my journal

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I'll write more in separate posts, just in case of accidents with saving and stuff.

So this I've been thinking and now i wonder if I am mature enough to not make any 100%-a-month forecasts.

But these "from now on..." resolves don't work.

Anyway.

The situation now is such that with increased knowledge about discretionary (more edge) and automated (better money management) and increased capital, I could get rid of gambling and could finally trade my way to financial freedom (that might have been the title of a book, I am an avid book title reader).
 
What the **** is this truck doing in the middle of the night... making all this ****ing noise to remove garbage bins? You goddamn assholes. Why don't you just drop dead right now.
 
I look on the bottom of the page and each time I see a reader. That's reassuring. I feel like a mental patient and I have a 24 hour guard (the readers) always making sure that I don't commit suicide or similar.
 
So right now I have... it's a great pleasure to be able to talk and write and be read without being interrupted.
 
After being lectured for a lifetime, I feel the need to lecture. To talk and be listened to.
 
So, now something more about trading, or else one might say this is not a trading journal.
 
Tomorrow morning, at the end of the morning, at 11.59, I will wake up. When I wake up in the morning...

And then I will see if my automated systems this week made money - yes because I basically trade only one of them, so I want to know what the others did.

Hopefully i will not have to find a 5th week of drawdown.

If I traded all the systems from july 20th to now, they would have gone up to 50k in the first 3 months and something, making about 200% on a capital of 20k required, and then, in the last month, they would have lost 30k, going back to a gain of just 20k, in a total of 4 months.

I am not satisfied about this, but it's still positive.

So. That said about systems. I just need to write until the battery of my laptop is dead, and then I can go to bed for good.

I am in bed, typing.

So the systems hopefully will have a positive week.

Then another good thing is that regardless of systems, I got from less than 5k to 7500 of today in just 2 weeks or so.

I know I am capable of making 100% a month. But the problem is when I start expecting that.

I must train myself to think: what will be will be.

 
Hi Travis,

Your natural tendencies which are perfectionism, obsessivness and mental hyperactivity are pretty much the antithesis to those of successful traders. The last thing you should devote energy to is defining an edge. If you are serious about making a living by trading instead living to trade or to feed your addictions you must put all your focus on learning to control your mind and emotions. You should stop trading because like you said you are just gambling. Addictions are not cured overnight. It involves a long process, maybe even professional help or medication. Very few people trade to make money; most trade for emotional/egoic reasons. Have you had enough?

If so, from this point on you should focus on keeping ego/emotions out of your trading. You can NEVER be cured which means attention to this must be FOREVER.

Good luck you CAN do it.
 
I look on the bottom of the page and each time I see a reader. That's reassuring. I feel like a mental patient and I have a 24 hour guard (the readers) always making sure that I don't commit suicide or similar.

17,000 plus viewers. Not bad for a guy who types in bed! :D
 
Hi Travis,

Your natural tendencies which are perfectionism, obsessivness and mental hyperactivity are pretty much the antithesis to those of successful traders. The last thing you should devote energy to is defining an edge. If you are serious about making a living by trading instead living to trade or to feed your addictions you must put all your focus on learning to control your mind and emotions. You should stop trading because like you said you are just gambling. Addictions are not cured overnight. It involves a long process, maybe even professional help or medication. Very few people trade to make money; most trade for emotional/egoic reasons. Have you had enough?

If so, from this point on you should focus on keeping ego/emotions out of your trading. You can NEVER be cured which means attention to this must be FOREVER.

Good luck you CAN do it.

Thanks. I agree, everything you said applies to me. I guess you talk from personal experience by how you wrote this. But not necessarily.
 
How I was taught that being happy is a bad thing

17,000 plus viewers. Not bad for a guy who types in bed! :D

Yes, I've been worried about views since the start. The views get updated once per hour, at the 56th minute of each hour. They are exactly "views" and properly called so. If you visit a page and then you refresh that same page, that's 2 views. So this means that since I wrote already 1400 posts, and edited them 3 times on average in advanced mode (that certainly causes a refresh and a new hit, unlike the other mode, that many not produce another hit), that makes about 5000 views from me alone. Or rather... I'd say that roughly I alone give this journal about 50 to 100 views per day. Let's make it 75, and multiply that by 100 days since I've started the journal. That means that over one third of all views of my journal came from me. To be honest it's not that much of a success. I saw journals with just 150 posts that have 10 thousand more views than mine. Now, that is amazing.

On the other hand, the few who are interested in my journal are very interested. They come and read a few pages, and come back. I see with great pleasure that both the invisible readers (that are increasing ever since I started to get in touch with the readers to ask them for feedback: yeah, I pretty much harass my readers) and the regular readers, that I see on the bottom of my page, often stay on the journal for hours... great satisfaction.

I had journals online where I talked about everything as here (except trading) and the highest average - with a journal on blogspot - was a daily average of roughly 30 to 40 readers per day. But not many of those readers were regulars. Few returned, unlike here, and few read more than one page. They came from google and then left pretty soon. Here I may get 100 views per day from 30 to 40 readers, but most of them meant to come here and read what I wrote and a majority of them reads several pages. So I am very satisfied.

I can even say that whereas on blogspot I had 40 visitors but none of them stayed and so, at any one moment, there was no one on the blog (40 1-page visits means people on the blog for a total of about 40 minutes), here at any time of the day and even night there's almost always one person reading. And that keeps me company, since I basically live here.

All this relentless checking interferes with my writing, but it adds to my consciousness. I know and notice more about what surrounds me. I am more aware of my environment with this almost compulsive checking of data.

I know i am a sick individual, because all this does not bring me any happiness. But then the happy guy, relaxed, may get run over by a car as he crosses the street because he's relaxed and not connstantly worried about what surrounds him.

That's basically what my dad has taught me: never relax and always be alert to outside threats. As a consequence I count the posts, the views, the friends, check who's reading the journal... this protects my life as a member of the forum.

For example, I wanted to say that the t2w awards are rigged because I didn't win as favorite journal, but I didn't say because that might have gotten me into trouble, and could have threatened my membership.

Now I need to write more so I can hide this comment I just made. Let's hide this into a lot of text so no one notices. Yeah, let's talk about my father more, so I can produce a lot of text.

So, as I said, he taught me to never relax, never celebrate, and always be alert and on the lookout. In my family we never celebrate birthdays for example. It's almost as if we're proud of this. Celebrating and rejoicing is for stupid people, that's the teaching from my dad. We should never rest and keep yourself unsatisfied so you will work more and improve yourself and your situation.

But then what is the point of life? To get your name on an encyclopedia? I think he's a sick maniac and turned me into a sick maniac.

If you add to all I've said the fact that my parents are so called "Catholic" and believe some of those things... or misinterpret some of those doctrines, then the mix is perfect for shooting rampage. I mean, it's a life of hell they imposed on me.

Yes, because celebrating is not just a waste of time and something that will keep your from working hard but celebrating and in other words being happy is something you cannot allow yourself for one more "Catholic" reason: there's people in the world who suffer and so you should keep your happiness under control in order to not disregard those people. You should make sure every person on the planet is happy before you can allow yourself to celebrate and be happy.

These mother****ers really ****ed me up!

 
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Weekly update on automated systems

Snap1.jpg

My sixth red week. A lot of reasoning has to be done, but it will be simple. The question is: are the bad results being produced by the systems I added a couple of months ago or are the bad results coming from all systems in general?

Because in the first case, I am all right, but in the second case I am screwed and my systems are not looking good.

[...checking... studying...]


Ok, studied and checked quite a bit and here's the deal. It wasn't just the recently added systems that caused the massive losses in the past few weeks. It was the Intraday systems that have lost because maybe the markets didn't go up and such systems mostly only go LONG, and of course if the markets mostly fall, it's not going to be easy for them to catch the LONG opportunity.

q.jpg

If I were to differentiate between each individual system, I might get rid of those that don't work, but I might be overoptimising. Instead, by looking at categories of systems, by common concepts, I should manage to avoid overoptimization (I mean: one system could have gotten lucky, but all of them put together is more unlikely).

So, as a category, the weekly bias systems seem to have failed so far. But they only go LONG and since in the past few weeks we've fallen, then that might be the only reason. These systems may start performing very well in the future, but am I prepared to take such a drawdown, whereby I go to 50k and then come back down to zero pretty much? Mind you, getting to zero doesn't mean my equity is wiped out, because the chart does not represent my capital but only the profits of the systems.


Let's go over the categories of these groups of systems just in case anyone cares:
1st hour bounce: a lot of screwing around in the first hour (trades 15.15 to 16 CET), but there's a tendency to bounce within the daily high and low. Well, I call it "first hour" because it's the first hour of "open outcry" trading, but of course the futures trade 24 hours a day.
ON bounce: after the close (22 CET), tendency to go in the opposite direction of where we've gone during the day.


opening gap: no explanation needed.
overstretched: self-explanatory title.


volatility breakout: no explanation needed.
weekday bias: on some days of the week markets go up.
with id trend: during the day (from 10 to 22 CET), whatever the trend, it tends to continue.


There's groups of systems that produce consistent results and others that have bad periods. I need to identify what doesn't work with the latter group. The weekly profit by groups table identifies the WeekDay Bias and the WITH ID trend systems as the unstable ones.

I wish I knew what went on in the markets in the past 6 weeks that might have interfered with my systems. But I am too busy posting guitar videos to be able to do any testing on this. The truth is that I am tired of testing, backtesting, automating systems.

When I sum up all the losses by those two groups in those 6 weeks, I get a total of 40 thousand dollars. If I had a way to avoid those 40k of losses, my systems would be ok. As I said, since those weeks are all packed together... I mean this is not bad at all: even considering the 42 systems all together, the red weeks all come in a straight series of losses. I could simply stop trading whenever I get a red week. How about it?

But this will become an issue only when I'll be trading all the systems. Right now I am only trading the best system of all and so it is not an issue.

One day I should start trading all of the systems at once, and that day, I should use this method of not trading after a red week.

One may wonder at this point, after how I mentioned posting guitar videos instead of working hard on the systems, one may wonder why I am not busy working and am here relaxed, wasting time. I am not wasting time. The quantity is all there, and it would be negative to focus on quantity any further on quantity, because I'd be missing out on quality and the much bigger benefits that I can get from it. I have built 42 systems, and there's enough good stuff in there to keep going for years. Now I need to focus on making a few good moves in the right direction and I am all set. Both for automated and discretionary, where making one good trade (sniper approach) per day is better than 10 pretty good trades. The real objective now, after all this hard work, is to slow down (in discretionary, simply to trade less) and focus on making a few good and simple moves, like these ones I've been talking about, such as not trading for the week following a red week.

Actually that's why I started this journal. Because I realized that the quantity was all there, and that I needed to slow down, sit back, and look at things from a different perspective, get a different approach, and add whatever quality was missing. Now I'll go and implement the weekly filter, whereby the systems don't trade at all after an overall bad week. Can't hurt me much. At the most I'll miss a good week. But since I haven't been getting one good and one bad week but a bunch of red weeks all stuck together, right now this seems the best solution.


Well well... check this out... was I saying six bad weeks? Look at this weekly chart of the EUR, which pretty much represents all my systems, since 7 systems are on the EUR alone, and most other futures I trade move the same way the EUR does:

fsspon.png

Ok... now I've added the red and green weeks of my system to the chart and the picture is pretty clear and self-explanatory.

ttt.jpg

Now I see that maybe instead of waiting for the red week to happen I could prevent my systems from trading when the EUR is not going up. Well, a lot of thinking needs to be done outside of this post. Probably I will wake up one morning with the idea in my mind, or while in the bath tub. What I need to do is remove the worries I am having about my job, because right now what I am dreaming of is the suspicious transaction reports, and that mother ****er, the boss.

Link from where I took the weekly chart.

Ok, this is it, but I don't know yet if that's it. I set up a chart with the 10 period moving average ona weekly timeframe, and that seems to get rid of part of the red weeks:
http://futuresource.quote.com/chart...a=W&z=800x550&d=LOW&b=CANDLE&st=MA(10,10,10);

But you know what? The best method still seems to be not to worry about what the EUR does, and just to stop trading the systems whenever the previous week was a red. I will implement this at once.
 
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"Well well... check this out... was I saying six bad weeks? Look at this weekly chart of the EUR"

That's only part of the story. Look at the Dollar index, which has been going up for that period, as I said it would elsewhere on this site.
The dollar index compares the dollar to a basket of other currencies.
www.fxstreet.com/rates-charts/usdollar-index/
Glenn
 
Yeah, my friend from March 2003, but you didn't comment on the main point of my post: the guitar videos. Thanks for the link and the feedback.

As I said, I'm going to implement a filter based on the performance of my systems rather than where the EUR is going. Simpler, more reliable. At the worst, I'll miss a few profitable weeks, but the way it looks right now, I might be able to avoid some of that 40k loss that went on in the past 6 weeks.

I've done some calculations and with "take week off if past week unprofitable" rule, the deal would have been:

1,462
5,913
1,092
-834
4,282 MISSED
1,951
516
1,406
4,661
6,044
547
4,888
-2,878
6,702 MISSED
12,116
2,926
-960
-7,395 MISSED
-2,692 MISSED
-10,357 MISSED
-8,393 MISSED
-6,898 MISSED

For a total of 11k missed profits, and 36k missed losses. Thereby gaining 25k. With the "don't trade if EUR below 10 period weekly timeframe moving average" rule, I would have gained 15k by sparing myself 15k of losses. So I will forget about EUR and dollar index, too, and implement the rule based on systems' performance.

The problem with this whole deal is that the systems that have been added along the way, are not counted from the start, because they weren't being forward-tested since July. That's why I should stop adding systems for a while. Enough quantity, let's focus on quality.

But this weekly rule will only be enabled when all systems, after a year of forward testing, will have turned profitable. Right now a part of the systems are not trading because the drawdown they encountered from the start of their forward-testing has made them unprofitable altogether. This will not be the case for probably any systems as time will go by. That's when I'll have to use this rule, to prevent systems that are overall profitable from trading in unfavorable periods, even if their overall profitability is not at stake. Of course, this all works until the red weeks stick together, because otherwise it doesn't work.

One important remark that has to be made is this: I didn't know the systems were so correlated among one another as they are turning out to be. They are all losing and making money together and this I didn't expect. I expected them to compensate one another. I will have to come up with something. Backtesting on multiple timeframes is not... damn, I'll do that as well some day, but not now. Don't make me go back to tradestation, and retest 42 mother ****ing systems on multiple timeframes, and have to save all the reports again, and get all their drawdowns again... don't make me do that now.
 
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I am more like a mule. I want to lead myself to water. Besides, it's true that I am stubborn, but your explanation on what I should do reminds me of the clues in crosswords.

 
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