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cunparis

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Posts posted by cunparis

  1. Posted

    Once again (you didn't reply to that): have you performed all the required tests before and after your trading activity? Were all the calculations made in a statistically reliable way?

     

    P.S. FYI, I'm a 10-year pure mechanical trader, and I'm profitable. And I'm not a genius. So, what's the catch?

     

    I thought I answered it, indirectly.. in that I gave up the automation and learned to trade manually. So I stopped doing analysis. To me it made sense to learn how to trade manually before learning how to automate. Before I was shooting in the dark and curve fitting and then hoping it'd work real time. it didn't.

     

    I don't have the time or desire to have a lengthy debate about anything I said as I simply don't care enough and I'm too busy. I've settled into my routine, I come home from work, make my levels, set my audio alerts, and configure my automated strategies and I go have dinner and spend time with the family. When the audio alert goes off I come to my PC and look to time an entry for my trade. I'm hoping to automate this last step so that I can avoid missing trades (not hearing audio alert) and avoid waiting for the timing trigger at my PC. I take 0-2 trades per session, and I'm done. This works for me. In Oct - Dec of 2012 I averaged 1 pt per day traded (for 1 lot), but I didn't take trades every day. That was better than I did trading full time. In January I traded full time and was breakeven. so now I'm back to what I did in 2012 and will be happy with that.

     

    Lots of people claim to be profitable, and I'm not saying you're not. I just quit listening to all that. I quit forums totally actually, but once in a while I get an email about an update in a thread from a long time ago.. :)

     

    I don't expect anyone to believe me, but I sleep better knowing I've recommended people trade on simulator until profitable 6 months (consecutive). I never said that one would be profitable trading real money after that 6 months, but it will at least prevent people from blindly throwing their money away.

     

    If anyone wants to read more about my story, you can read a lot including real trades and real performance results that showed the ups & downs of my trading over the past several years, on my blog.

     

    I wish everyone the best of luck in whatever they do and good trading. Cheers. :2c:

  2. Posted

    That's a too pessimistic point of view, IMHO. I think that a better question would be: have you realized WHY your strategy didn't work? You just generically mentioned market changes, volatility and so on. Did you quantify the overall and range-specific reactions of your algorithm to market windows and regimes? Did you take note (with your metrics at hand) of every single interaction between the market and the results you've got?

    Very often automation is abandoned only because of lack of a proper analysis.

     

    I think it's a very realistic view, and the very few profitable traders I have known have agreed with it.

     

    I've learned to trade profitably (not insanely so, but positive) manually using my brain. Modeling everything I do into an automated strategy would be way too complex. There are so many inputs and factors and they're constantly changing. And if it could be done, then one could slowly work up to 1000 contracts and make millions. Wouldn't every fund in the world be working on such a thing?

     

    But I don't want to argue this point because people coming into trading are chasing their dream and they don't want to believe it's not possible. So when someone tells them the odds of succeeding are 1 in 10,000 they either believe that's not true or they believe they'll be the one who will make it.

     

    In my case I went back to consulting which I was doing before trading full time. And my trading improved. So now I get a steady paycheck and I focus on getting one good trade in the last 2-3 hours of the US session.

     

    I'm kind of rambling. My main advice for someone who doesn't believe what I say is this: Trade on sim until consistently profitable for 6 months. That will remove the possibility of financial losses. The remaining risk will be time loss. There is no easy way to remove that one. When a strategy (manual or automated) works and you're sure it works, run it real time on sim for 6 months to make sure it doesn't stop working. I'm sure you'll find it does stop working but at least you won't lose any money finding that out.

  3. Posted

    I see that no updates were posted since a lot of time. I'd be curious to know how cunparis' strategy did in the next months.

     

    It didn't work. :evil tongue:

     

    The answer is yes optimizing profit target & stop loss is curve fitting, at least to an extent. If the stop and target are just random numbers that are optimized then it's curve fitting.

     

    I'm now working on a semi-automated strategy. I put in my levels and the basic idea and my strategy picks entries & stop loss. Since it uses my levels which are done manually, there is no backtesting and so no optimization. I've only been doing it for a few weeks and I'm working out little bugs but so far I'm encouraged. Market action wasn't great the past few weeks and I only run it the last 3 hours of the trading session so it'll take a while longer to get enough data.

     

    So if anyone is interested in automation.. I do not believe it's possible. The markets change. high volatility, low volatility, trend days, balanced days, etc. I've never seen anyone have a successful automated strategy long term, at least without massive drawdowns that would cause most to pull the plug. I think the best route is to give up trading, but if that's not an option, it's best to learn to trade manually and then look to automate parts of the trading slowly.

  6. Posted

    Blowfish,

     

    If you could get a trade intensity indicator and a rebundling indicator programmed for Ninja, I think you would be wildly popular (if they were any good of course ;) )! Maybe some members with a c# knowhow could get together to help you out on the project...

     

    I have prototyped bundling trades and to be honest I don't think it's that useful. The problem is one has to make a lot of assumptions that are often incorrect. Just because two trades occur at the same time doesn't mean it was the same trader who made them. That sort of thing. I'm curious to know how others have handled this. The programming is not hard but it seems we don't have enough information to work with.

  7. Posted

    I have spent many years in order flow and have created Algo's to find these orders. If you are familiar with Trading Technologies DOM and how it tallies orders at each price level you can understand the logic.

     

    Yes, it does work on multiple charts at the same time.

     

    I will upload videos later this week. Have a good one!

     

    I looked at your website but it wasn't clear what it actually does (even if you wish to keep the algorithms secret). I guess it's finding large disguised orders?

     

    If you have more examples, a video showing it work realtime, or a trial, I would be very interested.

  8. Posted

    I finished my blog series which was the subject of the first post in this thread. Now that the journey to profitability is complete, I start a new journey to slowly increase my size so that my income goals can be met.

     

    To update the thread I have recently started increasing my size. I now trade 2-4 contracts on bund & ES. Once this is more stable then I will increase it slowly (after each month of good results).

  9. Posted

    Cunparis, neither of the links in this thread worked for me. I'd like to check out your blog. -Eric

     

    My hosting provider had a major hardware failure and my site has been down for 3 days now. It should be up again today. It sucks but that's what one gets when one pays $6/month for hosting a website. ;)

     

    Also I must say that I've changed my use of stops a bit.. I don't use tight stops any more. I don't use hard stops actually, I just get out if it's not working. This has taken a lot of experience but I'm doing much better this way. I think tight stops are better if one can be profitable with it, but everyone has to find out what works for them.

  10. Posted

    So, I have found going for 90% mechanical far easier to find than 100%.

     

    Can you explain 90% mechanical?

     

    I've been doing programming that generates visual & audio alerts and then I decide to place a trade. I know another trader who decides when to potentially enter and he clicks and then his software will enter when certain criteria are met and will exit with other criteria. I think both examples are interesting and something I'm currently researching.

  11. Posted

    Others may find it more difficult to manage the trade, and most systems offer to automate this for people with trailing stops and profit targets......

     

    This is the trade-off with automation. It can't be as optimal as an experienced professional trader. For me, trailing stops give up too much profit and profit targets are often missed by a tick or two. That's why, for me, it's important to be able to read the order flow and adapt.

     

    If I get long I take my first scale when I see responsive selling come in. Then for my other units I watch the order flow as we approach my targets and if I see strong selling coming in a few ticks from my target I'm not going to risk giving back all that profit just to try and get 2 more ticks. It's a poor R:R to do that. So I will exit a few ticks before my target. It took me a while to learn to do this, but after many targets being missed by a few ticks I started figuring it out.

     

    Since most edges are very small (mine has been 2 ticks over the last 4-6 months) getting an extra tick on a target has a huge impact. This is just one reason, IMHO, that mechanical trading will be sub-optimal.

     

    Some traders may prefer to live with a sub-optimal method because they feel they can never acquire the skills to trade manually with discretion. This is how I felt for a long time but I realized that I was circumventing the problem. Best to learn how to trade properly and then I don't need automation.

     

    This year I made a lot of changes to how I trade and I'm still working them out but for most of last year I had a profit factor of 2.0. I never could make an automated strategy that worked long term, especially not with a PF of 2.0. So if I'm performing better than my automated strategies it makes sense for me to continue developing my skills.

     

    Just a point of view of someone who's tried it and chosen the path of learning to trade with a little discretion. I have my game plan before the open each day. I know what I will do, where I will trade, etc. But when it comes to timing entries or passing on a setup, and managing my trades, that's where the discretion comes in.

     

    If someone can make an automated system then that's great and I'm happy for you. The risk is that someone will spend 2 years trying and have nothing to show for it. But that's the risk with learning to trade too. It's the risk inherent in any worthwhile adventure. And that's why only a few succeed. So even if it's possible and you see someone with proof they're doing it, that doesn't mean you can do it. The odds are stacked against you with a very slim chance of success.

     

    This is not meant to discourage people but rather to show some realism. if you want to do an automated system you have to accept the fact that 99% don't work and that it can take years to find out. If one accepts these odds and gives it a shot then I sincerely wish you good luck with your endeavor.

  13. Posted

     

    This pretty much proves my point that it's not possible. Here is my take on the winner:

     

    2011-02-17_1341.png

     

    The Profit Factor is 1.15. There is no room for error. Commissions, slippage, market change, anything basically could make this go negative (which is already what happened if you look at the equity curve).

     

    It has 50% drawdown. If it continued it'd probably give back most of those gains. These systems have very short life-spans. If you're lucky they can do well in the beginning and then slowly stop working. Who can sit through a 50% drawdown to find out if it's just a drawdown or if it will never work again? I can't.

     

    I've had systems that did great like this but they all stopped eventually. Some after a few months, some after a few weeks, and one after a few years. The one that lasted a few years went into drawdown so I stopped and then it came back so i started again and then it went into drawdown so I didn't stop and guess what? Never worked again. ;)

     

    I know most will keep searching for the holy grail so I don't want to be a negative nancy and will leave it at that. Good luck. :)

  14. Posted

    So I was just wondering if anyone here has found such a thing?

     

    I gave up on that a while ago. Every once in a while I come up with some new idea and I test the heck out of it and of course it is not profitable.

     

    The problem is context. Context is everything. As an example: A system could signal a long but if we're a few ticks below yesterday's high then it's likely not to work.

     

    Context cannot be automated. It takes a human to analyze the context because each situation is unique.

     

    So for the past year I've been focused on learning to analyze the markets. Supply & demand, support & resistance, market profile, etc. I've come a long way towards understanding the context. However profiting from it is not easy. It takes years of practice.

     

    IMHO your time would be more productive learning about context and forgetting about anything mechanical. Count on it taking several years. If you're not prepared to put in several years then best to quit now.

  15. Posted

    Ondrej,

    For example, If you watch only a 1m chart then the whole test can be shown as one bar. I think it is more useful to look inside of this bar. If you look inside, then you can possibly see a sharp rejection or quick double bottom. Or you can find a slow round or flat bottom or whatever.

    In other words, while 1m chart can show you behavior on larger scale (the DB as a whole), the fast chart can show you behavior on the test and can serve for defining triggers.

     

    I find this perspective really interesting. I recently started focusing on 30min bars and I use 1min bars to pinpoint entries and my trading improved. What you say about 1min & looking inside with 5 second is how I feel about 30 min & 1min. Just goes to show how the markets are fractal and how everyone has to find what works for them. Thanks for sharing.

  16. Posted

    However, I have problems with reversals - I dont know how to recognize whether the price will likely reverse or sit at that predefined level. I trade FESX so I dont have acces to market internals such as TICKQ to help me to make decision. Could anyone help me with this and tell me what to watch? Thanks!

     

    Others may disagree but I think that we can't know if price will reverse. However if we have a good R:R we can profit from it when it does and have a small loss when it doesn't. The trick is to enter your trade at a good level where price is likely to move away.. an area where price isn't likely to chop around and hit your stop and then go on to hit the original target. There are only a few of these per day. I use volume profiling to find them. This is probably different than the Wyckoff approach so I guess I'll not elaborate, I'm just saying that we can't really know. Even if price starts to reverse at any second a big trader can step up and hammer it and set off a chain reaction.

  17. Posted

    So if that is the case, then how could we get REAL FEEDBACK about such services as OFA and others ? Is there some better method to know the real feedback of authentic users, rather then reading the posts on forums, where fake posts could be very easily posted. :(

     

    It's far more likely that DB mentioned this thread to his followers and a couple of them wanted to add their opinion, nothing wrong with that I would do the same if it were me.

     

    I have a posting history here so that won't be an issue. I know a few traders who have taken the OFA training and used the software. They're not using it now. I'm not exactly sure why, I've asked in the past but the response wasn't clear and I guess it just didn't fit their style or work for them personally.

     

    My own experience with the footprint is from Market Delta. IMHO the footprint is just a way of visualizing the time & sales data in a tabular form. Just like the DOM or Time & Sales, the footprint can be mesmerizing and even hypnotic. However if one has a plan and only uses the footprint when at support or resistance, then it can help confirm entries (just as the DOM or time & sales can). The thing to keep in mind is that even if one sees a pattern or "setup" all it takes is a few large traders to step up and start trading against you and the setup can fail. In the past I've wondered if I could make more trading failed footprint setups then the original setups themselves.

     

    In my opinion, one of the value points of OFA is that it can automatically enter your order when such a favorable condition occurs. I don't know anyone who actually used this so I can't comment on it but the idea is very interesting. It also has automatic support & resistance levels.

     

    I have used the footprint on and off for 2010 and the past 3-4 months have been without a footprint chart. So I don't think it's necessary.

     

    If/when I use the footprint, I prefer Market Delta for a many reasons. One is I have much more control over the footprint to change the bar type, the display, add indicators/statistics, etc. Second I trade multiple markets so I can have several footprints - I believe OFA is limited to a single market. Third I prefer to use IQFeed (which I understand OFA can do but it's through Ninjatrader so that won't work for me). Fourth is I like to annotate my chart. Fifth I like to have it integrated with my other charts. Sixth I like to have it on historical data so that I can study the past.

     

    My personal opinion is I believe DB is a good trader and has developed some really cutting edge software. I just don't think it's necessary for me. For someone starting out, I think it could be very useful. There is a cost involved but I have spent way more than that learning it on my own. If I had found OFA earlier I would have been much better off with their training & software. This is the key point - if you're learning all this it's best to learn from a professional. Learning on your own is difficult, costly, & time-consuming.

     

    In conclusion I realize that my post may not be very favorable to OFA and that is not really what I intended at first. But I reread it twice and there isn't much I can change. It's just a question of where each trader is in their journey. Those who are consistently profitable probably don't need it, and those who are new or learning or struggling could probably benefit. Everyone has to do their own research and find what works for them. Unfortunately there are a lot of scams out there, but I can say that DB & OFA are NOT one of them. They deliver everything they claim.

  18. Posted

    Well for me, its good to see that at least a few people are still participating and viewing here.

     

    I'm a complete beginner and I'm going through section 7M and have TONS of questions. I plan on starting a new thread for it, and I hope that people are willing to help me. :)

     

    I haven't ever read through those sections and I'd like to. I just noticed that there aren't all the numbers nM in the stickies. How do I find the others? Is there a set list of posts to read in chronological order??

  20. Posted

    Thanks for the reply

     

    I'm actually a professional poker player looking to make a transition into trading, so your analogy rings true.

     

    The thing is, with poker, there are mathematics that I can rely on, as long as I can accurately gauge how my opponents are playing. As you say, I may have pocket aces, but depending on the the other cards on the board, and how I think the other people play, the hand may or may not be so good.

     

    I'm just a beginner poker player but there are a lot of similarities between poker & trading. I bet you will be able to pick up trading if you can stick it out.

     

    Using your 3:1 risk reward example, I have difficulty finding those numbers with any confidence in trading. Sure you can enter the trade, set your stop loss at -1, set your target at +3, but how can you be confident that your targets are good?

     

    The main way to get 3:1 ratio is to trade near S/R levels. If the level doesn't hold it will usually pull back to the level giving another trade (in the direction of the breakout). Between the two one will often work (unless the market is just chopping).

  21. Posted

    at any moment a huge surge of people can come in and send the price in the opposite direction that you've predicted. How can you ever account for that? How can you swing the probabilities in your favor with this uncertainty?

     

    There are no certainties in trading for the exact reason you mention. Any trader can do anything and that can set off an entire chain reaction.

     

    I wanted to answer this question for myself so I set out to learn about order flow. This doesn't help me to see the future, but it helps me to see that big trader (or surge of people as you said) and see that maybe price isn't going to do what I thought and I can get out of the trade.

     

    So instead of thinking about predicting think about confirming your trade continuously and when something doesn't support the trade you can decide to act upon it. Now it's not as easy as that, for example:

     

    we make double top and I go short. we go down 2 ticks and I see a bunch of buyers. I exit my trade at breakeven. Price goes up 1 tick and then a bunch of sellers come in and drive price down 2 pts. I could have gotten out for nothing. Or if I'm continuing to monitor the order flow I can see the sellers returning and I can enter short again.

     

    There is another answer without using order flow (IMHO order flow is more useful for scalping). That is just to accept the randomness and let the trade play out. If you risk 1 to make 3 then you can be wrong twice and right once and still make money.

     

    What you're looking for in trading is the more probable event. Nothing is certain. It's a probabilities game. Just like in poker. I don't know what my opponents have but if I have pocket aces then the probabilities are high that I'll end up with the best hand. Then I can get a flop that has 3 of the same suit (and not my suit). Now probabilities can favor the flush for one of my opponents. So I can fold or just call & hope for the best. Folding would be like using order flow to bail out of the trade and calling & hoping is like using the R:R and letting the trade play out.

  22. Posted

    Some thoughts on my ES daytrades yesterday:

     

    es-day-trade-list.png

     

    1. I won only half my trades. But I ended positive. How? My winners were bigger than my losers. That’s really important for me.

    2. While it wasn’t a good day, I got 2 pts trading one contract (trade 2 was actually two different setups that overlapped). If I can get 2 pts/day every day I’m all set. So the point here is one doesn’t have to get 10 pts to make a killing. Just 2 pts/day consistently.

    3. Since I won half and lost half, those losers have a big impact. If I could have prevented one loser, I would have finished one pt higher for +3 pts which is 50% better. Yes, one single trade can impact my profit at the end of the day by 50%. And if I could have been on the right side instead of the wrong side, it would have made a difference of +2 pts which would have doubled my performance. Each trade is very important! The one time I read an email or surf the internet could be the time I miss something and lose.

    4. On Trade #4 I didn’t like the action on the DOM and I cut it quickly. This allowed me to re-enter 2 minutes later 1.75 pts lower. Now it doesn’t always work out this way but this is the biggest argument for using tight stops, and if possible scratching a trade that’s not going well.

     

    I hope you found that useful and as always, I welcome feedback.

  23. Posted

    Yes it was recorder, so once downloaded to site I will get you the link. BTW, tomorrow I will cover same information again at 3:30 pm US central time informational webinar.

     

    Would love to attend live but my wife would not be happy with you. Recording is great though I can listen to it another time. Thanks.

  24. Posted

    Yes indeed, I did show various set ups in the "6E" at today's informational webinar and I will have another informational webinar Thursday so check it out. BTW, I hit two trades in the 6E after the key supply & demand event taking place in the Euro I was telling you about at the time. First trade out at b/e and second trade caught the big move.....added a screen shot of the entry set ups for you.

     

    I couldn't attend the webinar last night cause it was too late here in Europe. Was it recorded? If so I'd like to watch it.

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