Mechanical Trading Intra Day

UPS is a good idea. I had several electricity problems during trading time and my UPS saved my a.s

I will be able to trade and store stuff remotely and not have to bother with all this personal pc nonsense!

Think... no more upgrades, disk failures, software crashes ( well only the odd one naturally ),purchase of numerous gadgets for protection. No more purchase of anti sypware, virus protection - the installing and reinstalling and uninstalling of software. You just turn your workstation on and up it pops just as you left in. All upgrades handled by people who understand that you don't want to be bothered with all this stuf - you JUST WANT TO TRADE/WORK!




And then I woke up.

Still sorting out software installations, etc so unlikely to post until saturday now I think.

June 9th

Ym -100
EMD 10
ER2 10
Dax 25
ESTX 10
SMI 10

Net -35 / 140

Back up and running again now. My spreadsheet is out of date on my laptop but last week was actually a great week.
Especially friday where we got hold of the big runs.
I will talk about my system failure to capture this trend in the next post however.

We are now back up to trading 4 contracts.

Yesterday was a very trying day for no profits. Annoying to take a small loss - it was perfectly feasible to get out with a breakeven day.

Here is the sequence of events with a Dax trade on June 6th.
The good news is that we got some profit. But we also left a lot on the table.
Had I been non discretionary about our rule based system we would have captured the whole lot

10-Jun-08
Ym 5
EMD (200)
ER2 (750)
DAx (775)
ESTX 10
SMI 0

Net (1710) / (6840)


All just horrible entries. Not much else to say.
Long on everything except EMD and still managed to lose money there.

11-Jun-08
Ym 5
EMD 400
ER2 290
DAX (525)
ESTX(170)
SMI 10
Net 10 /40

Something happened early on in the European markets to trip our stops and get us out of a beautiful Short position. I think it was the BOE announcement but I don't have live news so I can't be sure.
The system missed out on some major money AGAIN today.
Fortunately the late moves got captured in the USA market but we do not want to miss moves like today so we have to lick our wounds.

Well I have been beset by all sorts of tech issues in the last 2 weeks. Hopefully they are now all sorted out.
I resorted at one stage to trading on my kids computer as both my desktop and the laptop had (different) problems.
Trading is a bit like property - its all about backup, backup, backup.
On which point I saw a very interesting widget the other day - a wireless always on internet that connected to the mobile telephone network - £15 per month.
I am currently changing my network provider anyway and trying to do a deal so I can get one of these as part of the package - hence when the house broadband goes down - I have laptop and separate internet connection. How cool is that
I appreciate the younger members of these blogs will think I run on steam but I am genuinely impressed.
It wasn't so long ago I traded off 1 CRT screen using a 28k dial up connection paying $100 per month for a "real time" feed. Oh and only requiring 256mb RAM ( are you listening Bill, Tradestation, et al??).

Today it is positively luxurious.

Enough - and on with the update on trading.
Because I was trading off someone else's computer and having all sorts of issues the trading was left to the basic plan with no interference.... and what do you know we made 3 new equity highs this week.

Next trade is with 5 contracts.

Some of you may know that this is the last quarter that the ER2 is available on Globex. It then moves over to ICE on NYBOT. (Tradestation sysmbol TF).
Obviously there will be some confusion and adjustment. At the moment there doesn't appear to be any liquidity there as the no of contracts traded is just under 7,000 but one assumes (hopes) that this will improve dramatically after the current expiration date. I have not so far traded the TF symbol but if anyone has please let me know.
More importantly closing and opening times are changing and it is thought that TF may well have a proxy settlement time of 1615 and a real settlement time of 1800 (EST). That should prove interesting in terms of price action around those times.

No charts today - still busy doing other stuff. But should be back to normal posting tomorrow.

June 20
YM 145
EMD 20
ER2 240
DAX 3900
ESTX 740
SMI 850
Net 5,895 / 29,475

Another great day on the European indices.

The dax turned in a stellar performance after some dramatic news midday (European time). Well , I assume it was news.

This gave me the heads up not to play the open gap fade trade ( saved a fortune there) - so all in all a very productive day.

The ER2 (now TF symbol) worried us slightly in that we were down about $550 per contract at one stage and my get out finger was twitching but the main trend was down so we hung on and got out right near the low after it made fresh new lows for the day.
I had discretionairily stopped half my position after it went down about a point and then just couldn't get any further. I am not the world's best at tape reading but it tried and tried over about 6 minutes and just couldn't go down so I assumed it would at least take a breather.
I re entered a little early and took some heat but the profits reported here don't include the extra bunce I actually made. ( about 3 more points).
What is extra nice is that we were upgraded to 5 contracts 2 sessions ago so this really helps us leap over that small hurdle nicely.

Just to put things in context - today we made 150% of our original 20k equity in profits due entirely to position sizing. So we are now past the magic 100k figure - hurrah!

It is also our 4th new equity high of the week which is truly something. Drawdown's are just around the corner.