Saturday, March 6, 2010

Ending Manual Testing... My apologies :o(

Many of you may have followed my experimental attempt for the past few months to develop a support and resistance manual trading methodology for day trading. I usually trade support and resistance on some of my live accounts as a way to profit from long term movements in the forex market with positions usually lasting weeks or months. I decided to give a try at a short term version of this system during the past three months, time in which I have found many inconveniences with the manual day trading approach.

First of all, if you are thinking that this has anything to do with the +18% draw down the account was facing at the end of last week, you are certainly right. I have found that my short term support and resistance methodology is getting killed on the current rangy and highly volatile market conditions, however I am quiet certain that with time and the start of a trending market the method could easily recover from the draw down and get into profitable territory. There are actually some additional reasons why I decided to discontinue the trading of manual systems on the website.

The main reason is that trading a manual system on a short term basis and twitting continuously about opening positions was becoming cumbersome, I had to dedicate time to chart analysis and posting about this on a daily basis something which coupled with all my automated trading system development and usual analysis was taking a very big chunk of my time.

The second reason and a very important one, is that I believe that I am not mentally fit to try and trade a system in such a low time frame. I had figured this out about myself several years ago and this is the reason why I devoted myself to automated trading and long term system trading. I am simply not a very good day trader due to the fact that I do not like the "screen starring" part of trading, something which must happen for at least 3 or 4 hours each day to do this successfuly (I am a very social person and all this time with no contact with other humans is just a killer for me). This actually reminded me about my early days as a "trader" (many years ago) when I failed to sleep at night worrying about my SL and the short nature of the movements my positions were targetting for.

I also have to recognize that it is 10 times as hard to trade a system when something is expected from you. I started this experiment without any promise of profitability besides doing by best effort to implement what I believed could be a short term profitable day trading system but in the back of my mind I always wanted to give you profitable results. Even if only on a demo account, the pressure to have to get consistent positive results clouded my judgement and made me enter several positions which I sometimes wouldn't have entered if my results had not been public. It has to be said that greed and fear are expontentially increased when this happens, something which I suspected, but had never experienced :o). (expect a post on this soon !)

Will we see any more manual trading journals on my blog ? I think that it is safe to say that I have not plans to introduce new experiments about this in the near future. From now on I will devote all this time to the production of new likely long term profitable automated trading systems for asirikuy as well as the analysis and improvement of the currently traded systems.

Of course, to all of you who had been following this system and were expecting me to carry on with the testing, my sincere apologies. I hope you understand the reasons outlined above and continue to follow my ventures on automated trading which has been my main source of income for many months now. Hopefully someone out there will be able to trade my S&R methodology for day trading and succeed with it, certainly I believe that someone with the time and necessary dedication will do so.

If you would like to learn more about my development of automated trading systems and how you can have a high probability of achieving long term profitable results with sound automated trading strategies please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or joining Asirikuy to receive all ebook purchase benefits, weekly updates, check the live accounts I am running with several expert advisors and get in the road towards long term success in the forex market using automated trading systems. I hope you enjoyed the article !

1 comment:

townjet said...

Hey Daniel,

I love reading your posts by the way. I hear you on the shorter term trading strategies... I have recently got into EA programming. I have programmed about 10 systems already only to junk about 8 of them. I have been struggling to find something that works really well on 4hr or even 1hr and it is not easy at all. Sometimes I feel that greed bug tapping that money nail in the back of my head, as I think if I could only find something shorter term that would work well I could make all those $$$. Then I have to pull myself back into reality. I agree totally with you on the long term trading. I believe that short term trading is possible, as I have a co-worker that has a buddy which does this type of trading for a living. It requires him to bunker down for 6 months, little human contact, with an investment of $20K and come out of the dark to party for 6 months after that. This guy probably changes his strategy several times in that bunker. For someone to program what that guy does in that bunker would be phenomenal, a true sense of artificial intelligence coded for currency trading. Anyway, thanks for the posts, I have been reading them every day.

Daniel Fernandez's Expert Author Email Alerts
Sign up to receive email alerts of Daniel Fernandez’s latest articles from EzineArticles.com!

Email Address: