You describe it well. Thanks. Your ST skills remind me of a ClayTrader or that bearded dude that trades opening candles for 4 mins, cutting it if a level fails by 2c. Warrior trader Cameron or something...
I use Pro Real Time. It's a dinosaur language similar to Basic but is advanced enough to create AI strategies (I'm not there yet),
It took a long time to get started as I'd factored in a year of near full time trading and data collection. Most importantly, I needed to know why I would make the switch so that I had a burning desire to be wrong 100 times before I was right. You outlined a few of these things in your post.
I wasn't a programmer to start but have a very experienced family member who is the real deal. I thought with my market knowledge and his skills we could dominate. Wrong. All he did was get it working on my computer because he has no interest in money or markets and wants me to be self made. Fair enough, ok with that.
Any case, the market knowledge was worth more by being able to find trades and understand the code. I spent a few months testing a few ideas to settle on the opening drives. Figured I made my money solely for 3 months on this move so I automated it and run it across 3 markets currently and am optimising for more. It has a 65-70% Win rate with 1:3-1:5 RR. HK is through the roof. Trades once every 2 or 3 days currently but has win streaks. Also have a trend following strategy with mean reversion hedge built in but haven't taken it live yet.
It is actually very easy to beat the market index by 20 or 30% with various trend techniques but as Calvo said yesterday, the draw downs get up to 30%. But we don't do leveraged trading for those sorts of returns right? Personally I'll need 1000-2000%p.a. moving forward.
I still trade manually to get ideas to code and stay in touch, but over time my algos are starting to outperform me and they don't get upset, they don't care about screaming kids, they don't know they have to pay bills and they don't eat, sleep or feel anything and they have no interests in dirt bikes or diggers to distract them. They are also very good at waiting! They just do what they are told.
So, over time I need to assess performance and allocate capital and keep building more and better ones so the work never stops but I can choose when I do it.
My approach is to code very specific trades that run 0.4-2% Time in market to maximise the account size. Divide capital in 10K lots and give them to other strategies.
Every veteran futures trader I've listened to says the future is in algorithmic trading. It's still trading, not like I thought though. It's not free money. Got to think in ones and zeros. A deep understanding of various probability thinking is helpful ie. Kelly Criterium etc.
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