4EverMaAT

[ You have yourself to blame for any choice that you make. The first steps to developing a systems approach to trading is understanding that there are no victims. I suppose everyone has their own trading style, but what's the point of trading a robot you do not trust? You cannot trust something you do not understand, in which case, why would you be using it. You can jerry-rig it or hack it, but isn't it easier over time to build something that does work like you want?

If you can automate 90% of the strategy (which is obviously better than 0%, what is stopping you from automating the other 10%? if this "discretion" that you speak of has specific rules, why can't it be automated? Perhaps you are afraid of what pure objectivity will reveal about your strategy.

Intuition is mechanical as are your feelings; they are simply a reaction to your environment. It is our assumptions that we wrap around our feelings and how we judge our intuition that distorts everything we perceive. But I do see what you are getting at. The magic bullet / secret sauce is in knowing that there is no secret sauce. Nothing exotic is needed to succeed in automating your strategy. Why the need to run on multiple instruments? what is the end goal. When you are experimenting on demo account, this might be ok, but when creating automated trading system, everything in the system must have a purpose. It is a systems approach and needs redundancy built in after the fundamental parts of the TC are acquired

I guess I cannot speak for Tams, but I would like to see that the fundamentals of the system are solid and properly implemented. In short, there should be no mysticism. The reasons for entry/exits should be clear, and reproducible, given the same conditions. The same is true for any other mechanical system in nature. How does your car engine distinguish between the first 100th revolution and the 10000th revolution? It doesn't. Neither should your trading system.

Yes. and guaranteed through the clearinghouse. Futures also works on FIFO order filling, so the institutional trader gets the same filling order as joe trader

i'm sure the original premise is market price action-based. Indicators are secondary consideration. if the foundational aspect of the system is not adequate, the system will fail instantly. Time should not be a factor. You must look beyond the time differences to see what core factors allowed the system to win or lose.

Right now i am focused on forex, due to higher leverage and easier ability to position size. i will most likely be releasing an indicator that will help chartist remove time and focus exclusively on price action. This is difficult to do and take advantage of without the use of a script of some sort.

Glad to see you took the first step towards automation. It seems you clearly see the benefits of automating repetitive tasks that frees your time up to oversee your system. You cannot do this glued to a bunch of charts and having to manually pull triggers. Automating the triggers helps greatly in making the user manage systems, instead of being a worker. The first step is to have the fundamentals of market movement in place. The biggest hurdle is the frustration that comes with building your system, whether yourself or using a programmer. In the validation process, it helps to record desktop for several hours. The good news is that despite having hours of video, you can skip through many of the videos quickly and focus only on the relevent footage using a decent player like VLC player. There is a video here that assists in setting up recording remote desktops This is important because many automated trading programs will be running in the cloud for maximum uptime. I usually use BSR screen recorder. [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoybUfW0VdY]Live broadcast your remote desktop screen unattended - YouTube[/ame] From my point of view, the core problem of his systems approach is that he did not follow steps 1 or 2 from your approach. If he did, he would have the core aspects of the trading system (determining factors for entry/exit, and the physical entry/exit). From your article, it looks like your friend was seeking to accomplish finding the core aspects by chasing the secondary characterists (indicators, et al). In other words, he sophisticated-ly managed to combine needless inputs bullsh** that ended up confusing himself. As you mentioned before, backtesting [with tick data] is good for helping to establish that your system logic is feasible. That is "works" in the sense of whether mechanically all of the gears turn correctly. Profitability comes second. Big second, of course, but we must make sure our plane has LIFT before we worry about a stronger engine. Once the fundamentals are in place, then you take action. And a systems approach allows for repetition in action and scalability; two important features that are impossible to implement manually on a rapid basis. The conceptual aspect of a system should not be difficult to explain. After all, price only has two directions to go. Up or down. One of the biggest ironies of this automation business is that it does not take complex algorithims to make it work. If you read the interviews of metaquotes Automated Trading Championship of the top 10 contestants, the majority of them mention that it wasn't a complex system that allowed them to win. Other type of trading championships if you look at their trading strategies, the majority of them use position sizing (e.g. bet it all in) and took their chances.