Seth’s Journal.

[Anonymous]

If you want to become desensitized to [strike]joy[/strike] volatility, buy some bitcoin and put it on an exchange and send me your API keys.

June BTC
15m chart : (2%)
30m chart : (%20)

June ETH
15m chart : (26%)
30m chart : (9%)

[Anonymous]

Had an outboarding call with Nick last week and Craig yesterday. 6 months have gone by quite quickly. Looking to take some course work on Python to further engage in algorithmic strategies potentially for a job. I went ahead and made a twitter to post some daily snippets, you can find me @QTOD_seth https://twitter.com/algo_seth

Thanks to everyone who has helped along the way! Cheers!

[Anonymous]

Rocinante R1000
July: 6.71%

Need to calculate my NDX system. Will do it later.

[TimothyStrickland]

Solid Seth!

[Anonymous]

Thanks Tim!

Prime Directive NDX
July: 13.97%

Crypto strategies got turned off after I posted my June progress report because I realistically looked at how ridiculous they were.
Attempting a market neutral strategy currently. Will report back in 1 month for those.

[OmarAouane]

Hi Seth,
congrat on your great July.
After a chat with Nick, I jumped into the MOC pool. After few days of research, I got some first decent results that I will submit soon. The 0.2% avg trade makes me a bit nervous. I would be very interested to know what path have you been investigating when you started? I started the simplest way possible, like ATR make an X day high.

[Anonymous]

Cool dude! That’s awesome!
Regarding the .2% average – on your next call with Nick have him explain the “casino” analogy to you. In short, with a system like this, all we want to do it to play. We want to play every day and we want to play as many times as possible because we believe that we have a tiny tiny edge that we can exploit many many times over – much like the “house” does at a casino. They are open 24/7, free drinks, free entertainment, etc etc, because all they want is for people to play their games.

My system creation was abysmal to start. I think I had 5 or 6 conditions that I was looking for. I believe I had “indicator fever” and Nick was the “indicator instigator”. Go simple, simple, simple, simple! Make it bare bones!

I am not currently running a system based on ATR as a condition, but I have one that I will run when more capital comes my way (get the hell out of here COVID so I can sell my gym… damn!) that uses a StdDev(C) expansion. I imagine it will be more similar to the one you are describing.

My live system is more vanilla – stocks that are in upward trend and that have a slight pullback, and then a simple stretch. I have only changed my position size from 40 -> 20 and doubled the equity on each since going live. I think I am only getting away with that because my equity in this system is small to begin with. I’ve seen two days already with partial fills.

Also with your ATR breakout – keep that in the back burner when you go to make a short side strat as well. Neither of my two work for shorts, but I think yours are more likely than mine.

Also make sure you are on tiered IB commission. See my earlier post for cost analysis.

[OmarAouane]

Thanks a lot Seth for all the details. I am still digging but first feedback from Nick was encouraging. Will keep you posted!

[Anonymous]

Nick’s advice is good unless he is talking about growing a full head of hair. Listen to someone else like myself with a bonafide mop for things like that. Otherwise, yeah. Hope it goes well!

[TrentRothall]

😆 😆 😆

I’m all ears Seth

[Anonymous]

Rocinante R1000
August: -1.3%

Prime Directive NDX
August: very good, but Fidelity’s performance feature “has been temporarily disabled while we upgrade our system to serve you better.”
My account there still has some of my old strategy of buy and hold the index, so I’ll have to get numbers for it in a few days.

[Anonymous]

Crypto Market Neutral (this needs a better name, current moniker is too lame)
August: 97%

Holy kangaroos it was a wild ride. Mid August there was a large pump and I saw UPNL eating up over half of my initial equity. No way to backtest it [python can help here but I have to get better at it], so everything is live. In short (pun intended), I am trading futures with 10x leverage and exclusively doing DCA based on pivot points. Initial entry is $300 and all further DCA entries are $600. Using 15 pairs long and 15 pairs short, but my setup was a little short-biased due to some initial error that I am too lazy to fix. My solution to said laziness was to create a second account and run the exact same pairs, except all inverted. I’ve had that account running since the 22nd of August and it has done 32%. When a single pair’s average entry price is more than 35% away from current price, the system will make a fairly substantial reduction and take a large loss to then continue performing DCA trades.

The quantity of trade volume is astronomical. I’ve traded 350x my average balance in August. It’s probably not safe. Actually, it is definitely not safe.

Today I am going to even the balance across both accounts so that I will have a better comparison in one month’s time. My current thoughts are:

Barrier to entry is low: you could make an account and trade at 125x leverage in 5 minutes.
Because the barrier to entry is low, there are many inexperienced traders.
I am an inexperienced trader.
Almost all crypto traders have no system or rules.
Having a system is my only edge.
I should exploit the edge and maximize profit extraction.

Happy to talk more about this if anyone wants. Unsure if Nick is going to shoo me off of the forum with all of the crypto jabber. Anyway, cheers friends!

[Anonymous]

I fight with the freaking formatting on images every time. Sorry that one is so big.

[OmarAouane]

Hi Seth,
great job indeed. I am not expert at all in crypto and does not have a side really, in the sense that I am not sure if these are real financial assets or not. My pragmatic view is that it could make sense to allocate couple of percent as diversification as long term view.
But the leverage – or possible leverage – numbers you are talking about sound like sure ruin to me. And you would not even need to do anything wrong.
Just my 2 cents…
cheers!

[Anonymous]

Awesome work Seth.

I’m on the “its not real currency” side for things like Crypto. But with that said, and what seems to be coming out of your results, I would be tempted to pop 5 or 10K into it and give it a go on the premise you may never see the money again.

Actually these highly leveraged accounts don’t really worry me about the “never seeing the money again” part. They worry me that I will make some silly mistake and my 10K account which I started on the premise of never seeing it again suddenly creates a massively over leveraged debt and suddenly I have an instant 250K of debt on my hands that I am sure as hell the broker will chase me for and I will be obliged to pay.

[Author]

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