In the last 2 weeks, something interesting did happen.
I felt compelled to stop my system while I was analyzing the last 24h results because trades are happening faster than I have the time analyze them 2 times in a row.
the last 2 system versions did introduce substantial changes;
the fact that I still find ways to significantly improve the system while at the same time the number of generated trades is increasing might be a precursor that in a near distant future, the generated income might start to be interesting...
For at least 3 weeks,
I have been fixing bugs and shortcomings in the new code... I am getting very close to getting to something that works consistently...
It is about time as I am starting experiencing issues with my bank...
This is causing me to feel some stress and anxiety... which is not totally a bad thing... Feeling the urgency of succeeding allows my brain to be very clever about what is important and what is not...
This is giving me also an adrenaline boost making me a bit more productive...
maybe this was the small push that I was needing to finally make it...
last friday, I spent the whole day tracking down a problem that a new feature did introduce...
it has been fixed and using it has shown that, after all, it was not helping at all...
I am about to write a version 2 using a totally new feature... yesterday and today, I have taking care of all the boilerplate code. Feature is ready. Now, it is just a matter to code the logic on top of it.
Concerning last week feature... not all is lost... It is a great functionality. In fact, I have already found another opportunity to use it somewhere else... What it really is... it is a new tool to add into my tool set.
I am confident that it will eventually by handy at some point...
Now, I have 2 thoughts about the current events...
markets are still very quiet beside the occasional jump... This is not good for trading performance...
My new strategies are still not fully reliable. They provide inconsistent results... The code keep seeing new unpredicted scenarios that result into a poor trade result... Well, this is to be expected... and everytime that I spot a new issue, it is fixed and should never happen again...
I have introduced a bunch of small regressions into the code. Again, I guess that this is a normal side-effect of developing a lot of new code... What is important is that those regressions are spotted and fixed quickly which is the case... It feels a lot like a dance... 2 steps forward... 1 step back and on and on and on... So overall, the project is progressing...
I am not confident enough yet to crank up the trading budget all the way... the performance is still too erratic but I am hopeful that I should be in position to do so very soon...
One such regression that I have witnessed yesterday is the following. I have a mean reversal strategy that should be triggered by 2 different signals...
Yesterday, 2 market orders worth close to 10 million USD to buy bitcoin has attracted my attention. This is quite an exceptional event... Well, such event should have triggered the strategy and it did not... As of now, this is still a mystery but on the bright side, the issue is now on my radar... I suspect that this thing is broken for at least a week but the system is generating so much activity that this detail did escape me...
Spotting all those issues can really be attributed to luck and I have a lot of it these days... as all the small issues comes in front of me one after the other... the way things are happening is very fluid...
all I want now, is to be able to generate a decent income from all the work that I have put into the project and it needs to happen soon...
idk why this has not happened yet... I feel like there is a part of the answer that is external. I cannot control the market conditions...
the other part of the explanation is within me... The way I manage priorities... what I decide to put in front of my attention and so on...
I still have the feeling that I am very very close to a working and profitable system...
volume and volatility are still not present...
I am impressed to realize that pretty much since my last entry, I have been witnessed about 5-16 new issues per DAY...
Every time I am fixing all these bugs, this encourage me thinking that the system will finally work as expected... only to discover new issues the day after...
When I find some new idea and the prototype that the idea has potential... the potential seems to fade away as I polish the prototype...
this is weird... I do not want to believe this idea too much but I start to wonder if there is not some sort of external force that makes it easy for some to achieve some goal while for others, it is going to be extremely hard or impossible... Some sort of destiny that cannot or difficultly overcome the planned outcome.
On an optimist note, the market conditions are hard to navigate right now... I guess that a system that can thrive in those hard conditions will do wonders during favorable conditions...
Yesterday, the system was super quiet... this did allow me to move forward a new feature that I have in mind for some time... it is about to become reality...
but at the end of the day, I got interrupted by a bunch of trades that did not go well. I had to stop developing the new feature to analyze the logs.
all in all, a lot of good things came out of this work session...
but I am looking forward seeing it generating a good stream of income...
I have just completed a new feature...
this one is a flash that did pop out in my mind out of nowhere last week.
it took me few days to find the right way to implement it...
there a small voice, perhaps coming from my intuition, that was telling me that this was something important to do...
I am not sure yet if it was a valid intuition or not but completing this new feature has been very satisfying...
also, with September ending, it seems like volatility is finally about to return in the markets which will be good for my system...
to follow up my last entry, the previous addition is definitely an improvement... Now, it remains to be seen if it is going to make a difference on the bottomline or not...
Markets are still sleeping or in lethargy...
I have got few negative thoughts in the last day or 2...
The most likely explanation for my failures is very bad timing...
right now, if there is a financial crisis just around the next corner, it is quite possible that this is explaining why market are drying up some time before the crisis hit...
A little bit like the water is pulling back just before a tsunami hit land....
I am having a hard time to rationalize that the 4-5 times that I have came up with a very profitable trading system, it did only work for about 3 weeks before stopping to work...
It happens once, ok... shit happens... twice, you are very unlucky....
when you reach a succession of 4,5 times in a row... well, it is not impossible but as the successive failures pile up, this become a more and more improbable event...
I have imagined some imaginary scenarios... What if, the market feed was in fact only a simulation controlled by AI... Some sort of video game where the difficulty level increase automatically and adapt to what you are doing... This is a crazy idea... but how can you validate that it is not the case? is my bot observed by a competitor? How? beside from an insider from the exchange... I do not see how this could happen... but I know that some exchanges have a trading desk... Is there really an opaque wall between the trading desk and the exchange activity?
this is theoretically not impossible but highly improbable... I had the thought... and now I want to shake it out of my mind...
that being said, I have created a new trend following system... this has given me the opportunity to improve my framework so that it is easy to swap 1 system with another one...
As I have more and more indicators coded in my toolbox and that the framework is getting better to introduce new systems, I expect that the time it takes to go from 1 idea to a prototype will become very short allowing me to test more ideas in a shorter period of time... This is certainly a good thing to reach success.
my new trading system got his first run last night...
it did not go well... beside the first trade, all the other trades were losses...
The system seems also to be too much happy trigger
(A high quality problem. It allows you to be more picky in entry conditions)
I felt like crap and almost ready to throw the towel for now on my project as it did not receive any positive progress signs for some time...
However, I spent the whole day doing a postmortem analysis and things aren't as bad as I initially thought.
In fact, the analysis did allow me to uncover yet few new issues that have never been visible to my analysis before...
With them fixed, my impression is that the new system does not fully suck and might even good after some fine tuning...
I am almost done with all my fixing. I should restart my system soon... So, possibly later this evening or tomorrow morning, I hope to get encouraging results at last...
this is a totally possible scenario...
despite trading volume remaining quite thin, Price action is getting a little bit more volatile so this is another positive sign...
Second run has been horrible. It made a couple of nasty issues resurface...
but it is ok... it is another opportunity to fix my code and make it better... 3rd run can only be better...
I am somehow optimist that something good will come out of this new system because it generates a lot of signals...
I just need to make sure that most of the false positives are filtered correctly...
run #3 and run #4 went horribly bad...
with these results, I'll probably not keep the last system. It has at best a 50% success rate...
those YT videos that have titles like '10X better than this classical indicator' are a bit misleading...
sure, you can dig market data to find that one time for which it did superbly well to showcase the system but it is by far representative of how good it will perform in general...
However, it did allow me to test the rest of the framework in new ways and it did force me to improve it
it has also improve my understanding on how you can use off the shelves indicators to bake in pullbacks in an elegant and simple way for better entry points.
So all in all, it was a positive experience... Now, I am in the process of implementing my next system...
I made a 5th run while I am busy building my next system...
definitely it sucks... However, I got an 'ah ah' moment.
Maybe it is my method to confirm the volume by checking the volume...
I got a good idea to improve that aspect...
Framework is starting to paying off dividends... Since this morning,
I have been able to code 3 new indicators and I have almost completed integrating a new trading system...
If I can speed up the time it takes to build a new system, this will allow me to make a lot of experiments until I find a good system that works.
The time target is half a day... If I could try out a new system each day, that would rock. I think that this is quite possible to achieve...
Once my indicator library will full of indicators and I do not need to spend time to code new ones, I guess that it will be possible.
I have stopped counting the runs...
most of them have not been very good... The major issue is that trade signals are followed even when volume is clearly too low to confirm the signal...
The system description only says that when volume is above average, this is your confirmation. That might be enough in fx trading or stock market or any other traditional market...
but in crypto, beside maybe on the top 3 exchanges... Above average is not enough because in most markets, the volume is very low... I have kept raising the bar on which my system only consider signals above it...
maybe I am too conservative or too prudent in raising the bar as I have kept being bitten by the invalid signals due to unrecognized low volume...
but now, since the last time that I have rise the volume bar, the signals have become a desert... Beside last week-end because of extreme geopolitical events, the trading volume has been very low...
but the work around this last system did made me make some fundamental realizations... Those realizations are really going to pay off down the road...
Beside that, the refactoring driven by the need of the latest trading system did made me uncover 2 very small bugs. They were small but very serious in terms of their impact on the overall accuracy of the system.
One is very recent. It got introduced in the last week when I wrote the last system code... The other one has been lurking for much more time... I estimate it to have been around for at least 4 months...
Seeing it and fixing it has been a great catch... I have deployed the fix this morning... Alas, due to low volume, I have not yet noticed any improvements... but I am sure it will... It was in part responsible for the bad performance of my last system...
I really wonder if those 2 small bugs are just some random honest mistakes or if they are part of some unconscious sabotage... I guess that I will never know... and my project keeps moving forward...
hey...
I am still here... I am still using UMS...
Since my last journal entry, a lot of things did happen...
First, the markets have awaken from their lull. It makes everything much easier... Trending action is stronger and longer...
This is something that I have voiced as early as first week of October... I did not let go that dream...
Once I reach the throughput of testing 5 new systems per week... It is only a matter of time before I stumble on home runners...
A lot of new understanding in my trading craft have been acquired...
I am starting to put in place a framework that allows me to create new trading systems in half a day or less...
I am not there yet... my last developed system took about 2 days but I am confident that I will be getting there soon as my framework gain maturity...
The system that I was working on late September/early October was not that good but playing with it did allow me to perfect tremendously all the code monitoring an open position
The last 3 that I have worked on appears to be better... Still need some more time to validate the resulting success rate and the average PNL with them and once I am confident that they provide reliable performance, I will crank up their trading budget to generate some decent income...
I have many consecutive days with positive results... Unfortunately, this is only with toy budget... we are talking few dollars of profit... but it does not make a difference 5% wether it is on a $100 budget or a $5000 dollars budget, it is the same... Once you are able to be confident to generate a daily 5% profit consistently, there is no reason to not be able to repeat it with a bigger budget...
but maybe this is my ultimate challenge... Overcome the fear of loss... It is not impossible that I am too prudent right now...
Beside the trading project... October and November have been rough emotionally...
Few relations with family members did turn sour...
It is weird how I feel being treated... I am very rational and reasonable... Logically, I have done nothing wrong...
I have accepted helping my ex on her request... not sure what I was expecting in return. A thank you would have been nice but instead I got a burst of anger... with a bunch of unrelated accusations of wrong doing... I feel this is unfair... I feel unappreciated... She has broken her words to assist me on a task she did promise to help me with...
so all in all, she is treating me like shit in an unacceptable way... This is an asymitrical relation... where she keep asking and asking favors regarding the kids and for the rare occasions that it is my turn to ask for assistance, she just kinda just disappear and even not have the decency to explain me the reason and apologize for it...
For one, if it was not for the link that I have with that person with the kids, I would simply remove her from the list of people that I have want to relate with...
I am not too sure what to think about all of this... I have a great sense for treating others fairly and with respect and I feel that the more you are like that, the more you attract ugly people that will attempt to take advantage of you...
I really wonder if the UMS auric shield are making them feel bad for what they try to do to me...
I have even attempted to calmly expose my position with written communication... my communication did remain unanswered... I feel no desire from the other party to resolve the situation...
so, oh well I am giving up...
now, It is not a question of if... but of when... that she will have another favor to ask... I will definitely not be in the mood of being cooperative with her needs...
yesterday, I sent out an email to do affiliate marketing...
I just made 2 sales and I got over $500 commission... it has been a while since the last time a good mailing like that did happen to me....
the funny thing is that I made a silly error. I forgot to change the subject line which was talking about a new method to orgasm and the body was promoting supplements to help with enlarged prostate...
markets have been super quiet this week. In fact, pretty much the thanksgiving week-end... I expect maybe some more action with the new month beginning tomorrow...
@
lano1106 How long have you been running UMS2 now?