ToS, Futures, and finally being successful

July 20th, 2011, 11:48 PM

Hey Cloudy...

Thanks for the reply in the introductions forum. I didn't want to reply there since it was just for introductions but I did want to take a moment to tell you a bit about what worked for me in the appropriate forum.

As I said in my post, I trade purely on get in out signals. There is so thinking or feeling about it. Every time I did this, I sucked at it and failed. My emotions would get in the way all the time.

So I programmed my strategies and did (I use ToS as well) the back testing on the ToS charts using the reports they do. I trade on 1 and 2 hour charts so I use the OnDemand feature to go back to December 7 2009. I export all the trades from that day forward and bring it in to a spreadsheet. Then I have to make adjustments to the numbers there because the results aren't perfect every time and I have to paste 3 different reports together into one report. It's a pain in the ass but a very needed thing for me so I must do it.

Then I plot the P/L on a simple chart in Excel to see what the profit curve looks like. With Futures I always do 1 contract in all my reports. Just easier this way. Another thing if you do this, always add 2 ticks against you on entry and exit trades for slippage. This will REALLY tell you which strategies are worth a damn or not. I had a number of them I was trading live and once I did that the profits on the report when to crap - no wonder I wasn't making any money. Finally /YM, /SB, and /KC still look great even with 2 ticks of slippage on all entries and exits.

Prodigio still has a long way to go.. I can't wait for it to be a lot better than it is right now so I don't have to enter all these orders in every morning and day.

You said you're only a few years into it and struggling. Let me tell you something, this is not easy and never ever give up. If you want it back enough you will stick with it and don't get frustrated. I gave myself 10 years to get it right and finally after 7 I'm profitable.

Let me know if you have any questions. I am more than happy to answer any further questions you have. Books I thought were good, things I've learned, etc... Ask away if you like!

Thanks,

-Allistah

July 22nd, 2011, 11:12 PM

Hi Alliyah,

Thanks very much for sharing and elaborating! Yes, I had been trying TOS's dom on 5min and 1min with mixed success on the 6e and ES. Before I had tried a scam signal service which was based on the daily and weekly charts and had horrible results. (how did I know it was a scam? I took results and saved them on a spreadsheet. After I had quit the signal service, I compared 6 months later what results the scammer was posting on his ad website. completely different equity curve off by +$60k! which would have been losing or at best floundering, and I saw the "historical" trades I hadn't seen when I was using it ,pop out of thin air to make the equity curve back into an upward slope , ha) So it sounds great you have a system you backtested on the 1hr for /ZC, /SB, and /YM. And with 1 hr based setups you don't have to worry as much about slippage and overall sluggishness of TOS which is horrible for daytrading by scalping. I assume you were using TOS's "thinkback" and on "ondemand"? "thinkback" does require a little different way of programming than regular TOS chart strategies doesn't it? I've made some modified strategies and the required boolean functions for TOS scan, but I haven't tried "thinkback" yet. I saw Prodigio, looks very nice and using the graphical only setup for coding. I hope it's based on a separate and faster application than TOS desktop. Thanks for the advice not to give up. Glad to hear you preserve red after a long road to consistent profitability. I'll try to keep that in mind on my own trading.
Right now I'm mostly doing options and TOS scans. I have a journal just starting out in the journal category.

Thanks!

Cloudy

ToS, Futures, and finally being successful

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ToS, Futures, and finally being successful