Results since last update (2 weeks):
Cable Glider — 2 wins, 0 losses
Euro Ranger — 2 wins, 1 loss
Darth Fader (ES) — 0 wins, 0 losses
More of the same over the last couple of weeks. The systems’ win percentage is high, but the size of the wins is small. Almost every trade is offering an opportunity to override the exit signal to improve the result. Last week I did not override any exit signals, and I had a Cable Glider trade close with a tiny profit that I wanted to take sooner. I also saw a Euro Ranger trade turn from a profit to a loss last Friday.
This week, I did override a Cable Glider system and took a profit instead of a loss. I let Euro Ranger run without overrides, and it went 2 and 0, though the second win was quite small.
It’s another new equity peak for the year for me. Year to date returns now stand at 26.9%…but again, the new peak is driven by these discretionary overrides. These overrides have been the source of all of my profits this year, but a quick glance back to last August (in the chart below) shows that my discretion isn’t magical, and I’ve not yet been able to translate any of my discretionary exit rules into mechanical ones.
 
I picked up a copy of Larry Connor’s “Short Term Trading Strategies That Work”, because I keep hearing such good things about it. Hopefully that will help to stimulate some new research ideas.
Okay, so I was playing around with a WordPress plugin that lets me take the site offline for maintenance, and I couldn’t figure out how to disable the plugin without wrecking the site. For some reason, I didn’t mind. I took a break from recording my results here, but I didn’t stop trading.Â
Today I have the opportunity to review my trading on the June 2009 contracts. It just so happens that the last time I posted was in mid-March, right after I had rolled my positions to the June contracts.
First things first…the version of Darth Fader that I rolled out at the beginning of the year went SHORT the ES on 3/13/09 at 744…just 4 days after the 3/9/09 low, and it has not covered that position. If I had simply followed the system, I would have been down almost 200 full S&P points.  Thankfully, that trade always looked and felt wrong to me. I traded in and out from the short side and actually netted 9.75 points. I have not traded the S&P since the end of April, and the market has continued to rally. So that’s one bullet dodged.  I have since tweaked the system a bit and will begin to track the new version’s performance in my walk forward results.
Both the Euro Ranger and the Cable Glider were marginally profitable over the past three months. There really hasn’t been anything remarkable occurring, except for the fact that both systems’ win percentage has been very high lately, but the size of those wins have been relatively small. These systems continue to work well together.
I’m now up 25.3% year to date, and 54.3% since the launch of DESword last August. This is a new equity peak for these systems. The gains this year are almost entirely due to my discretion in not following the bad Darth Fader signal. The walk forward year to date results are a paltry 0.8% !
I’m itching to do some new system development, but I haven’t had a lot of spare time lately. Maybe I need to systematize my life a bit more so that I have more time for development 
