Clayburg And Universal Clone

[swansjr 10]

Last fall I was very interested in purchasing the TTM Universal System by John Clayburg over at Online System Trading. I was looking for an automated system to complement my descressionary day trading when I stumbled upon a webinar by Dr. Clayburg and his Universal System seemed like a real possibility. However, I was a little skeptical to put forth $7,500 on a trading system I did not fully understand. So, I did some research. I first discovered Clayburg offers no trial version of his software and I didn't know anyone who really uses it. You can lease the Universal System for $600 per month, but that did not satisfy me. So, I decided to become a member of his site ($30 per month) so I could view the member videos and participate in the discussion forum and see what else I could learn about the system. I'm glad I joined!

 

To make a long story short, the Universal System is tricky to setup and trade effectively. You simply don't just turn it on. Far from it. It needs to be optimized tested, refined before committing any money. Furthermore, when Clayburg shows off one of his performance reports or displays an equity curve on a particular trading system, commissions and slippage are not included. That sure makes the equity curve look great! Now, he has his reasons for not including commissions and slippage, but in my opinion this can be very deceiving for people new to the Universal System. While Clayburg does provided a lot of very helpful information with his video updates I have to say in the end I'm glad I didn't purchase the Universal Trading System for $7,500. I fear I would be very disappointed.

 

A few weeks back a stumbled upon this! The Universal Clone - a free beta download. I've been playing with it for a few weeks now (not with real money!) and would like to start a series of posts highlighting the trading parameters and results I've been a achieving. Don't expect too much! I'm still learning and I've not found a profitable system that remains profitable on a consistent basis.

 

Anyway, maybe we can learn a little about the system and who knows, maybe we can develop a tradable system. If you have been thinking about buying the Universal System, try the Universal Clone out first. It's free (for now anyway) and you get to see how the Universal trades without spending $7,500.

 

So, go download a copy of the Universal Clone and follow along.

[XDTrader 10]

I coded my own version of the Universal System after watching a webinar by Dr. Clayburg. I am not yet convinced it is a profitable system over time. There is a great degree of subjectivity due to the need to continually re optimize.

 

I would love to hear that someone has been using it for a while and has been doing well with it. If so I may revisit it and work with it some more.

[swansjr 10]

I agree XDTrader. I would love to hear from them as well. To me, the Universal is a difficult trading system to master and trade. Anybody making money on this thing?

[windsurfer 10]

Thank you for starting this thread.

 

I see Clayburg has a new add-on. It gives the results of varying parameters for the pre-market and opening. The idea is you pick the best parameters for that day, and change them in the same manner every day. It is strange but true that he does not give actual results. He does show his system trades every day, but does not have slippage nor a count of the number of trades, which must be in the hundreds. His best results seem to come from currencies. It does seem profitable, but the results disclosure is just too vague to purchase.

 

I look forward to seeing how the clone test goes. I'd suggest trying it on the Euro first.

[Lynnyhoot 10]

we leased univ for several months

i know it is a good system but it needs constant care

i know fellow in europe thatturns it on every morning on euro sf and yen and equity out almost every day for 500 each pretty consistently

[Tams 20]

we leased univ for several months

i know it is a good system but it needs constant care

i know fellow in europe thatturns it on every morning on euro sf and yen and equity out almost every day for 500 each pretty consistently

 

 

another first poster brilliant testimonial !

 

LOL

 

RUN !

[swansjr 10]

another first poster brilliant testimonial !

 

LOL

 

RUN !

 

No doubt Tams!

 

I've been unable to make this thing reliable as it currently exists. I do think there is some merit to focusing my energies on EC as apposed to the stock indexes simply because EC seems to trend more.

[Lynnyhoot 10]

clayburg has also added a self adaptive indicator. have anyone looked to clone it also?

[swansjr 10]

clayburg has also added a self adaptive indicator. have anyone looked to clone it also?

 

I've been watching his nightly videos where he has been demonstrating this new forward testing method. It's a great idea and I can easily see how this could dramatically improve the reliability/stability of the Universal. It address the core issue of Universal, the sensitivity of the four critical inputs.

 

For those not familiar, Clayburg has developed an indicator that essentially runs multiple virtual trading systems in real time. Each system is identical except for the four critical input parameters (B1,B2, S1, S2). He turns-on this indicator during the premarket session for about 60-90 minutes. He then can pick the best performing system's input parameters and uses them to trade live. All of this is contained within one indicator. The premise is the market's overall tone will be set early and by testing 20, 40 or even 50 Universal system settings on the live pre market data, you can determine which system settings will be more likely to perform well.

 

You can find the guys at TTM giving a brief demo here: Forward Testing for Tomorrow

 

It looks interesting and may have potential. My current opinion is the Universal is extremely difficult to trade right now. It may be done, but I have yet to see it. I can't believe they charge $7,500 for it!

 

Today Clayburg is giving a wibinar on the new "self adaptive" indicator. I'm recording it right now. Looks like the indicator will be released today.

 

Will there be a clone? Who knows?

[windsurfer 10]

The add-on is neat, but is an additional $4500! This price is ridiculous.

 

I'd think it could be coded by a TS user who is familiar with parallel functions. It merely runs the equity curve of 20 or so variations of the Mo and RSI variables on a single chart (e.g. the 5 min YM) so you can visually see which are performing best early in the trading day.

 

It relies on a major assumption- that the variables at the beginning of the day that are the best for a daytrading system will continue to be profitable the rest of the day. I am unaware of any research on this assumption. Any thoughts?

[swansjr 10]

Ah, yes! $4500!!!

 

Well, naturally Clayburg has been showing videos of running the add-on on EC, ES and a few other markets with noticeable improvements. But who knows how well it really works.

 

A poor mans way of duplicating the add-on is simply run 20 copies of the Universal with slightly different parameters. Start them all 60-90 minutes before market open then pick the best-looking system at market open. A parallel function is "simply" a copy of the Universal system. So, you can get the same result by running many copies with different B1, B2, S1, S2 inputs.

[insideday 10]

In my opinion the premarket solution isnt really a improvement, because you only get 1 or 2 trades in this premarket time range. Why dont he use the systems as meta indicator? If x % of the 50 systems give a buy signal then buy...

[swansjr 10]

In my opinion the premarket solution isnt really a improvement, because you only get 1 or 2 trades in this premarket time range. Why dont he use the systems as meta indicator? If x % of the 50 systems give a buy signal then buy...

 

The video's he demonstrated across several markets showed noticeable improvement. Of course he will be showing the best system impovements, but it is possible. Nothing is stopping someone from also extending the time earlier and/or later in the morning to capture more trades. But apparently even a few trades are good enough to determine the overall daily "mood." Furthermore, nothing is stopping anyone from updating the settings several times during the day.

 

I like your idea as well. Currently, it's not set up to function in that manner but it's certainly another idea. Kind of a majority rule. On the downside of such an idea, what if most of your systems are not performing well on a given day. Say 45 of the 50 are in the red. But only 5 systems are in the black. If you simply take the majority rule - well the majority can be wrong and you will get a poorly performing system.

 

I guess an alternative would be to take the top 3-5 performing signals and use their signals as a vote for when to buy/sell.

[indextrader1 10]

If you view Clayburgs free video each day you will see that the self adaptive indicator does not consistantly provide an improvement. Intuitively, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me because trading patterns during the regular session are usually quite different than the premarket patterns. Another problem with the Universal Trading System, besides the high price and the fact that even for that high price you don't get the code, is that if you turn on the interbar order generation option(IBOG), which you need to do to get the best results, each time you refresh the data or turn your computer off and then on again the next day, you will see that the historic results have radically changed, usually showing a marked improvement over the real time trading results. That makes optimization results questionable, although in my testing of the system it still seems to work OK, so far.

[windsurfer 10]

Using the clone and looking at optimized backtest results, my conclusion is that it will not be sufficiently profitable for the ES. For a 5 minute chart, I used 9,13,6,7 as the inputs to get a result that would barely cover slippage and commissions.

 

I had better results on the 113 tick EC using 23,11,5 and 20. I changed other inputs (session time, stops, etc) where appropriate.

 

Of course, what works now often will not persist for long. I'll autotrade it on 1 contract and see what happens. Today it lost $250.

 

For the time being, I'm not going to bother trying to adjust the inputs to the supposed best inputs for the day. In fairness to Dr. C, making these adjustments is in his view a necessary part of his system, and therefore my results cannot be validly used to compare with those of his clients.

 

Comments or suggestions?

[barryd 10]

I'm playing with the Universal Clone too and I'm seeing some strange results - can anyone else see if they get the same thing or give me an explanation of what I'm doing wrong?

 

I'm testing using a 5 min EC chart starting from 5/11 until the start of 5/18 (last 5 days) on 'natural' exchange hours.

 

When running parallel optimizations for the 2 Buy and 2 Sell inputs I get a max net profit (accounting for $5/contract commissions) of $4027 using the following:

 

B1:5

B2:2

S1:5

S2:4

 

Target 1: 5

Target 1 contracts: 1

Target 2: 15

Target 2 contracts: 1

Target 3: 50

Target 3 contracts: 1

Stop Loss: 150

=> No other trailing/day/equity stop toggles enabled (all set to 0) and start/stop hours left as default.

 

This is amazing for 1 week (unlikely to ever happen, of course) however when I looked at the actual trades I could see most of the trades taken were stopped out using the '$ Trailing Stop' Sell/Buy to Cover - surely this should not have been enabled if all the input toggles actually work?

 

Also, I also noticed a few anomalies when I played with the target inputs - I tried trading changing the profit targets as follows:

 

Target 1: 1

Target 1 contracts: 1

Target 2: 2

Target 2 contracts: 1

Target 3: 3

Target 3 contracts: 1

 

i.e. I'm only looking to capture a maximum of 6 points/ticks on the entire trade if I'm not stopped out.

 

In the EC, 6 ticks would equate to 6*$12.50 = $75, however in the 'Trade Log' I never saw any results for this. None of my trades ever achieved Profit Targets 1, 2 or 3 and all my trades were still stopped out using the '$ Trailing Stop' exit.

 

Most peculiar of all was that my Total Profit remained at $4027 and I found the only parameter that changed this was my 'Stop Loss'. Increasing the Stop from $150 to $200 increased the total profit to $4140 - plausible I guess.

 

Most interesting though was that putting in zero for the Stop Loss meant that NO trades were generated - why would this be the case???

 

Course, without being able to view the Easylanguage code I can't even begin to troubleshoot so I'm going to have to mail the developers, unless anyone else can help?

 

Thanks,

 

Barry

[windsurfer 10]

Barry,

 

I'm on the road on my annual trip north for the summer. I'd like to look at your inputs, but won't be able for a week. I'd suggest you start by taking out all profit targets and stops. If you get valid results, add additional inputs 1 at a time. Start with a very large stop, then narrow it. You should also start with a longer period, such as 6 months, using @ES as your symbol.

 

Good luck!

[barryd 10]

Ok I mailed the developers and I got a response that cleared up the 2 issues:

 

1) I was being an idiot - a profit target of 1 in the EC is HUGE as it moves in 0.0001 increments. Something more realistic is 0.0015, apparently Clayburg uses something similar

 

2) The system requires an entry in the Stop_Loss field to work at all.

 

Windsurfer - thanks, yes I have found stop_loss values between 150 and 300 seem to work best.

 

I have been running optimizations for individual 1 week periods in the @ES to see how much the B1 S1 B2 S2 parameters change from week to week. The developers told me to use values between 8-20 as a guideline so I have been optimizing between those.

 

It seems they change quite a lot - it's hard to know how often the system should be optimized to keep it profitable, perhaps a few times a day? If so, that will need a really high-end CPU and tons of RAM to chomp through so many input variables...

 

I will continue to back test and may try running live in simulation mode tomorrow.

[daedalus 10]

I've been following clayburg for sometime and I think the self adaptive indicator could really be the next "big" thing in systems trading.

 

I have to give credit where its due, and its a fairly logical and elegant step to adress the underlying optimization issues all systems traders have.

 

He eludes in some of his videos that you could even re-optimizes every hour during the day... I wonder how that would fair.

 

It can't be the hard to code if we have the "beta" free version. Doesn't it just track the equity curve of 50 different settings in the indicator? If so, most of the parameters can be found in the free videos on his site and on TTM's site.

[10xray1 10]

I'm getting some weird anomalies as well...

 

For some reason, it looks as if the End Of Day exit is labeled different in some cases. I get "$ Trailing Stop", "C eod", and "S eod." Other times, "$ Trailing Stop" and "S Day Loss" is used for the Day Loss feature with a trailing $ amount.

 

Also, I find the trailing stop after Target 1 does not work at all. Perhaps I have some settings configured wrong. I haven't quite figured out what it's doing. It looks like its exiting the appropriate amount of contracts, however, they are exited right next to each other, disregarding the amount/% trailing.

 

Is anyone else having those types of issues? Perhaps a correct config for the trail?

 

Thanks guys!

[swansjr 10]

I'm getting some weird anomalies as well...

 

For some reason, it looks as if the End Of Day exit is labeled different in some cases. I get "$ Trailing Stop", "C eod", and "S eod." Other times, "$ Trailing Stop" and "S Day Loss" is used for the Day Loss feature with a trailing $ amount.

 

Also, I find the trailing stop after Target 1 does not work at all. Perhaps I have some settings configured wrong. I haven't quite figured out what it's doing. It looks like its exiting the appropriate amount of contracts, however, they are exited right next to each other, disregarding the amount/% trailing.

 

Is anyone else having those types of issues? Perhaps a correct config for the trail?

 

Thanks guys!

 

I've learned there is a bug in the code in regards to the trailing stop. I guess that will be fixed with next next release.

 

As for the different labels they seem to be working on my charts. "C eod" is "Cover end-of-day" and "S eod" is "Sell end-of-day." Likewise for "S Day Loss" and "C Day Loss".

[rsi77 10]

I'm getting very impressive optimizaiton results on EC using 512 and 144 tick charts. Profit factors better than 2. I'm going to start forward testing and see how these hold up. I also know that TradeStation counts a touch on a limit price as filled, whereas in real life it usually aint so.

 

I'll probably try to code it up in Ninja and see how it fares there. In any case it's pretty interesting for a start of a system.

 

rsi77

[sevensa 10]

I'm getting very impressive optimizaiton results on EC using 512 and 144 tick charts. Profit factors better than 2. I'm going to start forward testing and see how these hold up. I also know that TradeStation counts a touch on a limit price as filled, whereas in real life it usually aint so.

 

I'll probably try to code it up in Ninja and see how it fares there. In any case it's pretty interesting for a start of a system.

 

rsi77

 

You can get very impressive optimization results with pretty much any system...

[swansjr 10]

I'm getting very impressive optimizaiton results on EC using 512 and 144 tick charts. Profit factors better than 2. I'm going to start forward testing and see how these hold up. I also know that TradeStation counts a touch on a limit price as filled, whereas in real life it usually aint so.

 

I'll probably try to code it up in Ninja and see how it fares there. In any case it's pretty interesting for a start of a system.

 

rsi77

 

Please post your live testing results in a few weeks. Would love to see them.

[rsi77 10]

"You can get very impressive optimization results with pretty much any system... "

 

Yes, that's true...that's why "walking forward" is important. Even then you have to be careful.

 

There seems to me to be some very odd characteristic of this free "clone" strategy. Quite often it buys at the exact low of a bar, even though that low is lower than any recent bars. As I understand the Clayburg strategy it should buy at the lowest low of the last 3 bars. Maybe the TradeStation interpretation is to blame, or maybe it's the strategy. In any case many of the trades shown would not have been possible in real life. Either they wouldn't have been filled on the touch of that price, or there's no way to know what the lowest low is the last three bars is until the last of the 3 bars has closed--in which case it's too late to buy there.

 

Also the targets fill even if only touched--often times in the charts I'm looking at that is the last chance they had to fill before stopping out, meaning a stop likely occurred instead of the profit. But the backtest shows profit.

 

I'm still going to play with this a bit and see if something useful can be learned from it.