trelco

lol okay but it is basically people who can't manage their emotions that are trading on what they "think" (eg: this will come back to me or I need to take profits now +1tick). Also the fact that this seems to attract gambling types who take illogical risk. My main problem if anything is that I hold winners too long and sell losers too early when I diverge from the system. Divergence generally only happens when I rush through the set up. This accounts for 3% of trades when I replay tested my system by hand for several years. This is unlikely to happen in real time because I won't have to get through 1000's of set ups in a day. The losses because of that are equivalent to taking 1 extra emergency stop per year. Relatively insignificant. The other part about forward testing: because of the way it was built that is already factored in/done. So far today I am a little over +$2100 using 1 ES contract. After a couple of weeks like this I think I will increase size. I skipped NFP. After all the zerohedge propaganda, poor retail performance studies, and general sub 100%+ returns people have posted with under 300k AUM I figured there had to be some mysterious market force that screwed people out of their money... I guess even with all the resources of the internet there is a lot of dumb money floating around...

My systems account for 4-12 ticks of slippage (randomly selected) with much more than that (4-36 ticks) during extreme volatility. Those are usually capitulation days. They also don't seriously depend on exact bid/ask size or trades for that 1 bar (assuming there are at least 100 contracts on book during recent years). All of the strategies were developed during the last 3 months based on theories I had. None of them use "fitting." They all outperform the S&P every year and meet my scalability and risk metric requirements (max drawdown, max length of losing streak, max sustainable drawdown, std deviation, Sharpe/Sortino/Beta/R-squared) *Am I missing anything here?* The data used starts from 1981-1998 (depending on security) to the present. Basically what I'm asking is what could I be missing that will mess up real world performance? zdo: You are right. Knowing the types of problems others ran into or know about might help me and others find what may stand in the way of successful implementation though.

What is the difference between each? We have all heard that 90% of traders lose money, so why are most people profitable on demo's but not in practice? What changes? What changes if it is an automated system? thank you.