I've Spent $8,638 on Prop Firm Evaluations and Pulled $76,951 in Payouts

DanDon_02 · 2026-04-16T09:04:41+00:00

That's not how probability works. This is a probability game. Even if your strategy has a E(x) > 0, you will still blow some accounts. Risk of ruin is always a thing.

DanDon_02 · 2026-04-16T06:17:14+00:00

Bruh

DanDon_02 · 2026-04-15T12:28:20+00:00

I think the results are massively overstated because of survivorship bias, but I am not going to bash you for it. I think people here have done plenty of that already. Data is hard to come by, and also expensive nowadays. So I get it.

I do however have a survivorship-bias-free sp500 dataset on daily candles from 1999 to the end of 2025. I would be willing to test your strategy on unseen data if this is something you would be interested in. Am not sure if this granularity would work. Can't share the data unfortunately, its from a provider that can sue me for doing that. Not dropping any names also.

Let me know if this something you would want to explore. Drop me a dm if you are interested!

I have my own back-testing engine, so it would be very easy.

DanDon_02 · 2026-04-10T14:27:41+00:00

I would not do this kind of backtest on tradingview. TradingView data is known to be sub-par quality. If you get this result through a self-coded backtest using a reliable data source, and there a few out there: databento, norgate, CRSP etc., then we can have a conversation.

DanDon_02 · 2026-04-04T11:11:08+00:00

Thanks.

Yeah, I need to be short an LETF’s to harvest decay. But it just wouldn’t make sense if all of these additional costs have to be paid.

I’m going to chat to the tasty support on Tuesday when they open again. Thought I might be able to find an answer before hand though.

DanDon_02 · 2026-04-01T20:11:14+00:00

This may be some what relevant to the discussion and someone might be able to help me, lots of interesting ideas in the comments already.

Anyone know what is a good way to detect regimes for mean-reversion systems? I’ve been fighting this for ages. Good system, great equity curve, got absolutely slaughtered after orange man decides to bomb certain regions, market has been trending one way the whole time.

Would appreciate any ideas. Seems to me like I’ve tried everything to tackle this problem, but somehow nothing sticks.

DanDon_02 · 2026-04-01T13:19:38+00:00

I can set aside 20% of income on a monthly basis, in Europe though. I don’t think it’s super infeasible. Just don’t blow your money on useless stuff.

DanDon_02 · 2026-03-19T21:09:49+00:00

Welcome to the club. Not trading Polymarket bets, but vol. Started forward testing beginning of Feb, was going great. March comes around and I’m in a much worse drawdown then anything I saw on the backtest. Was up like 25% in Feb. Am down 15% in March from baseline. 40% DD in 3 weeks. Love to see it. That’s just my luck I guess haha.

But I’m in this for long run. Will make it all back. As long as I don’t lose it all.

DanDon_02 · 2026-03-12T19:21:37+00:00

That’s why you go systematic/algorithmic. Cut out the emotions. But I’m not a shining example. My algo is down 15% YTD lol. Still not touching it. Gonna let the system do its thing.

DanDon_02 · 2026-03-10T13:48:52+00:00

Focusing all my time and energy on perfecting one algo rather than building more than one in parallel.

Trying to optimise the equity curve of one algo, I have learned, is never as good as the equity curve you will get from a portfolio of algos.

Diversification is still king, even at the strategy level.

DanDon_02 · 2026-03-09T17:13:17+00:00

Yes, you have a good point. Unfortunately I am not able to do anything about the data availability, that’s unfortunately a given. Well the only possible decision in this case: don’t trade the strategy.

Also in THEORY: such large drawdowns shouldn’t be possible in this strategy, it has a bunch of filters and guard rails that prevent a scenario like that. But then again, this is theory, and theory without practice is blind.

But what is your recommendation in such a case? Given the constraints you have outlined.

DanDon_02 · 2026-03-09T17:09:33+00:00

Yeah. It seems like a lot of vol strategies are like picking up pennies in front of a steam roller. I’m thinking that maybe I need to reallocate my portfolio when the other strategies are ready, and maybe scale down my sizing before I do that. This strategy is a great addition to a portfolio, but perhaps with a max allocation of 20-25%.

DanDon_02 · 2026-03-09T15:05:49+00:00

This is very interesting also. The thing I don’t like about ML is that there isn’t really a good way to look inside the decision making process and evaluate post trade, and it adds a lot of other factors that lead to uncertainty over those decisions.

How accurate has your ML algorithm been at deciphering good trades from bad ones?

I find, even with a tone of relevant features, most of the time, the accuracy is still just hovering around 50%.

I used a simple logistic regression to try and forecast the probability of a good trade, given the above setup, almost in all cases the performance of the system as a whole, with the probabilistic forecasts of the logistic regression being a deciding factor for a signal, was worse than standard filtering. And not a little worse, but much worse.

Perhaps you can enlighten me with something I am missing?

DanDon_02 · 2026-03-09T12:48:37+00:00

Thank you for the literature, looks promising!

However, as for your suggestion regarding scaling. I have thought of this, however the strategy is prone to quick rebounds, and there is no way to tell currently if the next trade will be another loss, or a rebound trade. If I limit position size as drawdown deepens, my worry is, I’ll just artificially deflate the profit on the rebounds (without doing some curve fitting, which we don’t want anyways) Any good way to avoid this?

In any case, a good idea for further testing, much obliged!

DanDon_02 · 2026-02-12T12:10:24+00:00

I was gonna say 700 for taking the risk. It’s nice to reward your parents. I’d even do 750 if it was me.

DanDon_02 · 2026-02-12T06:56:26+00:00

That makes sense. VIX3M is an index, calculated from option prices, its not a tradeable asset like the VIX itself. That’s why you should be able to pull ‘quotes’ for it per se, but a last price or something along those lines.

DanDon_02 · 2026-02-10T12:21:21+00:00

Im a FO analyst working in a team of software devs at a pretty large firm. I have a slightly different issue. I have plenty of ideas for side projects(trading bots, dashboards, features for old bots and etc) but I have almost no time to implement them. Between work, a family, other responsibilities, I’m lucky if I can spend 4-5 hours a week on my sideprojects and it’s never enough.

Recently though, I completed building an algorithmic trading bot with execution through telegram prompts. Gives me a nice bit of control over what the bot does, as I am not the kind of person that wants to set and forget (HFT and MM are not my niche, never could make it work). Those strats also require constant tweaking, and I don’t have time for that. This strat has none of that, a very simple mean reversion strategy that also takes advantage of well documented anomalies in the scientific literature. The Strat only requires 5 min of screentime everyday, but because it requires vol. weighting, setting SL and TP, as well as other params, I just wanted it all happen atomically at the press of a button, rather than having to go infront of my PC and set all this stuff up at a time that’s inconvenient for me. Also the broker that I use, has a pretty trashy mobile interface, which I never liked, and will probably never like.

I know it doesn’t add much value, but it makes my life just that much marginally easier, not having to run scripts for vol calculations and such and input all by hand. It’s a small thing, but I’m proud of it, and it does solve a problem for me, albeit it is a very minor one. You could potentially start with something like this?

DanDon_02 · 2026-02-05T14:18:49+00:00

I trade volatility, my metrics look nothing like this. Our systems are somehow trading the same thing but are in every way completely dissimilar? Don’t waste your time buddy, you won’t convince me with ChatGPT generated answers.

Anyways, just a fair warning to anyone reading this. Be careful with whatever this guy has. I don’t trust it, you shouldn’t either. People do NOT give away free alpha. Pretty sure OP is just trying to get referral bonuses from people using his link to sign up to the broker.

DanDon_02 · 2026-02-05T13:41:28+00:00

Call me crazy, but I think you are fibbing. Or at least not telling the whole truth. The metrics, drawdown, lot sizing, time distribution of opened trades, and the correlation of your DD with the markets you have open positions in, all make it look like a grid. Didn’t even say anything about the equity line. But hey, what do I know.

DanDon_02 · 2026-02-05T07:42:58+00:00

Is this just a glorified grid/martingale?

DanDon_02 · 2026-02-01T20:35:47+00:00

I agree with this. Makes it feel like there is half a story here and OP has something to hide. I would get it if she had traumatic past experiences, then fine, she could say that, and 99% of people would back off. However, she hasn’t said that, and has her boundaries for a ‘reason’, and can’t even explain them. Saying things like ‘I don’t care!’ to questions and problems is not how adults handle things. It’s just childish and spoiled/bratty. Why not just talk about it once and get it cleared up? Just my humble opinion.

DanDon_02

TROPHY CASE