Success Story from the "Close to Quitting" Trader
By Dave Mabe
A few weeks ago, we recorded a podcast about a struggling trader, Sridhar.
He had just gone live with 8 intraday strategies at once (!!), and it wasn't going well.
A few days ago, I got an update from Sridhar about how things are going after he listened to the episode.
He took the advice to heart and made some great improvements (shared with permission, edited for clarity):
Sridhar:
I switched to Amibroker immediately after the pod dropped, and re-ran my optimizations on the whole market. I was making some mistakes in my original pythonic backtesting framework that Amibroker rectified.
The biggest benefit for Amibroker, I think, is predictability and repeatability. To your point, Claude often regenerates the whole scaffolding from scratch when you ask it to backtest, which leads to minor changes between strategies that can be life or death when trading live. I don't recommend Claude as your backtester, having lived this experience.
I am tracking pretty close to the backtest. The biggest difference came from turning over my edge more, i.e running the 5 strategies on the whole market rather than just a narrow Russell 1000 slice (which is what I was doing earlier).
Here are the out-of-sample results since the changes I made after the podcast:
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Dave:
Nice work, Sridhar!
That equity curve is heading in the right direction.
Running the backtest across the entire market instead of an arbitrary list like the R1K is a great call.
Also, note that Sridhar didn't stop using Claude for backtesting - he simply shifted his process so that Claude knows how to use Amibroker rather than creating everything from scratch.
Smart move.
In short, he made Claude his "trading intern" rather than his "trading CEO."
Thanks for the update, Sridhar!
He also sent in several excellent questions about what to do next that I'll share in the coming days - stay tuned.
-Dave
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