How To Build An Intraday Trading System

20 years ago, before markets became completely computerised, traders worked off the floor and markets were slower and less efficient. In those days, intraday trading systems could take advantage of those inefficiencies to find a profitable edge. It wasn't easy but it was a lot easier than it is now.

Today, markets are controlled by computers and algorithms. HFT (high frequency trading) contributes to at least 40% of market transactions in some markets and even more in some other markets. Non-HFT algorithms make up a big percentage of the rest.

And the dominant players in HFT and algorithmic trading are big hedge funds and institutions; companies like Goldman Sachs that have huge pools of wealth and resources. Competing against these financial giants for the most part is foolhardy.

Teeing off with Norman

It's like Howard Bandy once said: "trading against Goldman Sachs is like going for a round of golf with Greg Norman. You're never going to win so there's no point in trying." Or something like that.

Consider also, that there are very few examples of anyone even being able to beat the market on an intraday timeframe. And even fewer who have been able to do so with a system.

Still not convinced?

So it's clear that intraday trading is not for the faint of heart and I should know as I spent almost a year trying to time the markets every day in a professional setting.

Even for professionals, intraday trading is supremely difficult and expensive. When I worked as a day trader, we may have had direct access to the market but we also had to pay £150 a day in desk fees, which very quickly mounts up unless you are trading very large size.

But what if you want to ignore these warnings and you're still determined to build an intraday trading system?

I can only wish you the best of luck and suggest the following pointers that come from my own trading experience:

- Avoid forex, there appear to be more inefficiencies in individual stocks and futures.

- Think outside the box. For example, look into social trading, look at the smaller markets that the banks aren't as interested in.

- You can override the system. Longer term systems may not benefit from overriding but there are studies to suggest that humans and machines perform better when working in unison. In fact, in the short-term, discretionary trading usually does better than system trading.

- Conquer the psychological side so as to avoid gambling and emotional stress.

- Understand how to analyse your system so you know when it's stopped working.

Master some of those rules and you'll have a much better chance of making money from an intraday trading system.

Article Source: Here

What Markets Should You Use for Your Portfolio?

A couple of years ago I made a fundamental mistake: until then I had my portfolio focused mostly on index futures markets. For years I have had with this approach really nice results. But that year, I experienced how frustrating it can be, to go through a couple of periods when index markets are underperforming. That was when I have decided to work really hard and improve my intraday portfolio composed of automated trading systems (ATS).

Smooth equity isn't just about the systems - it is a smart combination of markets, timeframes, trading approaches, and, later on, also innovative position sizing. When you think about it, there is the logic behind it.

Even though in times of financial shocks and surprises there is barely any negative correlation in the markets, there are still some markets which live their own lives - and they offer us smart way for diversification.

The result is that when one of the market groups is not doing well, there is another, which compensates the losses from the first one - and makes the equity overall smoother.

What market groups you should use

This is the first question - what markets groups you should combine in order to get the desired result - smooth equity.

We have following futures groups: Index, Currencies, Metals, Energies, Bonds, and Grains. Every market group lives its own life and you can find at least one noticeable market in every group that can represent the whole group.

Personally, I have experimented with all groups and, besides currencies, I can highly recommend any combination. The currencies are, from ATS point of view, highly unstable (for example in Forex, ATS are failing really fast and it is really difficult to find profitable ATS for Forex). It also depends on how many markets you create a system for, and how many markets you trade with your account. But even with rather a small account, you can trade 3-4 markets. For such cases, I would recommend following combinations:

Combination of 3 markets (pick one market from each market group):

• Index
• Grains
• Energies

Combination of 4 markets (pick one market from each market group):

• Index
• Grains
• Energies
• Bonds

Nowadays, I trade several portfolios that are based on the 4 groups mentioned above. Here is an example of one of them (breakout strategies, 30-minute chart, 5 markets, equity for the last 8 years, trading 1 contract per system):

The net profit for all 8 years and all markets combined is 421,548 USD and the max drawdown is just 12,315 USD.

Smoothen the equity by using multiple timeframes

The second way how to smoothen your equity curve (in a combination of trading several markets from different groups) is using several timeframes for every market (ideally without changing system parameters, or with just small changes).

It is more like a final touch than smoothing the equity, but it brings up an interesting idea that it might be better to add new timeframes instead of trading multiple contracts in the same timeframe. Another option is to optimize also the timeframes (check the results of your system on several timeframes and pick one timeframe for each market - it can, but doesn't have to be the same) - but then, we need to ask ourselves how much of over-optimization this is.

Anyway, here is another example of the portfolio mentioned above, when for every market we add the second, 15-minute, timeframe. The equity is slightly smoother, the drawdown hasn't increased so much, but the profit has.

The net profit is 812,457 USD and the drawdown is 18,815 USD.

What systems to use

The best variant is to have in a portfolio both trend and also counter-trend systems. Still, it is sufficient to have a system that can smartly react on both situations (equally, if possible).

I am specialized in breakout strategies and I can say that it is all you need to have a balanced portfolio across several markets - but only if you have systems trading both long and short. Sometimes you just need a simple breakout strategy that doesn't have great performance (that you wouldn't trade individually), but in combination, you have a nice portfolio with smooth equity curve. You need to constantly focus on the performance of the portfolio - it is more important than the performance of underlying systems. Remember when there is a huge drawdown for one market (system), the others can compensate that and you can still make a profit.

For that, you need to have a quality workflow setup how to create new and new strategies, as you will need a lot of them and for several markets. At the same time, it is crucial to have a setup of robustness testing procedures so that we can add to our portfolio really robust strategies.

Article Source: Here

Automated Breakout Strategies for Small Accounts

People often ask me if breakout strategies can be used for small accounts. And the simple answer is, yes, they can. Today, let's have a closer look at this topic and how it can be done.

First of all, it is important to explain one crucial context. If you would like to create breakout strategies for small accounts, you need to work with a low risk. But everything costs something. A low risk will practically always lead to some compromise - mostly you will make less and the stability of your equity will be lower. But, you will experience longer periods when your account will go mostly sideways. Unfortunately, in trading there aren't black and white solutions, and each advantage is redeemed by certain disadvantage. Once you decide to build strategies for small accounts, you have got to ask yourself: What is more important to you? Is it a small risk per trade or a drawdown that is the smallest it can possibly be? (And don't say both, as these are contradictory. Why? I will explain that in examples.)

Drawdown vs. risk per trade

There is a general rule in breakout strategies - the bigger stop-loss, the smaller the drawdowns. Maybe it sounds inconsistent, but the logic behind is pretty clear: Breakout strategies have a tendency to go through substantial corrections throughout a day and a bigger stop-loss will cope with this much better. You risk less with small stop-loss, but you will be out with loss more often. A bigger stop-loss will help you to stay in during corrections. So, even though each loss will be a bit more painful, the overall drawdown can be smaller and the profit and success rate much higher.

Let's have a look at one of my simple breakout systems which can be used to trade on numerous markets even with a small stop-loss.

In this system, the smallest acceptable stop-loss value is 100 USD (market EMD, 30-minute timeframe). It is possible to use the same stop-loss in ES or TF markets with similar results. Such stop-loss is indeed very low for automated trading strategy - quite often even smaller than in similar markets during discretionary trading. With a stop-loss like this, it is possible to trade a small account and losing trades won't be considerably unbearable.

How would equity and maximum drawdown look like with this scenario? The system is generating stable profits, but equity has its weak periods. The average profit is 3000 USD per annum and overall drawdown is 2380 USD. It means it is possible to trade with a very small stop loss. However the question is: Wouldn't it be worth to increase the risk a bit? I understand that for someone with a small account a stop-loss higher than 100 USD could be unacceptable, but let's see if we wouldn't actually gain more than if we used a very small 100 USD stop-loss.

And now the same system with a stop-loss of 300 USD. It sounds like a big jump to increase stop-loss to 300% of the original amount, but let's have a look at what we have gained. The average profit per annum increased to approx. 4200 USD (a 40% improvement), the stability of equity is considerably better, and drawdown decreased to 1930 USD (almost a 20% improvement).

So, the first rule when searching for ATS breakout strategies is: Even if you are working with a small account, search for a strategy with a slightly bigger stop-loss than you would normally use in discretionary trading, or a bit bigger than you would feel is acceptable.

In this case you have to perceive stop-loss only as a necessary protection. Even though individual losses will be more painful to some extent, your results will improve and profit distribution will be more stable.

How to capitalize

Once we have a system with relatively small risk (300 USD is still a very small stop-loss; I personally also work with stop-losses of 2000 USD per contract) and a small drawdown (drawdowns of under 2000 USD for an automated breakout strategy can be regarded as small), for such strategy we can capitalize with a relatively small account. The technique is simple:

1) Conduct a Monte Carlo analysis of the system (e.g. in Market System Analyzer 

 This drawdown will be mostly 25% higher than your original equity - i.e. in the above system we would have to anticipate a drawdown of 2400 USD instead of 1930 USD.

2) Think of what your maximum accepted drawdown is in percentage and capitalize in accordance to the Monte Carlo drawdown that needs to correspond with this percentage. If you decide that you are able to accept a 50% drawdown on your account, then your capitalization will look like this: 2 x 2400 USD = 4800 USD. If you decide you can accept a maximum drawdown of one third of your account, then your capitalization will look like this: 3 x 2400 USD = 7200 USD.

With a bit of patience and research you can come up with strategies that will be possible to trade under certain circumstances with very small accounts - i.e. 5000-10000 USD.

Once you have a few strategies like this, it is possible to work with small portfolios (2-3 systems). In such case you need to conduct a Monte Carlo analysis on your portfolio as a whole (program MSA is great for that) and capitalize in accordance to the Monte Carlo drawdown of the portfolio.

How to search for strategies for small accounts

So, once more... The good news is that to find a good, quality breakout strategy for small accounts is possible. The bad news is that it will take much more patience and you will always have to compromise slightly.

You have to ask yourself what is the amount you are willing to accept (such amount needs to be reasonable, e.g. 100 USD is a bit extreme, but 300-500 USD seems reasonable) and during the development of the breakout strategy, you will have to implement this as a fixed amount from the very beginning of the whole process, i.e. in search and development of the breakout strategy.

Generally speaking, breakout strategies with small stop-loss are better to find on markets like YM and ES, especially on 15 minutes and 30 minutes timeframes. However, it takes much more patience - to find a strategy for small-stop loss is considerably more difficult (but not impossible). From my experience, sometimes it is worth it to take a tested and proven strategy and to try it on other markets with different stop-loss values. This way I have found, for instance, low values of stop-loss for the BOSS system (but for timeframes higher than 15 minutes). Generally, only one in approximately six of my breakout strategies is usable with small stop-loss. This only confirms the difficulty to search for this kind of strategy - but with an account of around 8000 - 10000 USD, I can imagine to have a portfolio with three such strategies and have a decent base for further growth.

Happy Trading!

Article Source: Here

Why You Should Be Careful With Too Small Stop-Loss

In the past, I met several traders, that experienced live results completely different from their backtest results. The cause was a seeming triviality - too small stop-loss. Let me explain to you today, why this can be a problem, what to be aware of and how to avoid this danger. The following topic is just about those breakout strategies that are using STOP order to open a position and, at the same time, they are using too small stop-loss (this article is not about strategies using market order). What is too small stop-loss? Well, it depends on the market and the timeframe. But in general, it is a stop-loss smaller than the size of an average bar of our main timeframe. Let me give you an example - if we are using a 30-minute chart with an average bar value 250 USD, and our strategy is working with an 80 USD stop-loss, we are heading into a serious trouble. The live trading results might (and in most cases almost probably will) be totally different from those that we have from the backtest. Let's take a look at the reason why.

This problem occurs when the stop-loss is so small, that some of the trades have entry order and stop-loss on the same bar. Let's say we have an entry STOP order on the price 100 and also a stop-loss on the price 99. Now, imagine that the bar opens on 98.7, it goes to 100.1 and we open the long position - and the stop-loss is set up to 99. And all of this happens within the same bar - i.e. within this one bar, the entry order is activated, the position is opened and the stop-loss is set up.

Now it is important to understand why this can be potentially a dangerous problem. It is quite simple. There are several backtesting platforms which are not able to recognize, with the wrong setup or when the data resolution is not fine enough if the stop-loss was or wasn't hit on an entry bar. In other words, there are certain situations when, in reality, the stop-loss was hit right after the position was opened, because right after the activation of the entry order, the market starts heading south. However, our backtesting platform evaluates the trade as a profitable one (from now on I will write about TradeStation as it is a platform that I primarily use). How is it possible?

Let's continue with the demonstration of the situation described above. In this situation we can see the rising bar, i.e. the one that has a close price above open price and, at the same time, the close is close to its high.There is an assumption that the bar was raising the whole time and TradeStation assumes that the "inner" move of the bar, i.e. the way the bar was generated, was constantly rising, a straight line.

TradeStation is simply following the logic that when the bar closed close to its high, the process of generating this bar was rising. In such situation, TradeStation assumes that the bar opened on 98.7 and the price was continuously rising to 100.4. And during this time, it also activated our buy order on the price 100.

Nevertheless, this is very inaccurate and dangerous assumption. What if the bar was first rising, activated our purchase order, but then it reversed and went back down, below our stop-loss, and then started rising again to close to its high?

This is a totally realistic scenario that is happening every single day and that would result in a clear loss (right after we open the position) - and yet, TradeStation (and potentially also other software), defines the situation as if there wasn't any correction inside the bar at all. So no stop-loss was hit and trade ended up as a profitable one. This is the root cause to major problems as in the backtest you clearly see a lot of profitable trades that, in reality, would end up as losses - and right after we start trading this strategy live, everything starts falling apart...

Protection #1

Luckily the situation isn't so serious as it looks like and the backtesting platforms, in general, take this risk into consideration.

The first protection against this threat is simple and, to a certain level, highly efficient. TradeStation calls it LIBB (Look-Inside-Bar-Backtesting), others call it different names, like Bar Magnifier. The point is that when you turn on this feature, the program looks inside the bar to the level of the finest available data resolution (in most cases it is 1 minute), if there wasn't any inside correction after the entry order was activated, or if there was a correction on the same bar when we entered and the stop-loss was hit.

Despite that it sounds like a great solution (which is today a standard part of most platforms), it doesn't have to be sufficient when it comes to small stop-losses. Why? Imagine a situation when your stop-loss is 80 USD, but the average bar of your finest LIBB resolution (i.e. mostly 1 minute) is 150 USD big. In this case you are experiencing the same problem as described above, when the platform is not able to determine whether the stop-loss inside the bar was hit or not and it makes, again, just an inaccurate approximations that are driven by the above-described logic - if the bar closed closer to its low or closer to its high. In other words, you are again at the beginning and with too small stop-loss, not even LIBB will help you, and the problem still persists.

Protection #2

So, we are getting to the point when we need to go a little bit deeper to solve this problem.One of the solutions would be to use even finer data resolution - down to the tick level. But this isn't as easy as it sounds. Firstly the tick data history is not so easily accessible, or just for a very short period. And if these data are available, they are really expensive. But even if you still purchase tick data, you need to solve several technical issues - as the tick data are usually so big, that most of the platforms won't handle so many data, crashes or runs backtests incredibly slow (I can confirm this).

Protection #3

So we need to use much simpler solution - and that is the necessity to use reasonably big stop-loss. And what is reasonably big stop-loss? Simply use stop-loss that is at least 1.5-2x bigger than the biggest 1-minute bar on your chart. It is simple and you can avoid several problems. For example, if the biggest 1-minute bar for all your data history was 300 USD, use stop-loss at least 450 USD. Period.It is simpler and safer to get used to higher stop-losses than lying to ourselves and subsequently be surprised why such a nice backtest equity is quite the opposite of results of live trading.

Happy trading!

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