Traders' Roundtable

I've been using Wealth-Lab for the last few years and love it as it is a very quick and easy way to test ideas/concepts.

However I've started to develop my own C++ platform based on ta-lib for more rigourous and extensive testing as well as more sophisticated ideas such as genetic algorithms and ...

Try wealth-lab at www.wealth-lab.com

You can run fairly complex rules and screen a wide variety of global stocks and run historical tests to check the robustness/profitability of your system. Also available are other trading rules developed and published by other users. And all for FREE!

If you ...

Maybe a FAQ would be a good idea?

Peter

Ted,

Thanks for your thoughts. It turns out that that particular market set is the minimium set possible while keeping the performance parameters within my required limits. Gives me a reference point as I add more markets.

Thanks

Peter

Kiwi,

The "secret" is in your observation. Think of retracements as mini-trends rather than a step backwards from the main trend, just a matter of scale really.

Peter

Hi,

I've been working on trading systems that primarily trade market indexes. Since I am using a spreadbetting account I am able to speculate on a far wider set of market indices other than S&P 500, FTSE 100 and the like. The three systems I've developed trade on average once a week per market ...

Funny thing I was about to post an identical question.

I'm working on a system that is highly profitable on Nikkei 225, Hang Seng Index and FTSE 250. Using excel the correlation between the markets on a daily, weekly and monthly scale are between 0.33 and -0.33 for Nikkei/Hang Seng and Nikkei ...

It went pretty well. Keeping your words in mind I hit the execute button far more decisively than before. Of the 10, 6 of them I got at my stop level, 3 of them had upto 5 points slippage and 1 gapped my stop so far that it was not to traded.

Having thought about my preperation, I've reorganised ...

I think the gods have it in for me! Just finished calculating all the orders for tomorrow and guess what?! 10 of them are going to have to be market orders. So I'll keep all your advices in mind, take a deep breath and follow the rules.

Thanks Ted, Chuck, Damian, for your responses. I recognize the value of what you are saying. When I first started trading I might as well have gone down the street and handed out wads of cash. It's now over a year and things are different. I've stopped bleeding cash, I plan my trades and I sleep ...

Ted,

Possibly, likely.

Unfortunately the broker I use is the only broker that quotes for the instruments I trade. I use a spreadbetting service in the UK which is technically a betting service and therefore the broker in legal terms is a bookmaker. They are a good proxy to real futures trading but ...

I'm trading a mechanical system of my own design and it relies purely on stop and limit orders to open and close positions. However, a couple of days ago one of my stop orders was declined by my broker as it was too close to the closing price and market sentiment was such that it was likely to gap ...

An article in the FT Weekend, where a researcher tested the ability of respondents to predict future price movements based on a given price series.

http://search.ft.com/search/article.html?id=031011001313

Interesting but I don't think the conclusions can really be applied to mechanical traders ...

Gordon,

An alternative to phpbb is yabbforum [ www.yabbforum.com ]. If portability is important then you may want to use yabbforum over phpbb. PHPBB uses a MySQL database for managing the discussions which means porting it to another machine involves setting up two seperate applications and ...

Some breaking news.

Wealth-Lab Developer 3.0 integrates a trading interface with IB.

You can now leave your system on auto-pilot!

Peter

Wow, thanks for the explanation.

I increased the iterations from 10,000 to 500,000 and the bias narrowed to insignificance.

Live and learn.

However, is there a condition where a statistically significant bias could exist asides from errors and deficiencies in the testing?

Peter

Hi All,

As a part of testing my systems, I ran a system that traded randomly, buying/selling at market open and closing at the end of the day. The markets are stock index futures.

I noticed a consistent bias. Percentage win was 2.5% above loss and the bias was greater for long trades.

I don't ...

Hi All,

Just chanced upon this website:

http://grc.dukascopy.org/

Haven't had the time to really look in to it but it from what I can gather, it is an experiment to trade a synthetic market based on a combination of random, pseudo random and real market prices. The purpose in a nutshell, to see ...

Try Wealth-Lab Developer: www.wealth-lab.com

It has everything you ask for except 2D arrays.

You can download and try for 30 days. The scripting language they use is based on Pascal and is pretty straight forward to learn, especially if you have prior programming experience.

Version 3.0 is due ...

In Ralph Vince's book Portfolio Management Formulas he demonstrated an example where trading two systems, one with a positive expectancy and the other with a negative expectancy, resulted in significantly improved performance by all measures. Counterintuitive but in this example it was due to ...