Seth’s Journal.

[Anonymous]

Matthew O’Keefe wrote:

… 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.

Serious though – I was not kidding when I said: you can make an account and trade 125x in five minutes. I have provided no KYC, I made the account from an Ireland IP address, and I only hit the exchange from a German IP address because that is where my VPS is located.

They will happily liquidate you if your margin ratio gets to 100% and that will be the end of it. They must be making money hand over fist.

Omar: I used to care about crypto, but Nick’s course has changed my opinion drastically. I do not care at all about anything other than profit extraction. They are totally fake financial assets! There is a reason why all of the other non-BTC coins are called “shitcoins”… you can guess.

Cheers!

[Anonymous]

Problem is, CFD’s are totally fake financial assets as well. And yet plenty of people still make it work and trade a great living from it.

It is funny how the human psyche works in regards to trading something ‘real’ or ‘synthetic’.

[TrentRothall]

Seth Lingafeldt wrote:

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!

Seth what is DCA? Is this all automated running 24/5 or are you trading the system Disco style lol

[Anonymous]

Dollar cost averaging on the way down. Pulling avgEP (average entry price) towards the mark price when price is at a pivot point on the 30m chart. I’m currently bleeding like a stuck pig (do you guys use that phrase down under?) at the moment, but it is weathering these large moves decently. When the market calms down I will see if there are any changes that I want to make. I will probably reduce my order size, and I should have done that a month ago.

System is running 24/7 – absolutely no disco here! Hah.

[Anonymous]

Omar Aouane wrote:

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!

Yep! It happened. I think my eyes were turning into dollar signs, and the next thing I knew, I was totally liquidated:

Oddly enough I read Nick’s article on risk management after reading your post
https://www.thechartist.com.au/risk-management/
and it totally fell on deaf ears. Man, I’m a stubborn learner!

Changing trading limit on the BTC strategies a bit and making them less aggressive. Hopefully will have some better performance this month.

[Anonymous]

Rocinante R1000
September: -.08%

Prime Directive NDX
September: +6.68%

When checking the backtest for my NDX system, my account is not in parody [to my benefit]. I was dropping 10% of my account balance into the system bi-monthly, on the 1st and the 16th. I had been looking for an excuse to move the remaining funds out of the index and into my system, so this month after the dip in early September I went all-in on the system. It was good timing, just lucky.

[Anonymous]

Oh yeah, and I am under contract to sell my small business. That’s the best bonus of the year.

[ScottMcNab]

Great news Seth

[OmarAouane]

sorry to see that Seth… I didn’t mean to jinx you
hopefully it was a small account…as they say you are not a true trade if you haven’t crash couple of accounts
good luck!

[Anonymous]

Omar Aouane wrote:

sorry to see that Seth… I didn’t mean to jinx you
hopefully it was a small account…as they say you are not a true trade if you haven’t crash couple of accounts
good luck!

Oh, buddy, it was all my fault! I’ll wear it. Thanks for the kind words, cheers!

[Anonymous]

I SOLD MY BUSINESS

I SOLD MY BUSINESS!!!!!

Wow, what a freaking RELIEF! Quarantine threw a freaking wrench the size of a fat orange president in the way. UGH! Anyway, that is over and done! I’ve got a few months to make the transition with the new owner and then I’m off to the job market in January.

Rocinante R1000
September: +10.76%

Prime Directive NDX
September: -5.12%

In other news, and I talked to Matthew about this briefly, but I’m learning python and have taken upon my first task to write my own API program to take my amibroker output for my MOC system and send and manage the orders with TWS. It’s going really well. I have a few developer friends who have helped me along the way, and the program is in full working order (opens positions, submits MOC orders, and closes unfilled and partially filled orders at 3:40pm) for one single system, but with no GUI. The current API (and this is in no way a knock on it, because I use it every day) has the limitation of only letting a user run 9 systems, and I see that as a problem.

I want to be able to go to employers and say “Hey there company, I know I look like someone who has been running a gym for 11 years, but I have seen a problem and have coded a solution”. I mean, shoot, I need something on my resume other than “former muscle nerd”.

MyPyAPI (holy lord that is a bad name, will have to get a replacement ASAP) was created with a few ideas.

I wanted to be able to take an amibroker-saved CSV file with our “IB Signals” output type (so this can be done with amibroker’s batch processor and scheduler daily instead of user interaction) and clean it up based how many open positions the user wants, eliminating any need to open excel.

I also want to be able to take ALL orders of the same system style (MOC for example), and run them on one instance of the API. This is functioning, but would not pass an audit (too ghetto). This would allow someone who wants to run 10 MOC systems to be able to have 10 daily outputs from amibroker that only occupy one API client.

If I can get some intra-day data with python and my system backtests well with an intra-day limit exit, I plan on adding in the limit exit functionality. I’m not holding my breath for this,

I also foresee that the best way to run a GUI for this will be to have one totally separate read-only GUI client that will see positions of the entire account, but can display which system all of the positions have originated from.

OK, wow, long post from me. Been freaking busy with selling the business and closing that up. Likely will not change until after the holiday.

I used to be very active here, and I hope to return to posting on everyone’s threads as soon as there is a new reply! If you have read this far, thank you for stopping by and HAVE A GREAT DAY!

[JulianCohen]

Sounds really good Seth. Being able to run unlimited systems in one API would be a massive bonus

[GlenPeake]

Very nice return for the “Rocinante R1000″…!!!! Well Done Seth!!!

Congratz on selling the business as well!

[Nick Radge]

Congrats on selling the business Seth.

Keep us up to date on the API progress.

[AlexanderLuong]

Congrats Seth! I have to ask, why employers? Cause I’m trying to make the opposite switch, hahaha. If you’ve been a successful business owner and trader, a free man, do you think you can deal with all the BS and politics, daily standups, Agile, Scrum, useless PMs, and all? Cause I can’t stand it anymore and I need to get out of soul-sucking corporate slavery ASAP LOL. Working out all the time sounds amazing! Grass is always greener, I guess.

API sounds great. Before I met Nick, I was playing around with forex, crypto, and futures (and losing money), so I ended up writing my own API that I currently live trade with on a platform called QuantConnect. It can hook into multiple brokers for stocks/options/crypto/forex/futures so it’s nice for messing around with all sorts of stuff. It can backtest too, but Amibroker + Norgate is better. But now that I’m probably just gonna focus on stocks and IBKR to actually make money, I plan on just writing my own IBKR API as well.

Btw @Seth and @Julian, and others with multiple MOC systems, how do you squeeze that all under a single account balance? I was already running into many insufficient margin issues with my LMT fills getting canceled with just 1 long + 1 short strategy at 40 x 10% each even with the low fill rate. But I guess that’s like trying to use 8x leverage when I only have 4x, so Nick helped me sort that out with smaller size or LIT orders.

Might be fun to team up at some point. I’m a tech lead and proficient with all the main programming languages (Python/JavaScript/Java/C++/C#/Go), frontend UI (I like React) and backend servers, databases, DevOps, AWS/GCP cloud, etc. My plate is kinda full right now, but I plan on quitting my software engineering job next year because I have few itches I want to scratch before I turn 30 and my life is over, like just trading for a year and seeing if I starve or not + growing my dating app lol! Cheers!

[Author]

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