Blaiserboy, zenoni,
Thanks for your ideas. I was aware of majority of them, but some are new inspirations to think about. Here my thoughts to some of them:
[Blaiserboy]: I like the cfd's, particularly Google, nice moves almost every day, whereas the forex pairs have not a lot of volatility recently.
[bold]: Glad to hear that I am not alone who has made good experience with CFDs.
[Blaiserboy]: I am scared of time frames less than 4 hours. mainly because I have burned repeatedly.
[bold]: Theoretically I agree. But in practise my best systems (in real) run on 5 min and 15 min! Even with oscillators that are generally supposed to be tricky. Isn't it crazy?
[Blaiserboy]: Do you try 'long only' and 'short only' on the same time frame?
[bold]: In forex not, because I suppose they are symetrical. With CFDs sometimes yes, especially in longer timeframes (stock markets usually fall quickly than they rise).
[Blaiserboy]: Do you limit the hours for trading specific pairs?
I have had good luck on one hour charts by limiting days of the week and trading hours, but have decided that 4 hours is better for me.
[bold]: Sometimes I try to limit hours/days, but mostly not. I have not found enough benefits for real trading yet.
[zenoni]: You need to do most to understand the concept behind the each strategy.
If I am using the generator then I try to build a strategy towards a specific idea or concept. I try to simulate and backtest the situation with several ways to get deeper understanding about the drawbacks of the strategy.
[Blaiserboy]: I suggest that if you have more than one robot in one time frame for the same instrument that you use different types of indicators on each...... eg make one for price action and one for oscillators and one for trend and one for volume.... different approaches might act like insurance.
[bold]: Basically I try to build and diversify my strategies this way as ground ideas in the beginning. Then I start to use generator and optimizer - and, paradoxically, here lies a "dangerous trap" for me, that is not visible during development, but only later, after some real trading period. As I let generator (and optimizer) to "improve" initial ideas and add new instances, borders between initialy diversified ideas tend to fade discreetly. But for me it becomes quite hard to distinquish where the improvment is still healthy and where no more. First because generated (optimized) equity curves and their parameters might look very optimally, but they tend to perform in the similar way as other, originally diversified, strategies step by step. And second, repeated usage of generator (optimizer) produces more and more "nice" similar strategies; their number growths in a geometric way. Since every single sub-strategy requires some manual effort, it quickly starts to be very time consuming and untransparent. I must always solve, if and what of sub-strategies are already optimal enough and where to stop with futher "improvements". For all these reasons I welcomed Blaiserboy's interesting ideas and experience that also strategies with only few parameters can continually work profitably.
[zenoni]: Market has a continiously changing motion, it's quite a difficult to build exeptionalities to prevent strategy to run all the time. Sometimes it is necessary to manually swiths off or on trader when right market conditions apply.
[bold]: This statement also inspired me to express some improvement, as Blaiserboy asked. I will try to summarize them in the next post.
