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Auto trading is only thing that conquered my darkside


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Auto trading is only thing that conquered my darkside

  #251 (permalink)
 Xeno 
UK
 
Experience: Intermediate
Platform: Ninja
Broker: Mirus/Zen
Trading: Futures - bonds, currencies, index
Posts: 288 since Oct 2010
Thanks Given: 70
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RM99 View Post

Having said that, I gave up on trading off hours....the slippage is way too unpredictable. You can see several ticks of slippage on market orders and as I said earlier, I've tried automating with limit orders.....it's difficult with anything more than a single share/contract. Partial orders become rather difficult to address.

Agreed. I generally use limit orders for that reason. Ninja has an unmanaged orders mode (which simply means Ninja does less behind the scenes and you can program all the raw orders yourself.) It's not as bad as it sounds, but it meant that I can handle partial fills and still maintain stops etc. It was a bit of work, but it's all done now and in a separate library. So, I'm happy relying on limit during the night (and for a bit of added safety, I usually check the liquidity ,spread and reduce the contracts if necessary)

This means I often wake up with a position in something like AUD, JPY, EUR, or the bund. It also means I get possibly 15-22 hours in a position for what is effectively still a day trade. This makes it more viable to trend day trade on a 30, 60 or 120 min bar, for example, which reduces noise/volatility risk.

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  #252 (permalink)
 
monpere's Avatar
 monpere 
Bala, PA, USA
 
Experience: Intermediate
Platform: NinjaTrader
Broker: Mirus, IB
Trading: SPY, Oil, Euro
Posts: 1,854 since Jul 2010
Thanks Given: 300
Thanks Received: 3,371


Xeno View Post
I don't mean to belittle your point, which is a very good one, but I'd like to go into it in a bit more detail. I am someone who does leave live strats unattended, at least still in touch with me by text/email. I guess I would never be away from them for more than about 4-8 hours.

What you're describing is the worst case, and of course we should always consider the worst case. So, in your example (and leaving aside data feed, platform etc for now), there are some extra things that need to happen.

The downtime needs to be contiguous - i.e. all 17 mins at once. Something bad needs to happen to your position in those 17 mins. If you have a stop on at the exchange, which I always do for this very reason, you'd have to be very unlucky for something bad to happen.

Most of my strats would do very little during a position. Just trail the stop and look for an exit signal. It's not so bad if that doesn't happen for a short while.

My strats typically detect lost connections and act accordingly.

I agree that if your trading is very short term you might get some problems, but you still need a stop and your trades are likely to be lower total risk anyway.

You also mention that unattended isn't wise unless strat is very basic. Not sure I completely agree. Most complex strats I run have their complexity in spotting a setup, and managing a stop. As I said earlier, it's not a huge risk for me if they can't manage a position for 17 mins.

In summary, it's about knowing the worst case, the typical case and deciding whether you accept the risk.

I'll leave you with this. Let's say I have one of these events every six months, and it's a bad one that loses me 200 points. For the rest of those six months, my strats trade while I'm asleep or not working, from UK 11pm to 7am, and 6pm to 10pm. That's a lot of hours over six months, and my strats wouldn't be trading then if I couldn't accept the unattended risk. So, they need to make more than 150 points in all those hours to make the unattended risk worthwhile. Well, if they don't do that easily they're not worth running unattended. Actually the same argument would apply if you spent each afternoon at the beach. You're paying a risk cost to be there.

I trade with Interactive Brokers, and they keep stop/target orders on their servers or at the exchange, but very few brokers do that. For everyone else, your stop/target will be managed by your software on your pc. So, a power outage, internet disconnection, your pc running slow, freezing, crashing, etc., all of these leave your vulnerable. Even if you have code that detects lost connections, during that time, there's nothing your strategy can do other then notify you, if the internet connection was not the culprit.

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  #253 (permalink)
 Xeno 
UK
 
Experience: Intermediate
Platform: Ninja
Broker: Mirus/Zen
Trading: Futures - bonds, currencies, index
Posts: 288 since Oct 2010
Thanks Given: 70
Thanks Received: 274


This is a very useful list, from Ninja, about where orders reside

Where do your orders reside? - [AUTOLINK]NinjaTrader[/AUTOLINK] Support Forum

It appears from that list that with Ninja at least, most working orders are at the exchange.

I guess I've been spoilt having stops always on the exchange - I really wouldn't like them anywhere else for the reasons recently mentioned.

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  #254 (permalink)
 
monpere's Avatar
 monpere 
Bala, PA, USA
 
Experience: Intermediate
Platform: NinjaTrader
Broker: Mirus, IB
Trading: SPY, Oil, Euro
Posts: 1,854 since Jul 2010
Thanks Given: 300
Thanks Received: 3,371


Xeno View Post
This is a very useful list, from Ninja, about where orders reside

Where do your orders reside? - [AUTOLINK]NinjaTrader[/AUTOLINK] Support Forum

It appears from that list that with Ninja at least, most working orders are at the exchange.

I guess I've been spoilt having stops always on the exchange - I really wouldn't like them anywhere else for the reasons recently mentioned.

For me the important phrase of the majority of the entries is: "OCO (One Cancels Other) functionality is simulated on your local PC", this is where you are going to have problems if you loose connection to your pc. Only Interactive Brokers, and TD Ameritrade say: "OCO (One Cancels Other) functionality is natively supported on their servers." With IB, the moment my stop/target bracket order is sent, and I get no errors back, I can leave the trade unattended, the worst that can happen is that my stop loss is hit, with no other unintentional behaviors, whether my local pc is on or not.

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  #255 (permalink)
 Xeno 
UK
 
Experience: Intermediate
Platform: Ninja
Broker: Mirus/Zen
Trading: Futures - bonds, currencies, index
Posts: 288 since Oct 2010
Thanks Given: 70
Thanks Received: 274


monpere View Post
For me the important phrase of the majority of the entries is: "OCO (One Cancels Other) functionality is simulated on your local PC", this is where you are going to have problems if you loose connection to your pc. Only Interactive Brokers, and TD Ameritrade say: "OCO (One Cancels Other) functionality is natively supported on their servers." With IB, the moment my stop/target bracket order is sent, and I get no errors back, I can leave the trade unattended, the worst that can happen is that my stop loss is hit, with no other unintentional behaviors, whether my local pc is on or not.

Well, this is why I think you have to have a particular type of development philosophy when automated trading. You need to work with your software and broker and understand and work around all the things that can go wrong. For example, I don't use OCO very much, since running Ninja in unmanaged mode it's not to difficult to check orders statuses and act accordingly. But when I do, for things like bracketing, I don't put on the stop until I receive conf that the OCO bracket is cancelled. If the connection goes down and OCO doesn't work, I know that the bracket will act as a decent stop and the stop doesn't go on. That's what I mean by working with what you've got. It's not perfect, but it means you're happy you've covered as much as you can, and you're not totally relying on third party software to sort things out.

I think there is a fairly reasonable fear of what happens with your positions when your connection goes down. Since my strats have been designed with this in mind, and I always get notified about it, and can call my broker and check positions and tell them what to leave or close, I don't let this constantly worry me.

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  #256 (permalink)
 
Lornz's Avatar
 Lornz 
Oslo, Norway
 
Experience: Advanced
Platform: CQG, Excel
Trading: CL
Posts: 1,193 since Apr 2010

What I would like to know is why someone would want to use NT at all, much less for automated trading?

Aside from being underfunded, I guess? (I am not trying to be offensive)

Unless the program specifically has it in for me and my experience deviates from the norm, I would argue that it's far too unstable to use for any serious trading. Especially automated!

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  #257 (permalink)
 RM99 
Austin, TX
 
Experience: Advanced
Platform: TradeStation
Trading: Futures
Posts: 839 since Mar 2011
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Lornz View Post
What I would like to know is why someone would want to use NT at all, much less for automated trading?

Aside from being underfunded, I guess? (I am not trying to be offensive)

Unless the program specifically has it in for me and my experience deviates from the norm, I would argue that it's far too unstable to use for any serious trading. Especially automated!

That's the side I haven't seen. All I see is all the functionality I lose with TradeStation (as compared to the Ninja guys) and it leaves me envious. I have skimmed enough threads to get the sense that Ninja has it's drawbacks in reliability though.

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  #258 (permalink)
 Xeno 
UK
 
Experience: Intermediate
Platform: Ninja
Broker: Mirus/Zen
Trading: Futures - bonds, currencies, index
Posts: 288 since Oct 2010
Thanks Given: 70
Thanks Received: 274


Lornz View Post
What I would like to know is why someone would want to use NT at all, much less for automated trading?

Aside from being underfunded, I guess? (I am not trying to be offensive)

Unless the program specifically has it in for me and my experience deviates from the norm, I would argue that it's far too unstable to use for any serious trading. Especially automated!

I think it might be your experience/setup, to an extent. I, and I know one or two others, have run it live for months with no instability. Automated too.

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  #259 (permalink)
 
monpere's Avatar
 monpere 
Bala, PA, USA
 
Experience: Intermediate
Platform: NinjaTrader
Broker: Mirus, IB
Trading: SPY, Oil, Euro
Posts: 1,854 since Jul 2010
Thanks Given: 300
Thanks Received: 3,371


Lornz View Post
What I would like to know is why someone would want to use NT at all, much less for automated trading?

Aside from being underfunded, I guess? (I am not trying to be offensive)

Unless the program specifically has it in for me and my experience deviates from the norm, I would argue that it's far too unstable to use for any serious trading. Especially automated!

I've found NT7 to be much more stable then NT6.5. Where I use to get daily crashes and hangs in NT6.5, in NT7 this occurs less then once a month now. Hopefully it will get continually better with future releases. My main draw to NT is because of the power of C#, and the fact I was able to user the platform for free while developing and proofing my concepts. What platform do you use for automation?

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  #260 (permalink)
 RM99 
Austin, TX
 
Experience: Advanced
Platform: TradeStation
Trading: Futures
Posts: 839 since Mar 2011
Thanks Given: 124
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To veer back toward the original thread intent.....

For all you discretionary guys....

How many times have you said to yourself..."Man I wish I could have gotten in earlier" or "I sure wish I could have gotten out when the signals told me to."

My experience with discretionary was that by the time I had checked, rechecked, TRIPLE checked to ensure my entry criteria were met, the opportunity was either diminished or gone altogether.

The same was true for anything other than basic bracket exits. If I had exit signals based off market action or anything other than a simple OCO.....I always ended up saying....man I wish I'd have gotten out sooner, I'd have kept more profit (or reduced my loss).

If you multiply that concept by the incident rate, times the number of trades, the concept quickly adds up.

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