Woke up this morning to an email from TradeStation that very vaguely said they were transferring all accounts of over to Oanda and you would now have to use their Shitty, non-automated platform instead, but you could still use the TradeStation platform for FREE (OH YAYYYY!!!) Forever on SIM... Who cares! So, to find out exactly what that meant I decided to get a hold of their live chat people... Turns out for whatever reason, come March 1st TradeStation will no longer be servicing Forex accounts PERIOD. Oanda is taking over the roughly 2000 accounts, which is way less than I thought they would have. I've emailed the creator of the robots to find out what his solution is and he says he's got the robots already made for MetaTrader 4 and he is testing them to find out if they are exactly the same now... After having taken as long as I have to get used to TradeStation, I really love it. It just feels like a well crafted machine with lots of useful bells and whistles... At least with TradeStation I know I have the option of getting email alerts and having it actually work.... This has been a ridiculously long and frustrating experience... From taking months to actually get the details to these robots, to actually purchasing them, to getting them running correctly (Thanks to an error made by the seller), to testing them on sim and realizing there are problems... to finally being ready to put a real $20,000 account to use.... and finding out that literally the month I want to go live with them, the platform they are created for won't be usable anymore... Here is Scott's video update. Good news either way.
Finally have the bike fixed up. I took some time today to polish the head light, clean the exhaust pipe and repaint some things that needed painted. On top of that, while I was fixing the bike out in a parking spot in front of the apartment, out of nowhere a red pickup truck with an older bearded guy pulled up and handed me a business card and told me "If you ever need any work done I work on sport bikes." I thought to myself "What the hell is this guy doing here??" Well, turns out he lives in this complex and was told he can no longer work on his bike on the complex property because he leaves a mess... My maintenance guy came running up telling me that this guy video taped me working on the bike and sent it in to the office. What an asshole. I always clean up after myself, and this lazy person who doesn't has to ruin it for me. Either way, if I want to wash my bike, I'm gonna do it. If I need work done on my bike, I'm going to do it...
As far as the trading goes, I have started running the portfolio on my high performance rig at the same time and have noticed that my older computer has internet problems that my rig doesn't have. I will probably be switching over to just this rig for trading the portfolio. Possibly spending some money to have a newer dedicated rig just for the trading portfolio... but we'll see. After expenses and everything in the last 7 months, I've got about $21,000 total to trade with. Spending on dental crap and all that necessities I have turned out to be more expensive than I wanted. There is a truck wash in town that is hiring between $12.50-$15.00/hr. That would easily enable me to put consistent capital into the business. That's all for now.
On January 1st I started my 10 robot portfolio and ran it until midnight the 31st. I started with no experience on the Tradestation platform and came across a few hiccups during my month of learning, which cost my simulated account a substantial negative impact. I started with $10,000 and ended the month down $242.33 to finish at $9757.67 Now, that's only a 2.4% loss for the month, which is't bad at all really, but when compared to the results that it should have been, the discrepancy is a little unsettling.
If you look at the far right totals for both the real and reported month end, you'll see that the strategy that was actually running produced a profit of $42.69 while the backtest result (performed at the end of the month) reported a $36.92 loss. How did the actual performance have me losing $242.33 when the live running strategy actually reported a $42.69 gain? Let me introduce you to TradeStation's quirks. For whatever reason (perhaps the performance capabilities of the computer I'm running things on, mixed with internet instability) at one point the strategy was giving trade signals that the platform was not executing... So that generates trades on the chart that never happen in real life. There were also problems that kept the strategy from generating trades that it should have as well. Those are the two reasons for the discrepancies. One quirk I have noticed on my dedicated desktop is that when I load up TradeStation portfolio, there are almost always problems with the strategies initializing. I will have indicators not load on the chart, so I will have to disable and re-enable them before the platform recognizes the Robot. This problem has not cropped up on my more powerful desktop in the office, but I use that for many other things (Such as testing) and don't want to run the portfolio on that machine.
I do have a handy method in place for helping me keep track of the platforms performance. I have text messages setup to tell me when the strategy fills an order, and I know to expect another text immediately that says TradeStation filled the order as well. If I don't get that text, something is wrong and I need to go check the platform. Anyways, my present conclusion is that the robots do perform as described and advertised in execution terms, give or take a few dollars here and there. I will more than likely be running these robots on a small live account soon with 10 times smaller positions just to see if live money execution is drastically different than simulated positions. In the mean time, I have also decided to optimize these robots in accordance to the previous 5 years of market conditions. These robots were developed from roughly 2003 to 2007 to perform in this time period. I'd like to optimize them for the last 5 years and see how they do in earlier years. I can understand ones apprehension to fiddle with something that works, but I think a lot of that has to do with a lack of confidence or ability in ones own mind. These robots do very simple things: They use Moving averages to determine trend, and then use Relative Strength of the current market to identify a good time to enter and sometimes exit. There are many useful variables in the programming to take advantage of, but my point is they arrived at their current profitability through the same work I am going to be doing to modernize them for the current time period: Hours and hours of testing and paying close attention to the response of inputs tested. So far I have about 4 of the robots producing more profit with the same or less drawdown. It's something I will continue to work on for a very long time and perhaps as long as I am a robotic trader. I love data, and this beats manual testing any day. As far as my non-trading life goes, I am now rocking a pink cast which will be removed in 6 weeks, No surgery required thankfully. My new tail section is arriving on the 10th and I'm dying to get back on the bike. I'll have to rig my cast up somehow to make sure it will not slip off the right peg. My new left side peg is here and ready to be installed. I'm going to the cinema-pub for valentines day to watch Zoolander 2! I will be back in the gym rocking it very very soon! Turns out the bus isn't so bad at all :)
