Rank: Advanced Member
Groups: Registered, Registered Users, Subscribers, Unverified Users Joined: 10/28/2004(UTC) Posts: 3,111 Location: Perth, Western Australia
Was thanked: 16 time(s) in 16 post(s)
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You don't have to run all of the system tests each day. You only need to run them as often as you think as you will trade. I started off doing this weekly. I would spend Friday night conducting the explorations and then spend some time over the weekend going over the charts and doing the rest of my research on the stock results from the explorations. I went through a period when I was trading daily, which meant I ran my explorations each night when I got home from work and spent the rest of the night researching the results. I am now back to weekly explorations.
Some (most) people who try to use MS as an emotionally free mechanical trading system, will inevitably, fail. The idea of the explorations is to narrow the list of all POSSIBLE trades from the list of ALL stocks. I used it in the first place to narrow down my 'universe' of stocks that I would monitor. (I used to only trade ASX stocks trading between 10 and 20 cents, and had been doing so for the last three months). From there I would further refine this universe to the possible trades. This meant from the 1500 or so stocks on the ASX, I would have maybe 200 in my universe, of which, each night I would look at maybe 20 graphs. There are about 1500 stocks on the ASX and there is no way that even in a week, could anyone look carefully at every stock. If you can narrow down the field to say 50 or 100 then you are much improved already.
The explorations have their own personalities, but it is YOUR personality that is important here. YOU need to decide which explorations best suit YOUR trading style. Its sort of like the dating game: you need to define your own style and use MS to match it. Eventually, you might, like me, find your trading style has made a compromise and matched the capabilities of MS.
After runnning some of the exlorations you might decide that none of the built-in explorations suit YOUR style, so would like to start coding your own strategies. Learning to do this is highly recommended. Products that come out of the box, and can, without any tweaking whatsoever, return a list of trades that are guaranteed to be profitable are the holy grail, they do not exist. MS requires a lot of tweaking, customising to suit each individual and THEIR trading style.
Once you have made your tweaks, you run them through the system tester to 'try them in the market'. The system tester will ASSIST you to refine the logic of your entry and exit strategies, and may with the assistance of the optimisation process, ASSIST in the determination of variables. DO NOT abuse the optimisation process for 'data mining' or curve fitting! Change the logic of your entry/exits, its a lot safer.
Stick with it. MS is an exceptionally powerful TOOL, to be used with discretion by the educated/patient investor/trader. It is not a black box system maker, but an aid for you to refine the list of ALL stocks down to a list of TRADABLE stocks.
Read the MS manual. Ask any questions on the BB here. Read the MS manual. Get the MS Formula Primer, free from Equis, if you intend writing your own code (recommended). Read the MS manual. Get involved with the discussions on this BB and there are many more out there too. Read the MS manual. Practice with MS. Read the MS manual. Paper trade your ideas for a period until you are 100% comfortable with your trading system, regardless of the System Tester results. Read the MS manual. Read the MS manual. Read the MS manual.
Hope this goes some way to help.
wabbit. :D
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