I am going to start stage 2 tonight.
I have been tired for the whole week but I think that I have finally nailed why... Exactly 1 week ago, I started a new can of coffee and I did purchase decaf by mistake...
I would not have expected that I was getting such an energy boost from coffee but apparently, I do...
Now, some good news. After about a 1 week trading dry spell, my system did experienced a trading burst that lasted about 1h today. It made about 60 small trades (about $5K in volume). Surprise surprise, I would have though that it is the bitcoin short squeeze that would have made my system trade BTC but, apparently what was hot for the system was XRP... go figure... I haven't heard anything special about XRP this morning in the news...
Correction: the 60 trades did not occur in a 1h period but in a 15 seconds window! (and every single trade has been profitable!)
Congrats on the trading software! That's really cool. I have a friend who made himself very wealthy right out of college simply by writing a program for trading Forex. He basically had so much money coming in each month from that, that he got bored and went to work for entertainment and to socialize. I think you can probably do the same sooner or later.
thx for the kind words Shannon.
What I am doing is basically participating in an arms race. As my system is getting better, the competition gets wiser as well. If I had the system I have now last year, I would be making a lot. Last year trading conditions were more chaotic than they are today...
Correct that getting money is not an end by itself but I don't think that I will ever get bored with it. There is so much things to build and improve in this world. Money would only enhance the scale of what is possible.
One step at a time. I'm not yet at the stage of making too much money. I'm at a step where I am very close to complete a feature that I have imagined for the first time 1 year ago and I am progressing at a snail pace as if something was resisting from reaching that important milestone...
I am preparing for stage 2 and I have just noticed that I did use the Masked version of stage 1 during the whole stage while I intended to use the Hybrid version...
Stage 2, day 9
Usually, based on my previous multi-stage programs experience, stage switching is exciting.
Not with UMSv2 stage 2. It is pretty much uneventful... So much quiet that it is as if I was not using a program... I usually feel changes. I'm not feeling any changes occuring with stage 2.
Hence this might explain that there is no entry in my journal for more than a week...
I felt the urge to increase the daily # of loops. I think that I went from the prescribed # to currently 6 loops.
Maybe it works better than I think. With previous programs, I was able to consciously listen to the track. With UMS, because I listen to it when I go to bed, maybe the program puts me in some sort of trance. I only consciously hear few minutes before falling deeply in sleep and when I wake up, the loops have long been completed.
I am almost done with integrating margin trading into my arbitrage strategy that I said last month would take at most few days. What remains to be dealt with is like a surgery in a very complex system. I have yet to find an elegant way to integrate the feature without having to change everything and keeping things as intuitive as possible. At the same time, as I revisit old code that I wrote 1 years ago, it is as if I was modifying code of a stranger. I need relearn all the small nuance of that part of the code...
I definitely have horrible time management skills. I have to remind myself to rerun BASE some time soon. I remember that this program was beneficial to me in that regard. At the beginning of the week, I got insight from some Linux kernel dev that was applying a qualifier to the function declarations of his module to indicate to the compiler if the function was hot or cold.
If it is cold, the compiler optimize the code size and place all the cold functions together. If the function is hot, the compiler optimize as much as possible for performance and place all hot functions together. This leverage the locality principle. Since all hot functions are close to each other, they are more likely to be found in the CPU cache as they are the most often called functions. The Linux kernel dev did claim a 3% performance increase from this simple change.
I felt the urge to apply this idea to my own project. This has been a titanesque effort that took me the whole week. I have yet to see if it makes any difference in the system performance as I have just installed the result before writing this journal entry. I will know if it was worth the effort or if it was a waste of time when I'll see the system reaction time with the new change baked in.
I have a good feeling. The main lib size went from 22MB to 20MB. And CPU usage of the thread executing the hot path appears to have decreased by half. I like this part of me. Despite having a plan, I remain open and receptive to unexpected opportunities that may help me to achieve my goal.
About a month ago, I did tell a bit about my personal life where the shit hits the fan. (SHTF). One of my grief was a small rodent of my kids that I got attached to during lockdowns that was becoming sick. It has a regain of vitality for the last few weeks but it started to get bad again and I decided to call a vet.
During pandemy, normal clinics have long wait list. I got refered to a clinic specialized in emergencies. You can bring your animal ASAP but the price is much higher. I have called and by learning the price, I felt some hesitancy. I liked what did happen next. I did ask myself the following question: If money was not a concern what would I do? If my trading system was generating few hundreds of dollars of profit every day, what would I do?
The thing to do following that question became crystal clear. So I took an appointment with the vet.
Last week has been horrible in terms of activity and profit. Almost nothing. This is really testing my faith in the project... I'll see what I will do once the trading marging feature is done. Hopefully, this will make the situation more easy to be optimist.
Finally, on a totally unrelated note, the $4,000 DOT investment I made few weeks ago while on UMS is still great. I bought it at $25 and it is now at $36 so my $4000 investment is now worth over $5000. On top of that, I was not a big DOT staking fan due to its complexity. You have no idea how complex it is. You need to bond your funds. Next, you have to nominate up to 16 validators. But now, that I have done it. I need to say that it wasn't that bad and with $4000 of DOT (120), this gives me a $2 reward per day. If I get it right this is 18% API!
So far, UMS seems to work but not where I was expecting it to work... It is working in my "sidequests"...
Stage 2, day 15:
After 2 weeks of struggling, I am about to complete the margin trading feature. At last, the design is finally clear in my head. I initially estimated to few days the time it would take to do it...
A more or less 2 weeks long dry spell has finally been broken. I was starting to panic seeing that the system profit did abruptly halt. This made me doubt about my capacity to reach financial success and about UMS potential to help. Then I went to wonder if anyone in the forum did actually experience major financial breakthrough while listening to UMS. AFAIK, there is none...
This did really help me eliminate the dark thoughts to see the trading dry spell finish... With major price movement in markets, I expect some turbulence soon that my system needs to perform well...
Plus I got few more ideas of improvements...
Last week, I felt tired for the most part of the week. If it is resistance fatigue, that would be a first to feel it delayed. That is a week after the new stage has started...
Stage 2, day 19:
Stage 2 is very hard to me.
After feeling tired, I started a cold Friday. I went to bed early to break it fast. I thought that I would get away from it but no... I started having a soar throat yesterday and today, I have my 2 feet in it.
Is it parts of me who are resisting UMS?
Maybe, I still got distracted away from completing the margin trading feature. Last optimizations round did nothing in terms of making the system trade more but it did change a bunch of internal timing and this did awake a latent bug that have been there for some time.
I spend the whole day yesterday to track it down. I'm quite happy to have finally nailed it... I feel a compulsion to fix bugs when I know one is around... It was maybe not a high priority problem...
I am probably a day away from completing the margin trading feature... No more excuses. I need finish that. I have been talking about it for too long...
Stage 2, day 22:
I'm getting closer to completion with turtle steps....
I should finish my new feature later today...
Incidentally, I got a new optimization idea... Yesterday was a decent trading day but it dropped many many trading opportunities by being too slow...
Stage 2, day 24:
This morning, I got some major breakthrough and moments of clarity about the solution of my current design problems.
I love having this feeling as it indicates that the finish line is very close.
Unfortunately, those illumination moments also occurs on days where I have major commitmenta. I was working with great fluidity but I had to abruptly stop because today was my daughter birthday party...
I should be able to substantially move forward the development tomorrow as nothing is on the schedule...
I have been reading about the latest DMSI development just before journaling... hmm the temptation to maybe take a small break of UMS to make a short DMSI run is strong... I think that I haven't had sex since last July... It hasn't been that present in my mind but I feel a small void in that area... I wouldn't want to run DMSI for months but maybe just long enough to meet an interesting new partner that I could see occasionally... Having that in my life could possibly energize me to push stronger on my project...
Right now the idea is only at the temptation level... nothing decided... If I end up deciding a small DMSI break, that would only happen after reaching an important milestone in my project... Something along the line offering myself sexual release only as a reward to add an extra incentive to succeed... I believe this is something that Napoleon Hill was advocating doing...
Otherwise, the recommendation for UMS is 12 consecutive months... the way that I see journals... It doesn't seem like a lot of UMS users will succeed doing it... It seems to me that there are much less active UMS journals now than when the program just got released...
Stage 2, day 27:
Almost done the margin trading feature. I started to modify the last class that needs changes. I have about 4-5 remaining functions to review and modify. I can almost touch its completion. I was thinking yesterday that only few hours were missing to complete. Things went slower than expected and I got blocked on something yesterday at the end of the day. I figured that the night would assist in finding a solution.
Today, I still have the same impression. I am only hours away from completion. Hopefully, it is going to be true today.
Also, after a week long dry spell, trading did resume while I was sleeping. When a trade occurs, the software generate a sound to provide an audio cue that some trading is occuring. It usually wake me up and curiosity makes me get up to go look at the computer what just did happen. This night, my sleep was so deep that I haven't heard a single noise. I got the surprise to see that about 150 trades did occur for a $60K trading volume.
On the bright side, the system state appears to still be sane after this trading burst. There used to be always some sort of glitches despite overall good behavior. It seems like finally everything went as designed.
I could wait for the daily summary report to be generated to find out if this activity has been profitable. From a quick assessment. It seems like it has been breakeven. Half of the trades generated profit, the other half was at loss.
I don't look into the profitable trades as they did work as expected but I always look more closely at losing trades to make sure if I could find ways to avoid those type of losses in the future by modifying the code.
(10-23-2021, 09:12 PM)lano1106 Wrote: [ -> ]Otherwise, the recommendation for UMS is 12 consecutive months... the way that I see journals... It doesn't seem like a lot of UMS users will succeed doing it... It seems to me that there are much less active UMS journals now than when the program just got released...
I'm still running ums2 and I've been running UMS and UMS2 from the moment they released. But even I'm thinking about switching to DMSI for a while. It was always my plan to skip one release of DMSI then jump back on it when the next release came out, but I never thought it would be this long in between releases
(10-28-2021, 05:08 AM)Superman Wrote: [ -> ] (10-23-2021, 09:12 PM)lano1106 Wrote: [ -> ]Otherwise, the recommendation for UMS is 12 consecutive months... the way that I see journals... It doesn't seem like a lot of UMS users will succeed doing it... It seems to me that there are much less active UMS journals now than when the program just got released...
I'm still running ums2 and I've been running UMS and UMS2 from the moment they released. But even I'm thinking about switching to DMSI for a while. It was always my plan to skip one release of DMSI then jump back on it when the next release came out, but I never thought it would be this long in between releases
Then, it must qualify you as one of the users who have been exposed the most to UMS!
Would you qualify your UMS journey as a success?
Personally, I have only close to 2 months under the belt. I got small gains that I did attribute to the program but beside those, no life changing altering events related to money...
Shannon just did share that he experience UMS resistance while developing DMSI.
I can definitely relate to that. My infamous margin trading feature is progressing at a snail pace...
It seems like I have been working on it since the start of the month (I got the idea last year). Earlier that month, I did estimate the remaining work to only few days.
From that, I can conclude few things:
- I have seriously underestimated the complexity of the problem and the required effort to make it work.
- I am getting older and my mental sharpness is declining.
- I am seriously resisting UMS goals too...
On the bright side, I am getting closer to completion everyday so eventually, no matter what, it will be done. It is just damn slow...
Also, it is way too early to draw final conclusion but so far, I have the impression that BASE was maybe more supportive to my endeavor than UMS...
If BASE ever gets updated to the latest technology, that will be a sure buy to me...
Stage 2, day 29:
My system did benefit from yesterday BTC flash crash. It made about $150 of profit from it.
(10-29-2021, 01:01 PM)lano1106 Wrote: [ -> ]Stage 2, day 29:
My system did benefit from yesterday BTC flash crash. It made about $150 of profit from it.
Would you ever sell your system or teach others how to do the same?
It is very unlikely that I sell it as it is proprietary and built on open source software.
Distributing it would require me to provide the source code which is pretty much where the secret sauce resides on top of having to purchase an expensive license for the GUI part which is built on top of the Qt framework.
Next, selling software comes along with running a business... Having to make sales, marketing and customer support and so on... This is anything but freedom that I am seeking to reach...
The essence of what I do is very simple. It is called triangular arbitrage. You can google it. I believe that it would qualify as HFT. I have been chasing over shaving off milliseconds from my system reaction time... This is where the challenge reside + taking care of all the small details where the devil can be found...