Saturday, February 26, 2011

Meta-Trader - Goodbye to February

Welcome back Meta-Traders.

It was a week to forget on the homefront. I missed Traders Expo in NYC on Monday due to a snow storm. Everyone was irritable around the house and about the only good news is that February will soon be behind us. As of now, the weather is no longer a factor and instead has just left behind a pile of dirty snow. So that's this week's theme photo - dirty snow.

On the global events front, things got ugly in Libya. Quaddafi vowed not to leave without a fight and instead, has vowed to fight to the death. As of now, the country appears to be a state of divided military rule with little chance of a peaceful settlement, let alone a stable democracy emerging. This un-nerved the energy markets and sent oil prices soaring and taking gasoline up as well.

The stock market hated all this and sold off sharply. Tech stocks also took a beating slicing about 4% off my portfolio in a 2-day period. Things came back somewhat by the end of the week and gained back about 1.5% of the loss. Netflix (NFLX) was particularly damaging, spiking to a high of nearly $248 then selling off back to the $210 area and finally settling at about $212. It makes the case that I need to pay more attention to topping formations and take profits after parabolic moves to the upside.

On the Forex side, things continued to move ahead nicely. Atinalla #1 Live had a nice week picking just over 3% for the week and this account is now up just over 30% year to date!

Atinalla #3 had an even better week picking up about 3.5% on the week and is now up about 11.86% on year to date basis.

Megadroid Live picked up 1.2% or about 9 pips.

FX-Regression Live had a decent week, but went out with a 40-pip open loss with a buy in USD/CAD. Overall, this account appears to be flip-flopping around even and this is typical for this system.

Atinalla FE Live had a losing trade and shed about 2% or -81 pips on the week.

Sapaq Demo had a pretty good week and has come back from a maximum loss of about 4% earlier in the month and has now come up above even.

My new live account Atinalla Full Portfolio Live had a nice week picking up 3.5% for the week, but went out with an open loss roughly equal to his gain. Even so, the other instances running over at Asirikuy are all doing well and i'm hopeful we will see future gains.

Finally, Atinalla #4 SM Live had a pretty good week and came back from some drawdown and is struggling to get back to even.

The only change this week is that i'm going start running Sunday gap trader DCT in my Megadroid Live account with minimal risk. Hopefully i'll get some time on Sunday to start up a new demo with one of the genetic portfolios setup on Asirikuy.

That's all, have a great week!

Friday, February 18, 2011

Meta-Trader - The Face of Watson

Welcome back Meta-Traders.

Last week's jubliation regarding events in the Middle East gave way to fascination over IBM's Watson computer.

In case you missed the story, IBM's computer system nicknamed Watson - (after one of the IBM founders) took on human champions in the game show called Jeopardy this past week on national TV in the US.

The Jeopardy game requires broad, encylopedic knowledge of history, literature, music, film, popular culture, etc. It also requires deep language processing packed with puns, nuance and double-meaning. Needless to say, Watson crushed the humans. It could easily be argued that Watson was "curve fitted" or heavily trained on the Jeopardy game having been fed every Jeopardy game clue and answer for the 27 seasons the show has been on TV.

That said, I think IBM made the point that there's more information available then any human can access and process. Load that information into a massive search engine filled with every available information source, then tack on deep language processing, its easy to make the case that the Watson is the smartest machine on earth!

What does this have to do with Forex Trading? Nothing of course, but I was once a computer scientists in pursuit of machine intelligence. But my capitalist side won out. Makes you wonder what IBM could do in the Forex market if they brought their computing and intellectual resources to bear. Anyway, let's do the numbers.

Equities continue on an upward tear with the SP-500 closing higher in 12 out of the last 10 weeks. The SP-500 has now doubled from its low made back in March of 2009. My portfolio had a pretty good week, but ended off the highs with selloffs in AAPL, NFLX and AMZN. Offseting these sell off's somewhat was a monster breakout in Heath Care payment manager HMS Systems HMSY.

On the Forex side, I had a pretty good week as well. The week's winner was Atinalla #3 which picked up 183 pips or 2.61% for the week. What's more, it went into the weekend with 117 pips in open profit. This puts Atinalla #3 up 8.33% since starting it back on 1/11/2011.

Next up was Atinalla #1 which picked up about 32 pips on the week with a winner and a loser. Even better, it went into the weekend with 76 pips in open profits. This portfolio is up a spectacular +26.98% for the year.

Next up was Megadroid Live which did not trade due to DLL issues.

Next up was FX-Regression Live which had a pretty typical week winning on 8 out of 10 trades and picked up 45 pips on the week. Even so, it's down just over 1% for the year. I'm have to believe I can do better than this since it's results seem very close to a coin flip. If nothing else, I will learn something from the process - and i'll let you know what it is once I find out!

Atinalla #4 slowed its downward slide and lost 31 pips or -0.76% for the week. On the bright side, it has about 75 pips in open profit. I'm still not sure this account is performing properly, so we'll keep an eye on it going forward.

Megadroid Live didn't trade due to DLL problems. Atinalla FE Live did not trade this past week. Sapaq demo gained about 1.48% for the week.

Finally, Atipaq Full Portfolio has passed the demo test with flying colors and I will start trading this portfolio live next week with my remaining $2100 which has been sitting idle over at Forex.com.

Also, this Monday i'll be heading to Trader's Expo at the Marriot Marquis in New York City on Monday. Drop me a line if anyone else will be attending.

That's all, have a great week!

Friday, February 11, 2011

Meta-Trader - Egyptian Jubilation

Welcome Back, Meta-Traders.

It was an extraordinary week on the world stage with an 18-day mass-protest in Egypt resulting in the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak.

Congratuations to the people of Egypt for affecting a major political change with little or no violence. Ghandi, Jesus and John Lennon would be proud. Also, the Egyption Army played an exemplary role of non-violence which is pretty amazing considering their role as defenders of the status quo.

The world's markets went on more or less unaffected by events in Egypt, until Mubarak's departure was announced about mid-day on Friday with little warning. Equity Markets interrupted their relentless upward surge with - you guessed it - another spike to the upside!

Particulary impressive were a handful of Nasdaq stocks such as Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN) and NetFlix (NFLX). Secondary issues QCOM and HMSY put in good performances as well. Each of these companies has built their franchise over many, many years and in the process developed deep barriers of entry to fend off potential competitors. In any case, my equity portfolio surged and i'm doing well for the year but lagging the major averages.

The forex markets were pretty quiet. Atinalla #1 started off taking a nice profit from a trade left open from last week but then gave some back. Either way, its leading the pack up about 26% for the year.

Atinalla #3 gave back about 48 pips for the week but remains up just under 6% for the year.

Megadroid Live came off a period of inactivity and picked up a few pips for the week. Recall this account was up as high as 30% last year before giving it all back and going into drawdown. As of now, its down about 1% from when I started it back in December of 2009.

My own EA FX-Regression Live went into drawdown and gave back all its profits for the year. It took 6 trades and lost on 4 out of 6 which is atypical. One thing I noticed is that since the 3 pairs it trades are all somewhat correlated, they tend to either win or lose as a group, and this week it was lose. Another thing is that EUR/USD is supposed to take the rest of the week off after a losing trade. Since it lost on Monday, and traded again on Friday, there's a bug in its underlying logic. USD/CAD didn't trade at all and EUR/USD and USD/CHF took all the trades.

Atinalla FE went into drawdown closing a trade left open from last week.

Finally Atinalla #4 Live continued to bleed money. I removed the God's Gift instances which have been performing poorly lately and responsible for much of the losses. I took a look over at Asirikuy and its seems like the performance is pretty much being duplicated over there as well.

On the account maintenance side, I have the first full week's results from Atipaq Full Portfolio Demo. I'll be watching that going forward for potential live trading. Also, i'm going cancel the Quimichi demo since there's no chance i'm going to trade that live.

In terms of system development, my regular job has me over-subscribed, leaving no cycles for programming. Take care and have a great week.

Saturday, February 5, 2011

Meta-Trader - A Wintry Mix

Welcome back Meta-Traders.

Last week's massive snow storms gave way to a different type of weather this week - the Wintry Mix. Fortunately, we got through it okay with no damage or loss of power. Things continued to sizzle in the Forex markets and we'll see in a minute when we do the numbers.

Equity markets made back most of last week's losses and nice rebounds in AAPL and AMZN as well as a new all-time high in NFLX bringing my equity portfolio to within 1% of a recent equity high.

On the forex side, the week's winner was Atinalla #1 which gained just over 5% for the week with nice gains from all 3 embedded systems. The best gain came from a buy trade in EUR/USD triggered by Watukushay #2 last week and closed out on Tuesday for a 127-pip gain. Nice gains came from the other 2 systems on the short side of EUR/USD and as it stands now we have about 50 pips in profit on 2 open trades. This portfolio is now up a sizzling 25.36% year to date.

The Atinalla #3 Live and it demo equivalent had a pretty good week as well picking up 277 pips or nearly 1.2% for the week.

My own EA FX-Regression Live took 10 trades for the week and won on 8 out of 10 picking up 52 pips for the week. I was particularly happy with last trade of the week where FX-Regression was long EUR/USD while most of the Asirikuy system were short EUR/USD. Once the Non-Farm-Payroll numbers hit at 8:30 AM EST, EUR/USD had a sudden spike up which took me out of the FX-Regression trade at a 27-pip profit, 7 pips above my 20-pip TP! This turned out to be the upper shadow of the hourly candle, and EUR/USD turned around and went south bringing in nice profits on the short trades.

This was a case where a collection of EA's can profit from both the wiggles and the big moves. I should advise caution, however, since things could have just as easily gone the other way. So keep your risk level as recommended and keep a long-term perspective.

By the way, FX-Regression is free to members of my Yahoo group, so if you want a copy, join my Yahoo group at FX-Mon. Please run it in demo for a while to make sure the settings are correct and only use money you can afford to lose.

Next up is Atinalla FE Live which was down as much as 5% early in the week, but came roaring back on Friday and closed the week up 76 pips. This system is now up +1.71% for the year. This EA is also free, courtesy of Daniel Fernandez over at Asirikuy and can be downloaded here.

The only rough spot continues to be Atinalla No 4 SM which was down as much as 11% about mid-week, but came roaring back on Friday but still lost about 1.1% for the week. I nearly pulled the plug on this system mid-week, but decided to stick with it. I'm not sure i'm out of the woods on this system since I am undercapitalized by about one-third. So i'm going to keep a close eye on it.

Upcoming changes for next week:

Scrap demo accounts for Atinalla #3 Atinalla FE and just run the live instances. These systems have few demo-to-real execution issues due to their wide TP and SL's values. Besides, I can always use the other live instances on Asirikuy to confirm whether they are trading properly. This will free up some CPU and disk for other systems.

Start trading the "Atipaq Full Portfolio" from Asirikuy in a demo account. This account has been doing very well on a year-to-date basis. It shares some systems and pairs in common with Atinalla #3. Once i'm convinced that's running properly, i'm going to go live in my Forex.com #4 account which has been idle since funding it early this year.

That's all for now. If anybody has any tips about good EA's or systems, web-sites etc, please leave me a comment and have a great week.