Welcome to NexusFi: the best trading community on the planet, with over 150,000 members Sign Up Now for Free
Genuine reviews from real traders, not fake reviews from stealth vendors
Quality education from leading professional traders
We are a friendly, helpful, and positive community
We do not tolerate rude behavior, trolling, or vendors advertising in posts
We are here to help, just let us know what you need
You'll need to register in order to view the content of the threads and start contributing to our community. It's free for basic access, or support us by becoming an Elite Member -- see if you qualify for a discount below.
-- Big Mike, Site Administrator
(If you already have an account, login at the top of the page)
Trading 2 markets with a bot (ES, CL) - 50K Combine Journal
I am new to Futures trading in general, but I want to keep a log here of how this goes. I have a degree in Finance and am currently almost completed with a CPS degree. So I've mixed my abilities and made a simple bot that I am day trading a very small sim account with for the next month.
After this month is complete I am going to try out TST and see about getting a funded account from there. The idea of the bot is simple, it uses customized price oscillation and some different momentum indicators to trigger Long or Short positions. The sim account I am using only has 1,000 in it because this is about how much I would risk if I were to fund myself :P
Anyway this will be my 4th day using the bot so I thought I would catch up.
The first day I was confident enough to run the bot was an absolute gold mine, I played only 3 markets and won 6 trades and lost 1. My Profit Target was set at 25 ticks and stop loss at 20 ticks. In 2 hours I had doubled my account balance (well close) to $1,958. I obviously was beyond stoked that not only something I programmed was working, but it was working well. I stopped trading for the day and ran some additional backtesting and saw my win historical win rate was under 50%. I wasn't really sure what was causing it to say that so I decided to give it another day.
Day 2(Monday):
Starting with double my money I was feeling good and ready to see magic happen again. Unfortunately it didn't go as planned, the bot got stuck upside down in a trend essentially and would short and stop out almost instantly as it was shorting a strong upward trend, and it did this 3 times in less than 30 minutes... This malfunction put me back into the 1,400 range, I won all of my long trades but the short trades seemed to be a huge problem. I halted trading and made some script adjustments since the bot was taking short positions where it shouldn't, and made it so the bot almost never shorts now. Making these slight changes boosted my strategy to a historic win rate of 68% in backtesting. These slight adjustments increased my profitability historically by over 20%! With the new bot ready I cut my losses on day 2 and got ready to try it out the next day.
Day 3(Tuesday):
On day 3 my bot was not taking positions as often and only had 6 trades for an 8 hour trading period (I know you aren't supposed to trade for 8 hours, but this is all going into calculation for what days/times are historically good for the strategy which I will implement into the bot once I start TST) The win rate was exceptional however on 6 trades I had 5 winners and 1 loser. So even after my losing day 2 I was back up to around 1800 after day 3.
Day 4(Wednesday):
Going to get a little more in detail today since I got to end my trading session a bit early.
Starting off this morning I tried doing a few of my own trades outside of the bot which put the account down about $250 bucks. I turned the bot on and decided to compare results. The bot went 5/2 today. If you take out my Tuesday altogether the bot is 14/4. This is seriously insane if it keeps up like this. Breaking my trades down per market.
ES 03-17:
1. Around 10:45 the bot got its first Long indicator. I entered in 1 contract at 2386 and hit my profit target by 11:30 at 2392.25.
2. Around 12:50 the bot got another Long indicator and entered in at 2396.50. Hit profit target 2399.5 by 2:20. This was my own call honestly or I'd still be in this position. Momentum had died and I know there is resistance at 2400. It's trying to break it now but I was impatient and up on the day and closed the position a few ticks early.
Overall the bot went 2-0 on ES.
NQ 03-17:
1.) The bot tried going long in the early AM at 5361.5 but the pullback wasn't completed yet, it was stopped out at 5356.5. Then the bot took a long position almost instantly at 5357.25 and hit my profit target 20 minutes later.
2.) At around 12:45 the bot entered another long position at 5388.50 and hit its profit target by 2:20, same as the S&P.
Overall the bot was 2-1
YM 03-17:
1.) The bot actually had no signals at all today here. Naturally I got impatient and tried a trade and was stopped out.
Overall the bot was 0-0 and my personal trade was 0-1.
GC 04-17:
1.) This was a fun one to watch today. Lots of volatility but limited signals from the bot. I tried making a scalp short in the AM, but got stopped out... I would essentially have $300 more in the account if I wouldnt have done my own trades today.
2.) The bots first signal to buy was around Noon. I got in at 1245.9 and hit my profit target at 1248.4 around 1:20. It then tried trading the trend again and went long at 1249.6 but the magic time of 2 o clock hit and it stopped out.
Overall the bot was 1-1 and I was 0-1.
To sum up today it went awesome! The account currently rests at $2,100.
Updated the inital thread to reflect todays trading. I am not sure if I am supposed to bump at EOD or not. Hope everyone else had a successful Wednesday! The account is up over $2,000 as of now. Also updated the Imgur post with the most recent graph. Thanks
The bot is programmed in C# in NinjaTrader (NinjaScript).
Im assuming you mean ML as for MetaTrader scripting language? Or am I misinterpreting this?
I have been optimizing this bot for awhileeee so I'm not going to get into too many specifics as of now. Of course this is sim trading so contracts may not be filled right away in a real account, which could skew some results. What I can tell you about the bot is it is focused entirely on if a stock is overbought or oversold on a 1 minute chart. All it is is a bunch of nested If Else statements that when criteria is met, executes methods within the NinjaTrader API.
Additionally I have reached my 5 post minimum and have posted the links in my OP.
Terrible terrible terrible day today. Although it was a great learning experience. (This is why we use sim accounts with new strats first :P)
The markets were disgustingly bearish today, and the bot continued to try and trade against the trend. I have two new ideas to prevent this... For example I could just use SMA or EMA and say if the last bar is under the 200 period MA and a long position triggers, don't do it unless its above. Vice versa for shorts? Alternatively, I could use the ADX and incorporate that to detect the trend and just have the bot never trade against the trend. Im going to run both tonight and see which one yields better results. Does anyone else have any experience with this?
I didnt know you couldnt edit original post this long after posting... So here is the update. (I was wondering why everyone was doing seperate posts each day!)
Cheers!
Day 5 (Thursday):
Don't even want to talk about today. I went to lunch and left my computer on at work running the bot. I had disabled the auto stop part of the script as I had coded a few parts wrong of it and of course Gold had to do what it did today :P The bot did the same thing it did on Monday except opposite, Gold was showing a heavy bearish trend and the bot continuously was going long in it. I learned a lot in this first week of trading futures and know where I have to go from here and I believe it is going to entail using ADX because I think it is impossible to not for this reason.. Either way here is a breakdown: NQ:
All I want to say here is OW. The bot did 1/4 here and the disappointment started early. I normally start the bot around 8:30 so it can collect previous data and start calculating things before the 930 open move. However today the bot saw a buy signal at around 8:50and went long at 5392.25. I wasn't paying much attention seeing as I am at work and have other things to do :P As soon as markets opened everything came crashing downthe bot stopped out instantly and then entered another time long and was stopped out instantly again. Sometimes I think the bot has feelings as it went long again right afterwards AGAIN! This time it finally hit the target so I was able to minimize losses on the opening two trades. As the day progressed everything continued to fall, the bot saw some potential for another long position at 10:45 but of course we dropped over 30 ticks and I was stopped out at 20. I realized at this point I was all done trading NQ for the day and halted my trading.
Note: I need some sort of trend indicator to prevent this from happening. Im debating making it so wether I go long or short the previous bar has to be over the sma200 on top of my other criteria to go long and under to go short, this would have prevented a lot of havoc today but I am going to do more backtesting on this later.
YM:
YM was pretty terrible today too the bot went 2/4 with it today. Same story as NQ in the AM we got an early signal 930 came along and 2 stop losses hit and 1 target hit. 10:45 came it went long twice and stopped out twice during lunch and on the last contract we went in at 21043 at 12:30 and got a lucky 230 reversal to hit our profit target of 21068. I figured it was about time to halt trading there as well since I was having no luck keeping bullish positions on anything.
ES:
ES went 1/1 on trades. The bot entered a short a 10:30 for 2388.50 and hit its first profit target at 11:10 at 2385.75. The second trade I thought was going to hit the target then it tanked so I cut my losses before my stop loss and just got out... Was kind of over everything today and just wanted to lick my wounds and wait until tomorrow.
GC:
GC went 1/3 today with the three losses coming in at lunch time when I was gone and not watching the price just absolutely tank! Went long at 1240.9 stopped at 1238.9 went long again stopped at 1236.8 and again at 1237.3 to stop at 1235.5... Miserable. the madness finally stopped when at took a position at around 1:30and just now hit my profit target.
Overall today was terrible went 5W/11L. The account now sits at 1,400. I have updated the Imgur and am in the process of doing the spreadsheet. Any advice on how to improve would be greatly appreciated and considered when I do my optimizations to the bot.
Today was another all around losing today except for ES. Focused more on bot optimization and debug logging... Stepping through the code and making sure everything works. I added A LOT of code last night and spent about 15 hours of my day doing it lol so today was more optimization than trading.
Here is an interesting optimization. I ran all of my scripts parameters through the optimizer for the first time today. These parameters I think I will be using in my TST attempt. It doesn't trade very often but holy crap the historical return is amazing! This is ES only... I think I am going to optimize each market separately!
I am having an absolute blast doing this! Hope to learn more and more with each day I mess with this
Today's Journal is going to be limited as it was mostly a test day for me. I changed up my script a lot to include timeframes and debug messages. I am really trying to make sure everything is solid. I am willing to share my progress to anyone who is interested and has programming experience. I am an amateur programmer tbh so it would be nice to collab
Next week will be the last week of optimization, before TST. If anyone has any hints, tips or tricks to conquer the 50K challenge feel free to let me know! Otherwise see you guys on Monday!
good luck traders!
went 5W/11L. The account now sits at 1,400. I have updated the Imgur and am in the process of doing the spreadsheet. Any advice on how to improve would be greatly appreciated and considered when I do my optimizations to the bot.