It'll be
What have I achieved since I started?
- I've built about
1430+ trading robots,95 (the truth hurts! and I expect this number to decrease) of which seem to be long-term profitable. I spend most of my hours running tests these days. - I've also written a handful of indicators but I find them to be mostly decorative.
- I've started working with an actually talented coder on this site to produce some new ones, hopefully the best yet. I like this creative aspect of trading and I like collaborating for a change.
- I've written well over 200 systems now, and
hopefully the latest one, which I'm calling 'Elastic', will be the best one yet in the sense of having the best risk to reward balance. And although I enjoy the intellectual exercise, I hope it will be my last one (for a while) so I can focus on building something that's a little less self-serving and more helpful to the community.hahaha. Oh boy. - The book club thread is nearing
4050 pages and we've nearly covereda couple dozen35 books. I hope to keep doing that, and to pick up the pace a little once we get past the (perpetual) requests for technical analysis books, which by their nature make claims that have to be investigated. - I've
reducedincreased my personal trading philosophy to47 core beliefs - which you can find on the book club thread, and basically (so far) I think the rest of the market is noisy randomness, and for the retail trader, a little bit of unfair competition, something which the entire system depends on in order to exist. If markets were predictable or forecastable for any length of time or to any tolerable precision the whole thing would just implode. - Every system and trader needs to be able to handle chaos and be antifragile, a term that's a bit overused, but still brilliant (Taleb).
What are my plans for the future?
I'm thinking about starting a signals or 'called trade' service. Something that's backed up by more than just empty promises, where I put some of my own skin in the game instead of just sitting back and collecting a fee rain or shine. I might put that out on YouTube. I don't want to use MQL5.com for a variety of reasons.Nah. Nobody cares.- I might also start selling some of the robots, if I can work out a way to do it that's fair to me and to the buyer.
- My vision for 'forexrobotsclub' is still just a vision, but maybe some day I can make it a reality
I hope that the world and my health can hold together long enough to do this for another six years. I'd be happy to do it for another sixty.
Thanks for reading my thread, and I wish you consistent profitability.
Clem
updated June 2020:
I've been studying and paper live trading for almost two years four years pretty much to the day. It's been a wild ride!
I've written nearly a hundred two hundred systems, some of which work great, others OK, others not at all. I've come to the conclusion that systems might be too limiting to deal with the almost infinite variations that the real marketplace can throw at you. Actually, maybe not. Either way though, it gets easier with thousands of hours of practice.
I think know I've made some progress. I'm mostly playing with house money these days.
I can look back at my notes and paper journal and see how much I've learned in a relatively short time.
If nothing else I've learned a lot in four years - definitely a college education equivalent - statistics, probability (Bayesian and conditional), corrected some of the deficiencies in my math education, learned a lot about finance, market microstructure, fundamental analysis, technical analysis, cyclical analysis and its relative un-importance, the importance of automation, C, MQL, expert advisor programming, risk management, scaling, back-testing and its relative unimportance, frames of reference, the compounding paradox, protrusion zones, relative extrema, the treachery of periodic indicators, and trends, trading psychology and its unimportance, contrarianism, its importance and limits, holistic analysis and its limits, zoom error, timeframe paradoxes, mean reversion, trade frequency, punctuated equilibrium, the treachery of quantitative methods, the reason neural nets don't work, fractal capital allocation, etc.
The most important thing I've learned so far is to take my own notes, create my own data sets, theories, concepts and then test, test, test everything. Details matter. Discard what isn't clearly helpful. Hold on to the rest, as that's my edge.