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We are developing a strategy that, so far, has shown promise. However, we are having trouble getting around spread commissions. We're curious what type of performance others are looking for in a "good" strategy so that we can start to understand how this strategy compares.
At first glance, we were happy with the performance analysis...until I realized that after commissions we are essentially at break even regardless of the decent performance results. The image shown is for 4 months of market replay on USDJPY and I am calculating commissions based on a constant spread of 1.4p. All trades are sized at 1 lot.
So my questions stands, how good does a strategy need to be in order to beat commissions evilness? Placing just 1.85 trades per day on average has earned me total spread commissions nearly equal to my net profit for 4 months. Your thoughts are appreciated.
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
If you didn't (over)optimize the system before, the results are not bad.
One of your next steps could be a deeper look into the MAE / MFE profile of your trades.
Average losses are (very) high compared with the average wins.
If you can cut some relatively large losing trades without losing too many of your winners,
that could solve much of your commission problem.
I heard one time a good rule of thumb was to have a minimum average trade of greater than $50 usd after slippage and commission. This was for intraday systems. Makes sense to me as a hurdle.
Thanks for your comments. There is no back testing optimization done here. I will look into improving the MAE/MFE profiles. I can limit the risk a bit more, and possibly take more profits, but that will decrease the 80%+ accuracy that I enjoy seeing. No free lunch right?
Xiaosi, very good point. In fact, exactly half of these trades are simply breaking even with themselves after commissions by design. I will need to take more profit than that.
Would it make a difference to trade a different instrument or market? I haven't looked into it much, but I know that I could get lower commissions with a similar return if I trade stocks because I can get a flat fee of $10 round trip vs the $30 I am paying for FX. Any insight on how futures commissions would compare? Or another instrument?
Here's how I think about this in my mind. All strategies can be plotted on a grid with probability on the x axis, and average win/average loss on the y axis. The center of the graph will be 50% for probability, and 1 for where your average win is equal to your average loss. Something like this:
The further away from the center of the grid we get, the less common that trade is. We don't want our strategy to be too far from the center or we won't make as much due to too many trades. We also can't be too close to the center or we lose money on commissions.
Most strategies that work for retail traders fall along the two axises:
The first group follows the Y axis. These are strategies where your average win is twice as big as your average loss or more. Such trades could have a probability between 35-55% win rate. Such strategies tend to be more trend based as in order to make twice as much as your risk you'll have to catch some sort of trending move.
The other group follows the X axis with trades that have a higher probability. These are scalping or mean revision types of strategies. These trades tend to have a probability of between 60-80%. The average profit / average loss should probably be above .5, although I suggest looking for trades where the risk/reward are equal.
There's also the big banks area. These trades are probably unicorns, but certainly exist. If you have a trade like this you probably trade someone else's money.
So you fit more in the scalping type of category, but you're just under the break even line. Your average loss compared to your average win is too high. I suggest trying to get that ratio closer to 1:1.
That's an awesome graphical representation of the problem and how to work towards solving it. Thank you very much for the good input, Yes, mathematically you're absolutely correct in that we should be at 1:1 for the accuracy we're seeing in order to make it out of the commissions band in your area plot. I think that this is a good generalization--much better than simply trying to trade an instrument or market with lower commissions.
ShatteredX,
Slippage is set to 2p which is fairly realistic, so it's the commissions that are troubling. The performance numbers will be the same after commissions are added, but the net profit will be much less. This tells me that it has potential, but needs some work in the win:loss ratio as others have pointed out in this thread.
$10 per round trip? sounds expensive, unless you are trading 1000s on units per trade?
"Free markets work because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or incentives for skill. The strategy is, then, to tinker as much as possible and try to collect as many Black Swan opportunities as you can"
That's the commissions fee for TradeStation. Either .01/share or flat 5 bucks. I wouldn't be interested in trading less than 500 shares for the sub $300/share stocks that I follow, so 5 bucks in and 5 bucks out is the better deal. Which platform allows you to trade 500+ shares for less than that? I haven't looked around much yet.
