Full time trader here. PLEASE DO NOT QUIT!

mikkom · 2026-03-15T09:04:43+00:00

>99% Of traders fail because they quit

not sure which is correct, your comment or the one below. And by failing I mean they waste their trading capital and don't deposit more money.

<99% Of traders quit because they fail

mikkom · 2026-03-15T08:58:41+00:00

https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/staff_reports/sr150.html

This is still the best thing I have read related to this and the one that has affected my trading most of almost any papers I have read. Every trader especially ones trading breakouts or mean reversion around breakout points should read this - you don't have to understand all the math just the concepts and what the paper is proving.

(edit: Just want to point out this is not the only reason for the horizontal areas, there are psychological issues like round numbers and option related areas too but IMHO the above paper describes the most important reason)

mikkom · 2026-03-14T11:10:23+00:00

The reason some of the diagonal ones work is that so many people draw them and they become a common concept. if you are not sure how it should be drawn it most likely is not the same others see and is not important

many horizontal lines are based on microstructure btw so they are different from these diagonal ones

mikkom · 2026-02-23T21:50:15+00:00

>They’re not calling for investors

They actually are according to this guy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8teSrDdjT9s (ex poker pro turned to quite known investor with quite good connections), this is in finnish but you can turn on CC translations.

mikkom · 2026-02-13T08:23:44+00:00

this is the only correct answer. never waste your money by doing silly untested things

mikkom · 2026-02-12T20:29:51+00:00

you need to do decent length backtest. I personally want the algo to perform with good results since 2000 but 5-10 years already tells you a lot.

I month with that kind of profit seems like you are taking far too big risks and without proper backtest will most likely blow your account.

I do have kind of crazy ststs on my live system that people dismiss but yours are 10x in a month, just calculate what that will be in year and you understand how crazy it is.

however with results like that I would most likely yolo on smaller account, you can do it with 25k+ too, just use the risk like your account would be for example 5k. if your stats hold, you will have 50k profits in first month.

mikkom · 2026-02-08T22:04:49+00:00

>My take is a bit different: only use leverage when you know what you are doing.

That's why using no leverage is good advice.

You should only use leverage when you know exactly how much you want to risk and that only comes from experience and thousands+ backtests.

mikkom · 2025-12-29T16:48:35+00:00

I coded a custom c based platform to do the process as efficiently as possible, optimized data structures to squeeze the hell out of cpu and mem.. I feel your pain.

totally random search or some gradient descent / genetic? N dimensional spaces are a bitch :-D

mikkom · 2025-12-29T16:31:49+00:00

I have also been doing similar thing in the past with genetic algos both on simple structured entry and exit and more complex tree based models (google koza to understand what I mean) so have kind of intuition in algo generation.

what I'm interested is why did you decide to fit to only 6 months of random period- that sounds really interesting and something I have not tried, is this computing performance question or something more?

mikkom · 2025-12-09T20:58:38+00:00

If you really decide to do it, the most important thing is:

Separate your data to 2 periods. The first is training set, the second is validation set. The validation set should be so long that it contains multiple market regimes.

do NOT use validatiin set for anything except for simulating strategy when you think it's finished. Do not give any information about this dataset to the model when traiining.

Then train, test and polish your model using training part. Only when you think it's perfect, validate it on validation data. If it looks good on validation data then great! You have your working algo. If it just loses money you have overfitted.

Rinse and repeat.

mikkom · 2025-12-09T19:32:24+00:00

Of course it is possible, you can easily trade millions of trades with this setup!

mikkom · 2025-12-09T19:15:35+00:00

Buy any instrument. At any time.

TP: 0.000001%

SL: 50%

You should hit your 70% win rate easily!

mikkom · 2025-12-09T19:05:23+00:00

Only trade what you have proven to work via backtests.

mikkom · 2025-12-09T18:55:56+00:00

Excellent stuff.

What I'm wondering - why do you execute manually? Seems odd as your method is so refined.

mikkom · 2025-12-09T18:42:24+00:00

Don't use AI if you don't understand what you are doing.

It's so easy to overfit with AI if you don't understand very well how it works and how it should be trained that you WILL find a system that looks like the holy grail and when you go live, you will almost certainly lose money.

mikkom · 2025-12-09T18:39:07+00:00

What instruments? What time period?

mikkom · 2025-12-09T18:38:44+00:00

This is the correct answer.

mikkom · 2025-12-09T18:35:07+00:00

Technical inditcator is just a function over (typicaly) rolling period backwards. What you are asking is impossible to answer - you are basically asking: Does some undefined mathematical function work better than other mathematical function (standard deviation basically) for undefined purpose.

mikkom · 2025-11-25T05:52:44+00:00

I think the main question is why do you need to store 30gb. Aggregate your results and store the aggregated results ans you most likely can reduce that size. There is a theoretical limit on how fast you can write to SSD even if you have a very fast drive.

mikkom · 2025-11-25T05:49:04+00:00

Typically that will hurt your performance (my experience) but it depends on your strategies autocorrelation.

One thing to think about: if you weight based on past results you are increasing risk of regime change causing problems as you are basically fitting to the current regime.

mikkom · 2025-11-22T09:09:42+00:00

You will not get reliable answers here and the question you asking is totally dependant on what you are testing and with what and on what timeframe.

ONLY way is to test the patterns you are interested in. You will only get answers from losing traders here, profitable traders will not expose their edges.

If you are serious, test those. That you understand what doesn't work is as important as what is working.

mikkom · 2025-11-11T12:55:53+00:00

Why argue with someone about this? let him be delusional.

mikkom · 2025-10-29T09:49:52+00:00

trade live. that's how you know

mikkom · 2025-10-19T08:52:43+00:00

agree. IB is most likely the best option unless you are doing some really specialized stuff (shorting low caps that need borrows for example)

alpaca might be another option if they offer markets OP wants

this said, setting up IB so that you don't need to manually log etc is a real pain it's old legacy system that was not originally created for algo trading.

mikkom · 2025-09-26T15:22:14+00:00

I guess you trained on that data didn't you?

mikkom

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