8/11/23: Restart

It is hard to believe that it has been a year and a half since I had posted last, I still need to go back and read some of my last posts but I do recall the reasons well.

This past year certainly has been eventful both in my personal and professional life. I do recall stepping away as my full time job became very taxing with time and emotionally, on the personal side I also took on the purchase of a home and full renovation.

As I sit here today life has calmed some, the house is getting close to complete, work life is what it is but is far less demanding of my time. I have also taken time in the past year to focus on my physical and mental health, both of which have greatly improved.

My plan moving forward is to continue on my trading path, that is still the long term goal but also to explore other entrepreneurial avenues for financial independence. I will use this blog to document my path along the way that others can benefit from the journey. You will see the site change to include products that I have found in the past year that I have tried tested and and helped.

On the Futures trading side I have been doing some Algo testing of the AlgoNinja product and I am running some settings in a live environment against a SIM account. So far the results are positive, I will document this more in the coming days. I have also continued to learn more about trading without Algos as I feel this is most likely the end game for myself.

Stay Tuned and God Bless.

12/3/21: Week 6

Ok so was a bit of an exciting week, will start with the results since 10/24/21:

Ok so this week being fresh in my head here are some notes:

  • 12/1/21: Was actually up over $400 and intended to shut algo down for a profit for the day
  • 12/1/21: Pushing to recover from a loss I exited a Algo trade poorly (early) and also took two manual trades for $300 loss total. My manual trades WERE the correct read of the chart, I just did not set my Stop Loss far enough back
  • 12/3/21: Algo entered the monster short today, I messed all of this up with bad chart management, even after two years I still panic a bit and I am still learning.

All in all this week was positive, sex week average is $733 per week, will keep testing tweaking and most importantly learning. I would say that a six week average of $733 is a huge win for me, but I know this could be more like 1k if I had executed properly. I am at 1/3 of my goal of 2k per week, get there and maintain it for 6 months and its time to talk about my next phase in life.

11/5/21: Week 2

So based on the testing of the algo and the settings I am running I know that over the course of this year there are periods of draw down. The bad news is this week was one of those periods, but I stayed with it this week, took the bad with the good, had one trading error on my part.

So as the chart shows you this week started bad, but with that the past three days its just about completely covered. The one error I made on Wednesday of this week was that I switched the algo to trade on a SIM account, just was a bit worn out from the beating. As I got busy with my day job I miss this trade:

This long trade easily would have been $400, which would have made my week green. In the end I am happy with the week, yes there were some tough days, but my account recovered confirming the validation of the testing I have done.

10/29/21: Progress

I have been trading Futures since March of 2019, some manual but mostly with Algorithms with spotty results to say the least. As I have said in previous posts I have been working to change my approach and mindset, with that I have also over these past weeks tried to mix in some good from my old approach, here are this weeks results.

This is far better than what testing showed it would be long term, but in back testing this week it could have easily been better (300 roughly). But with that I am not a trusting individual and made some manual moves to my stops and closed out at my weekly goal of $2,000 on a micro NQ algo.

Will post more analysis this weekend as I review my week and look for the next addition to diversify and make these results consistent.

10/13/21: Tough Day

So the subject says it all but these days will happen, here are the results for the day:

These are definitely tough to handle, but there were lessons to be learned. The primary lesson for the day is to NOT trade on big news days, here is the chart for the Algo:

Trades:

  1. Loss, Trade was for a max loss, entered a short at the Day Low
  2. Win, this traded a long on the second cross of the ATR
  3. Loss, entered as the algo is programed, but went for a max loss, entered after inflation report
  4. Loss, Entered as programmed for a long, came straight back and hit the Stop loss on the same bar
  5. Even, this trade was a minor win, entered the trade just before the Fed spoke, this was the second cross of the ATR, would have normally turned the algo off and not have taken this

I have been trading long enough to know better to run a algo on news days, especially these days with all of the uncertainty in the world. As the name of the site says, I am going to show the good with the bad, and honest and direct.

Outlook for tomorrow I am honestly unsure, I have the algorithm on, today really didn’t see the market move either direction. I am playing the long game with this, so fingers crossed.

10/12/21: Day Two Results

As I said in prior posts I have been really working to rethink my trading style, tons of old habits to try to break, but in general larger risk with much larger reward. Last week I did do some trading on some Algo settings, adjusting and playing with mixed results. This week after the experience from last week as well as some testing last weekend I have moved forward with the new system.

The week so far has been better than planned, the results from yesterday and today were:

As a part of a overall plan until I build up my small account the intent is to push to consistently net $1000 per week, from there I will scale in. But with this today I turned the Algo off, which in hindsight I would have netted another $100-$200 for today. For me working to the larger plan $240 today was enough to stay on track for $1000 for the week.

The overall plan is to scale this Algo (add contracts) based on some conservative values. The very rough plan is as follows:

I say this is conservative because based on testing the algo settings I am using should net $1500 to 1700 per week, I am also scaling in slowly. Even this being the case by the end of 2021 I should be on very good pace to be where I would like to be, this is all just on one set of settings trading One market.

There are other settings on other markets already in testing, should go live with those in the coming weeks as well. My goal is to follow the plan above for 6 months, if I’m still on track this would put me in a life changing decision point, good problems to have.

Basic plugs for great products and services:

  • AlgoNinja, only program I would use or recommend, hope to see you over there for the 14 day free trial
  • ChartVPS, use HONESTINFO3 as a discount code for a 3% permanent discount.

10/10/21: Trading Algos Unattended

I have been trading for a couple of years now, both manually and with Algos either written by myself (bad Idea) or using systems developed by professionals. Initially I was trying to run on a machine at home that I would remote into as needed to check how things were going. What I learned:

  • Home Internet issues: when just watching TV or browsing the web having a connection issue is an annoyance, but trading with real funds, one issue can cost thousands of dollars.
  • Home PC Issues: Yes you can get a good PC at a cost, and set it aside and do nothing else with it, but this is a investment to make. On its own this is not a show stopper.

In short I got burnt a few times, I honestly got burnt enough that I did not feel comfortable trading this way. With this my first attempt to fix this was to setup a Remote Desktop using Microsoft Azure. Essentially what this is doing is running a PC on a server (somewhere), it functions just like a normal PC and you access it via a remote desktop program, which is usually on every windows machine. SIDE NOTE: Ninjatrader does not run on a Apple Operating System, setting up a remote virtual desktop allows you to use a Apple but also trade with NinjaTrader.

The Benefits of a Virtual Desktop are:

  • Internet Connection: There are zero issues with this in my experience, flawless
  • Cost: Cost of the setup depends on the performance that you want for your Virtual Desktop, it ranges from $60 to hundreds

This setup worked well, I did have some issues with my Azure setup as I am not a IT guy and more or less learned how to set things up on the go. I did run into a case where hackers tried to get into my setup, but the Azure team helped.

About a year ago I found a service that offered the same benefits as Azure but also had a couple of additional perks, this company is ChartVPS. Additional benefits:

  • Support: The ChartVPS team is very helpful and also is built around supporting trading, there are zero IT skills needed
  • Cost Effective: ChartVPS is a bit less expensive then Azure.
  • Location: they were able to offer me a server in Chicago, which is where the trading happens, this makes transactions a few ticks quicker.

All in all, if you are considering trading with automated algorithms there is just no other way to go than a virtual desktop and with that I have nothing but great things to say about ChartVPS.

For those interested in trying this use HONESTINFO3 as the promo code and you will get 3% off of your monthly fee PERMINENTLY. If you have any questions on this topic please reach out to me at Information@Honest-Information.com.