Tim’s Journal

[TimothyStrickland]

Matthew, something to keep in mind is that my MRV system is currently in a 28% drawdown so it has taken a beating the last several months, yesterday was simply a nice reprieve where the system worked very nicely. That is why I mentioned things could change tomorrow, the system just happened to get on the right side this time, today it could be a different picture.

[Anonymous]

Hmm interesting.

Julian I don’t like lady luck. I like to remove her influence as much as I can. Sure, I know I need to leave it to her on some things, but the less I have to deal with her, the better.

Tim I’m guessing with 0.4ATR you must still generally have a high fill rate though. If you are getting plenty of fills on tight days you must always be getting lots of fills on the more loose days. You must have been getting a shedload in August?

[Anonymous]

p.s. Getting a shedload of fills, I mean.

[TimothyStrickland]

oddly enough I didn’t get much in August. It was a light month. You can only remove luck so much in trading. My fill rate is generally high over the year, my goal was to try and shoot for a certain trade amount at the end of the year.

[Anonymous]

Yes know what you mean. On the short term systems like MOC I like to aim for 1000 trades a year in the systems I build. It doesn’t always work out and for example perhaps I can only get 6 or 700 fills in a year. If the 20 year backtest still shows me say, 15 to 20,000 fills though, I am happy I’m on the right track. Earlier incarnations of MR MOC I was looking at perhaps 150 fills a year and perhaps 2 to 3,000 fills in a 20 year backtest. I learned that, for me, that is just not enough in terms of trade quantity. This was because of my tendency to look for better/optimized results instead of more robust and conservative results over a larger volume of trades.

And to think, Nick’s Tag is “next 1000 trades” and one of the first lessons in the course is flipping the coin to see the effect of trade volume. You can only laugh that one of the biggest, earliest and most important lessons is right in front of your eyes yet you don’t see the forest for the trees.

[TimothyStrickland]

MR HFT: +1.3% ( Yes, you read that right, a positive month for my MR system, the first one in several months.) Long way to go before climbing out of its drawdown though.
NDX Aggressive: -4%
ROR: -3.2%
SPX Momo: +1.7%
Opening Range: +2.2%

[TimothyStrickland]

Seems to happen to often now a days, churn out small profits over a month and lose it all in a single day and then some = P. Not a lot of people can deal with this type of punishment, us traders are a special breed.

[TimothyStrickland]

Its goal writing time for the next year and early retirement seems to be getting closer and closer for my wife and I.

The wife and I are now saving over 70% of our income with the end of next year goal being 75%.
We are looking to retire in 7 years although we will probably hang around for 10 years out of an abundance of caution.
If we wait till 10 years we will have well over the amount needed to survive comfortable indefinitely. This will make me 49 years old at the point of retirement. I am only including conservative conventional investments also, things like 401k, Roth IRA, Mutual Funds etc. Even if we lost all of the money in our trading accounts and all of our properties in real estate went belly up we can still retire in 7 years because only a small portion of our savings goes into higher risk investments about 25%. If our trading takes off which I expect it too and our properties do well then we will just be buying be donating more to charities and maybe a few extra luxury items, an exciting time.

On a trading note, the momentum system seems to be recovering while the MRV system continues to struggle. Nick looked at the system again after the mentor call but neither of us could really pin point anything solid. We tried seeing if changing the entry point might make a difference but I didn’t see anything earth shattering. I tried temp building several MRV systems with different parameters but none of them performed well over the last 2 years. Clearly the market has not been conducive for MRV profitability lately.

[Nick Radge]

Congratulations on setting those goals. Another to consider is what you intend to do with your time – very important.

I’m back in Aust today so I will get back to looking at your system when I get control of my emails!

[MichaelRodwell]

That’s awesome Tim. With a young family (two kids 3 and 1 – yep, in the trenches) I’ve started to think more about these things too. It feels like that’s (10 years) a very reasonable time frame for me. Getting out of my day to day job within 5 would be nice but it might be hard to get ahold of the credit I would need to continue do property projects. About 3 years ago I switched my focus to high yielding commercial property and so far its been working nicely so I’ll see how that plays out.

What would you do Nick? Go fishing, hangout with the family?

My major goal is to coach one of my kids sporting teams (assuming they are into sports).

[TimothyStrickland]

Thanks Nick! Yes, I know you have been traveling a ton and the system is still active for the time being will wait till you get settled back in.

Good point on the time. My wife and I plan on working with our church as well as spending more time in our side businesses which have not been getting the attention it needs due to work. I am fully engrossed in a Computer Science degree so I can learn the ins and outs of coding and algorithms and full time engineering position. Luckily I get paid to go to school due to serving in the military, one of the biggest benefits.

[TimothyStrickland]

Nice Mike! Hope the real estate works out. Something to consider is how much you can cut expenses. Cutting expenses is one of the easiest things to do and easy to track. Making more income is less uncertain because it depends on investments working out, job letting you work overtime etc. It is harder to control, it is somewhat easier to control how much we spend. My wife and I will be able to retire just from the money we have invested from our jobs which is a good thing. The hope is that the real estate we have been buying and our trading systems will do well so we can be very generous with our giving its just those things I feel are a bit less uncertain right now. I know everything is uncertain but I have not been trading these systems long enough to say that they will beat the markets consistently yet, but I do believe they will.I do not need to completely trust that they will because I didn’t dump all my capital in it, that way its easier to disconnect myself from the money and let them do what I tested them to do. I think once I get some years on the system I will be more confident to moving more money into them and less into the other things I feel are reliable investments

[TimothyStrickland]

Mean Reversion systems

MR HFT: -4.2% The Great Mean Reversion drawdown continues. 29% Drawdown now.

Momentum (Rotational systems)

NDX Aggressive: +8.2% (LRCX made a lot of the gains here as it gapped up.) was up over 10% until today’s small pullback
ROR: +10.8% (Has a larger share of LRCX)

Moving Average systems

SPX Momo: +2%

Discretionary Systems

Opening Range: +18.4%

All systems are on fire this month save the MRV which continues to struggle as usual.

[TrentRothall]

Opening range 18.4%!! nice work!

[TimothyStrickland]

Thanks, Trent, it is a very small account still though. Most of the profits come from the really big moves like the FOMC announcement, I have been fortunate to catch the right side of the move almost every time, which won’t likely last. It is also a home run kind of system, taking little losses but then catching a home run, it has had a good several months but it tends to be on and off, it will do well for a while and then not do well, for instance I ran this 2 years ago and ended up running a 35% drawdown so yea. I just wish I knew when it was going to go into a dry spell. The system tends to have huge swings because it is futures systems, in some of the backtests the drawdowns are as bad as 60%, I will never put a lot of money into this system, the ones that Nick taught me will host more of my money.

[Author]

Posts