Traders' Roundtable

For me personally, I only began to be 'successful' (based on my criteria - I'm not comparing myself to any of the traders you mentioned) when I treated the proprietary trading income more as a 'bonus', and put alternative revenue streams in place to pay the bills. I suppose this is the natural exten...

Going briefly back to Elliott Wave/Fibonacci for a moment, I just wrote a brief review of 'Elliott Wave Principle' by Frost and Prechter - it's available at: http://www.pmkingtrading.com/id67.html For anyone remotely interested in this technical analysis technique I believe it is the most definitive...

There are a couple of things one can look out for in instances like this (I get the phishing PayPal emails every day and they are getting more sophisticated/legitimate looking). 1 Legitimate emails usually contain some identifying information that only the real sender would know - e.g. Dear Paul Kin...

I have some experience in historical data and symbology from my previous career as a business analyst (my last 'real' job before I started my own company was at an ECN) In my opinion 'accurate historical tick data' is an oxymoron (at any price). Sorry to disappoint you. People in this forum may have...

Dean, I am in year 4 of my full-time trading journey and I started with the intention of being 100% mechanical. As each year has gone by I have introduced some discretionary components into my trading in cases where it is impossible to 'program the rules' I am using. My favorite analogy is a chess c...

When you buy an ETF, say the Merrill Lynch Semiconductor HOLDR (SMH), what you are actualy buying is a number of shares of each component of SMH in the proportions determined by a algorithm specified when the ETF was created. The obvious advantages of buying SMH instead of each component individuall...

Using ETFs will mitigate this problem somewhat, but they do still change composition from time-time due to corporate actions (mergers, acquisitions, breakups, spin-offs etc.) and companies going bankrupt. If you look at www.holdrs.com for example, each one has a list of all historical changes so you...

I looked into this a while ago when I was thinking of developing a system based on additions and deletions to the S&P 500. You can get S&P500 index changes (not all the components - but you can work it out from the deltas) back to 2000 for free at: http://www2.standardandpoors.com/servlet/Sa...

p.s. if you email me I will send you a copy of an article I wrote called 'The Main Caveats of Backtesting' which goes into more detail (but BEWARE, by revealing your email address to me you are leaving the door wide open for possible occasional trading-related emails from PMKing Trading containing s...

Budonk, You make an excellent point, and I believe that backtesting is useful in general, but does have some drawbacks that should be taken into consideration when estimating 'real' trading performance. These include (and are not specifically applicable to TradingBlox - I have not used this software...

If you read Fortune's Formula by William Poundstone, you would say it is in the realm of 'Information Theory' (which is a great book by the way - on my recommended trading top list), but I believe for practical purposes it is more related to probability theory than anything else, since you are tryin...

Edward, Because ModeX can be applied to any liquid futures contract (that has 1 minute bars) has user-defined account size and percentage risks per trade it is difficult for me to estimate the commission and slippage for the contracts and size you would want to trade. I suggest you download and inst...

I will email to discuss.

Paul

Tom, Please take a look at www.pmkingtrading.com. I have a intra-day futures trading system called ModeX in the Strategies section. This system is a TradeStation system (but could be adapted to other platforms) and can be applied to any futures contract that has 1 minute bars, so you can tailor whic...

Here are a few techniques I found useful: 1) Don't display currency symbols in any trade-monitoring documentation/system/method/code - just use 'unemotional' numbers. This helps to stop you thinking about the dollars, pounds, whatever you are making (or losing). Try to think of your trading as a gam...

I happen to believe that people actually get more out of advice/books/publications that they pay something for, and are more likely to value the content accordingly. The article is $4.95 which is less than the cost of commission on one (discount brokerage) trade. There is a some free content on my s...

Yoyo, Monte Carlo simulation. historical backtesting, and trading are not the same thing. Historical backtesting is a representation of trading results that may have ocurred given a specific set of entry, exit, and position sizing rules, when applied to historical price data (which may have errors, ...

It depends on your objectives what 'better' actually means. System A has better Net Profit, System B has better Gross Profit. System A has bigger maximum drawdown. You need to choose which variables are most important to you in order to determine what is better in your terms. Looking at your system ...

If you are using time and sales or tick data to perform historical backtesting, you have to seriously consider whether using 'corrected' data is really representative of the actual market you are testing on. Using data that has been corrected, if the correction was actually really only available at ...

If you are using time and sales or tick data to perform historical backtesting, you have to seriously consider whether using 'corrected' data is really representative of the actual market you are testing on. Using data that has been corrected, if the correction was actually really only available at ...