I have been looking at alternatives to increasing my IRA account balance. I don’t want to really trade futures on it as I am supposed to be "conservative" with that account, and as a result I have been doing option spreads and covered calls only. I guess I should be thankful to be able to achieve around 1% per month on average; but it bugs me doing so little on that account when I have grown my other accounts by around 70% over the past year. I can not short on my IRA but I can day trade with no issues and certainly leverage the concept from pairs and do it with derivatives.
I have been looking into other methods to grow the account with limited risk, and hence the thread subject. I would be curious to know the forum experiences with Pairs Trading, preferably in an automated manner both intra and daily time frames.
I might try to code something in EL, but I figure I check first if anyone within the forum has performed any work on EasyLanguage or NinjaScript for pairs trading.. something I can use as a template, or a method already defined I can leverage. Why re-invent the wheel if I dont have to?! :)
The biggest obstacle I see is finding an automated(filters/scanners) way to identify pairs to trade; and then second, avoiding(well more like recognizing and jumping out of) drift.