Ed Mamula.com

If I ever somehow try to convince myself to shut one of my systems down without real objective proof that the system should be shut off, I need only refer to the following chart, which shows how much better the Euro Ranger and Cable Glider work together than they do separately, and I should be cured of such a foolish notion.

These results are on the backtest page.  This is the power of trading uncorrelated systems.  Higher profit, lower variance.

Well, I’m back from my self-imposed two week break.  Within 48 hours of turning the systems back on, I’m down 3%, mostly on the back of two losers in the Cable Glider system.  It’s time for me to face the fact that Cable Glider has been a consistent loser all year, and it needs to switched off.  I am doing that immediately.  I will continue to monitor it in paper-trading mode, and if it shows two months of consecutive profitability, I will re-consider using it.

My plans had no provision for System Death.  I plan on becoming more studied on this subject, and I will incorporate it into future system deployments.    There is some good information over at Vertical Solutions, which I hope will point me in the right direction.

In the meantime, I will keep Euro Ranger active.  It was virtually break-even last month, but it has shown several consecutive months of profitability. 

The linear regression system that I was testing on the Japanese Yen totally fell apart in out of sample testing.  It’s a little bit disappointing, but then again, that’s why we test strategies before deploying them.

I’ll also be tinkering with tick charts a bit…this is something that I’ve never considered before, but I believe that it makes good sense to use tick charts instead of time based bar charts in a 24 hour market where most of the ticks are clustered into a small time frame.  For example, if we use a 500 tick bar on the Euro FX contract, we’ll see that sometimes a single bar can span a few hours (usually right after the session opens), and as little as 1 minute in a fast market.  Very interesting indeed…and that’s what I need right now…new ways of looking at the data.  We’ll see what it yields.