDs at times and no stop system that I've looked at seems to fix this. Stops just shift the win/loss ratio around and generally degrade returns.
5) Even though they are mechanical they still take a lot of time and I still have my day job, so it is hard to devote enough time to do things right.
I have a bad habit of taking the gains from the systems and pissing them away on ES trading attempts.
Boredom is another problem. System trading can be drudge work.
I'm sure I'm just scratching the surface on the psych issues.
I do feel that if I had a means of automating all the steps and keeping my hands off, I'd do much better.
m