Welcome to Jez Liberty's home for sharing research and insights on automated trading systems development. 
s it important to understand why Trend Following works (ie what are the sources of its profitability)?
I believe yes. Because markets are non-stationary (changing all the time), their characteristics – including those at the root of Trend Following profits – are changing too.
Understanding these market characteristics is a first step towards being able to identify [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Data'
How-To: CSI Data into TradersStudio
January 12th, 2010 · 4 Comments · Data
Dear readers, I hope you enjoyed the holiday break. I wish you a happy New Year – may it bring you progress and success in your automated trading endeavours!
I wanted to start this year with an idea I left off last year, when investigating robustness: Using the median as a more robust tool than the [...]
Price Distributions and Trend Following
December 8th, 2009 · 7 Comments · Data, Forex, Trend Following
I posited in an earlier post that fat tails are one of the main reasons why trend following works. The underlying concept can be summarized as follows: trend following attempts to capture big price moves (a.k.a. trends). Since price distributions are leptokurtic (i.e. they exhibit fat-tails) long trends occur at abnormal frequency, providing greater sources [...]
Are you reading the essential books?
October 13th, 2009 · 1 Comment · Backtest, Blog, Books, Code, Data, Development, Money Management, Software, Strategies, Trend Following
I am bit of a geek and this is especially true when it comes to books. I firmly believe in self-development and I think books are a great medium to learn many things. Ok, the internet is so great to learn about new things; but nothing beats a good in-depth book(s) to really learn a [...]
Tags: library
Unfair Advantage API Code (C#): Extract Futures Continuous data
October 4th, 2009 · No Comments · Backtest, Code, Data, Futures, Software
As mentioned in the previous post on retrieving Back-Adjusted Contracts using the RetrieveBackAdjustedContract2 function of the Unfair Advantage API, I have coded up this very simple project to read a list of Futures underlying instruments, retrieve a proportionally back-adjusted contract for each of the instruments and oputput it to a file.
Getting started with the API
Fire [...]
Tags: API·C#·CSI·Futures·rollover·screenshots·Unfair Advantage
Continuous Contract options
September 27th, 2009 · No Comments · Backtest, Data, Futures, Software
As mentioned previously in What everybody ought to know about continuous Futures contracts, there are multiple ways to concatenate Futures contracts. Unfair Advantage offers a rich choice of concatenation algorithms – I will use UA as the base for this post.
Please also refer to the Unfair Advantage online manual.
Let’s look at the different possibilities:
Non-adjusted contracts
Take [...]
Tags: Continuous contract·CSI·Futures·screenshots·Unfair Advantage
What Everybody Ought to Know About Continous Futures Contracts
September 22nd, 2009 · 10 Comments · Backtest, Data, Futures
And how to avoid easy common mistakes when choosing which data to use to back-test a trading strategy on Futures… This is a “long-ish” post but I believe essential for good-practice back-testing.
No long-term continuity
Futures are specific in the way they trade in series of short-lived contracts that are only active for a few months (the [...]
Tags: rollover·screenshots
I just got myself an Unfair Advantage…
September 15th, 2009 · No Comments · Data, Futures, Software
What is this Unfair Advantage?
Well, I have just purchased End Of Day historical futures data from Commodity Systems Inc. and this is how they call their Software/Database!
Admittedly it is supposed to be a very good data feed that Google and Yahoo use for their respective Finance portal. They are also recommended by back-testing software companies [...]
Tags: CSI·screenshots·Unfair Advantage
