The Way Forward

2:45pm CST - As mentioned end of last year, the way forward for me has to include system trading. I know myself well enough and have enough history of my trading to conclude this is the least painful way to get my equity curve rising again.  I could be envious of the discretionary traders out there who seem to post winning days endlessly but what point is there in that?  Good for them. I wish them continued success, except for times they may coincidentally be on the other side of my trades!

I've been doing a lot of Ninjatrader strategy coding and continue to improve. I never run out of ideas but it's so rare to find anything that produces some results with good merit.  And that sometimes causes frustration and/or procrastination when backtested results, after days of work, are almost always bad.  But you just have to keep moving ahead to find a gem.

My main criteria for "good merit" includes:  decent Profit Factor (usually >1.5), low Drawdown, high NetProfit to Drawdown ratio (usually >2) for all 1-year periods, sufficiently high Average Trade Profit to overcome slippage/commissions, and of course, a decent looking profit curve.  Lots of intangibles come into consideration too like how robust the system seems to be with various tweaks and optimizations to the variables as well as different timeframes.

I hope to start trading again soon and I may be adding TF back into the mix. More work to do tweaking my latest system but these results look good enough for me.

The monthly crop report was today and I resisted the urge to trade that (I don't have a system for it). The first minute or so was not for the faint of heart...