We’re not rockers… but let’s look at detrending price series data for backtesting: Why, How and its relevance for Trend Following.
Why Detrend?
The main premise for detrending data is to remove the underlying trend effect on the strategy. This is due to the position bias that the strategy can have (eg being long more often than [...]
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Tags: detrending
I recently came across the Vortex Indicator, which aims to leverage the chaotic science of fluid mechanics (vortices) into a new indicator. I decided to code up this interesting concept in Trading Blox.
The indicator logic is described in the January issue of TASC (Technical Analysis of Stocks and Commodities) and sounds intriguing (link to PDF [...]
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Tags: ADX·DMI·IPV·Trading Blox·vortex·Welles Wilder
This post is trying to present a process to determine your bliss function, as a follow-up to the previous post introducing the bliss function concept.
e’ve seen that the bliss function is not a universal function but needs to encapsulate your own criteria for evaluating a trading system. Similarly to popular dishes, everybody has got their [...]
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Tags: bliss function·optimisation·robust
David Varadi, from the very good CSS Analytics blog, pointed me to his interesting findings on a Mean Median Divergence Indicator (MMDI) he devised as a replacement to the standard MACD.
I wanted to test the MMDI as a follow-up to Moving Median: a better indicator than Moving Average?. This also provided a good opportunity to [...]
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Tags: robust·screenshots·Trading Blox·Trend Following
Backtesting mechanical trading systems involves a great deal of optimization: testing and running a system across a myriad of parameters to choose the one(s) that produce the best results.
But what is “best”?
How do you measure best results, though? Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) is one of the first metric that comes to mind (it is [...]
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Tags: bliss function·Ed Seykota·optimisation
Stepping back from the story of the cockroach and the cheetah, it seems that robustness is all about survival. For an automated trading system, this means the system “survives and thrives” after you decide to put it “live”.
However there are different ways to look at robustness in a mechanical trading system.
Different definitions for robustness
Trading [...]
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Tags: eckhardt·optimisation·robust
Anybody researching automated trading systems quickly comes to realise that robustness is very much a required aspect of any system. Robust systems are sturdy and able to withstand all that the markets can throw at them without collapsing in ruin.
To explore this further, let’s study the animal world with the Cheetah and the Cockroach – [...]
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Tags: cheetah·cockroach·Michael Clarke·robust