Deadline June

Let's go over it again, even if it were just to repeat it to myself:

1) first we need to make enough money to live for the rest of our life OR AT LEAST we need to prove that we are consistently profitable on a monthly basis (producing the equivalent of a regular salary) and keep it up for 12 straight months.

2) then we can quit our job.

I will continue this reasoning on my own journal:
http://www.trade2win.com/boards/trad...ml#post1474198

Thanks for banging on about it (although I think you're being a bit dogmatic about it Travis) - going over my situation again, I have to weigh up the pros and cons of each option I listed but what I've done now is to have launched myself into the process of finding a programming contract where the employers may make me an offer to start right away.

That's where the urgency is coming from - I've gone off looking for work before I'm ready to leave the systems up and running on their own all day. Actually though what I should be doing is consolidating the systems and ironing out the kinks and the quirks so I feel happy about leaving them running all day. I leave them running already 6 hours overnight, but 8 or 10 hours during European peak time is a step up.

So I guess I need to consolidate first, and then decide on the options for the next phase.

I've bought a new laptop to feed the beast that is NT7 and I'm now renting a Win2003 server to run it on in the US. So I've got a few tasks on my to-do list.

I also want to extract the combined profit and losses for both systems and put them into my risk analysis app to get several of the stats I like to see which NT7 doesn't produce - like the optimal fixed fraction for a portfolio. Another multi-day task, maybe even 100 hours. If I started working next week, assuming optimistically that I could still squeeze in 10 hours on trading alongside full time contracting, that'd take me 10 weeks instead of 2 or 3.

Going back to the original question though - to go out and take paid employment - apart from the time issue, what I think about starting up as a discretionary trader is that later the synergies with mechanical trading would be huge, plus the hours I work could be much more flexible than when working for someone else.

Anyway, we'll see, in a while.

By the way, Travis: HFT is high frequency trading. I noted some of your Crude trades were less than a minute apart, that's all. I was asking in the hope of hearing a bit about what you're trading there. I see you've written about it though.

Yes, I see now. HFT then is not for me, because I wasn't picking the opportunities as I should have. Out of those 50 trades, I should have made probably only 3 and they would have been 66% winners. The day wasn't right. The timing wasn't right. And yet I even made some money. I think this might work, unless as usual I have 8 small wins and 2 huge losses that blow out my account. That is the objective of my 1-minute timeframe, which, if followed, should keep my losses from getting out of control. Even though it is true that in one occasion Friday the CL lost 2000 dollars in 2 minutes:



This would speak in favor of an absolute stoploss, in points. Even though I would have been warned by the candle before that huge fall.

All in all, I think the 1-minute method has enough rules to keep me from staying against the trend and have huge losses, and from entering against the trend, which are both problems of mine. At the same time, it doesn't have so many rules as to suffocate my good ideas. I just hope I'll stick to it long enough to make it work.

P.S.: I just changed it again, hopefully for the better.

This trade has clearly moved beyond the territory where the original entry signals have any meaning.

So either I put in a timed stop, or I just go with it because it's 50:50 now whether the trade's a winner or not and in time they'll all cancel each other out.

I suppose I could look at using a radical change in volatility to reset the indicators so the values from volatile periods don't carry over into non-volatile periods. Just an idea, sounds a bit flakey but there might be something there.

On the EUR/JPY, the volatility has disappeared out of the indicator.

I assume there'll be a reversal soon on USD/JPY from the system as well.

Of course it's going in against the short term trend, annoyingly. But the system has a better record than I do in this area.

Just loading up some FXCM data for 2000 to 2008 so that I've got a second dataset after the DTC data. I have FXCM data from DTN / IQFeed, going back to 2008 or 2006 depending on symbol. This FXCM data is 1 mins bars that I downloaded from http://forexforums.dailyfx.com/free-...ical-data.html

Here's a screen shot of the FXCM 1 min bars with this new data above and my existing data from DTN / IQ Feed below.

Why it is different, I don't know. Hopefully the difference isn't enough to impact trading results in a big way.

The differences I notice are the highs which are rarely at the same bar. Plus the candles vary randomly and consistently in wick length and body length.

But it looks roughly the same so what the hell.

Got out too early.

Actually this steady rise is unprecedented for currencies. It looks like a stock.

Does this one actually count?

I have no time stops on this system. Although this one turned into a winner, logic dictates that it's pure 50:50 after the original turning point is superceded by another. In that time theoretically the system should be able to trade again with smaller targets for some profits.