Success Story from Chad - 77R in a Month
By Dave Mabe
I'm receiving more and more success stories from traders who've started down the systematic route, but more importantly, have started using columns in their backtests.
This one is from Chad (name used with permission, lightly edited for readability)
Chad:
My first column-based strategy has been running for a month now - so far, so good. It peaked at 77R and is in a slight drawdown. I have so many ideas to improve things.
I want to experiment with limiting the number of open trades. It opened 50 trades in a short period (after a Trump tweet), and all I could think was that if I were trading with large size, that would really scare me.
Thanks for sharing your concepts and ideas!
Dave:
77R in a month - I love it!
One of the metrics I study closely when optimizing a strategy like this is trades per day.
I want that number to be as large as I can, but also, importantly, I want the trades to be spread out.
That is, I'm careful to make sure there aren't large clumps of trades on a small number of days.
Of course, you can't control the fact there could be days with more trades in your system than occur on any single day in your backtest.
If you want to reduce the number of trades, I would go back to the backtest and use one more pass through the Cruncher to find a way to:
Reduce the trades per day (since you have a lot of room to play with)
Increase the profit per trade
Create a smoother equity curve
With the right columns in your backtest, there's no doubt this is possible.
And with this new version of your strategy, you'll have eliminated an obstacle in your path to confidence for this strategy.
Nice work, Chad!
-Dave
P.S. Do you wish you had a column library that would tell YOU how to make your strategy profitable? My column library is now included with MabeKit