I Just Needed To Get Out Of The Way!
So, if you have read my last 2 posts, I presented my thought process (hopefully logically) about why I chose to go with automated trading and specifically, Inteligex. So, you would think that when I turned it on, I trusted the math and just let it run… WRONG!
After all, I am human…
The algo would take a trade and go into profit and I would think the move was probably ending – so I would manually close it out. Then I would watch it go for a lot more profit than I settled for.
Or, I would turn it off when I thought the market didn’t look right to me – and then see trades it would have taken that made a lot of ticks. My track record of outsmarting the system wasn’t very good.
So, here’s what I did…
I ran it in SIM from market open until market close and gathered some data. I found that, for me, the best time to trade was between 9:35 est and noon. Why 9:35? Because I was trading a 5 minute chart, so a signal that fired at 9:30 was based on the last 5 minutes of pre-market activity and often would reverse when the players came in at 9:30.
I realized that my job was to determine when to run it and what settings to use. After that, I needed to get out of the way and not try to outsmart it. This was using the prior major release of the software – Amber.
With Amethyst, the current release, it does a much better job of filtering out lower probability setups, so my job is getting smaller and smaller. And I welcome that…
If you’re just getting started, Inteligex has some settings so that you can control more of what it does. Like me, you may need to use more of them at the beginning so that you can be in control more.
But, I suggest that at the same time, see how it would run without your changes. I think you will find like I did that most of the controls you are putting in place are costing you profits and you will pare that down to the base settings you feel comfortable with and then just get out of the way and let it run…