Blog

  • Backtest, Forward Test, Live Trading

    Eureka! You’ve just found the holy grail of market indicators. The indicator of indicators which over the past few days has perfectly called each 30 minute top and low in the e-mini S&P futures… Now what?  Time to put some real money on the thing and retire to the islands…. Not so fast! Your strategy may be looking good over

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  • Creating a “Curve-Fit Free” Trading System:

    We explained last week the definition of Curve Fitting, and the conundrum it creates for potential systematic investors. Having the ability to determine if a system uses curve fitting is essential. But that can be difficult to determine. So how does one find a “Curve-fit Free” Trading System? The secret to creating a non curve-fit system, is to change the

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  • What is Curve Fitting?

    What is Curve Fitting? One of the greatest appeals and advantages of mechanical trading systems is the ability to evaluate their historical performance by “backtesting” the strategies on historical price data. While we may have just a handful of months of actual performance data available, computers and backadjusted data make it possible to see what a system “would have done”

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  • Measuring Slippage: Make it a Top Priority!

    The computer reported a gain of +$1,365.81 for the Sistema SGA121 Daxsystem’s day trade on the iSystems platform on 4/25/14 after accounting for $17.26 in commissions , but clients trading the system earned just $1,249.29 on the trade. What happened? Where did that extra $116.52 go? It’s called slippage, and it is the difference between where the computer signaled the

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  • Bargain Hunting Trading Systems

    One of the original developers on the iSystem platform – Ilpo Kumpulainen of Ges Trading Strategies  recently shared a piece with us looking at how value investing in the stock market has a corollary in the automated trading system world, and we found it so informative – we wanted to post it here… Enjoy: _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

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