Is an Automated Trading Masterclass a great fit for you?

On this page you will find my tips on improving strategies. If you discovered something new, this book is for you. If you didn’t this book is probably not a good fit. 

Improvement checklist to improve a strategy’s performance

Most trading strategies are not immediately profitable. You will need to make some improvements to do this. In general, I always do 4 things for each strategy I develop. If these steps won’t result in improvements I will quit trying as this strategy will probably not work. If however, I keep tweaking the strategy, I might end up with the curve fitting problem described earlier.

Change the security and timeframe combination

I try to focus on one security, the first thing I will try to do is find a security and timeframe combination that performs well. 

Stop taking trades in one of the market sides

This is the first thing I check. In the performance summary tab on Tradingview, you can see the performance of the trading strategy for long and short trades. Most of my strategies only take long trades, because the strategy’s performance when going short was either negative or had a very bad risk to reward ratio due to the increase in drawdown.

Tweak the parameters, but don’t get to specific

Some strategies will benefit massively from changing the parameter inputs, but be sure to check the robustness as described earlier. For a moving average crossover strategy, I for instance try to determine a good combination of the fast and slow moving average. When doing this I mainly focus on the strategy testers tab picture, drawdown, and number of trades.  

Improving a strategy with a simple conditional statement.

The return of a strategy can take an enormous positive leap when a conditional statement is implemented. A conditional statement I often use is the 200 candle moving average, with this conditional statement I will only trade when the price is above the 200 candle moving average.

Great conditional statements:

• –        Only trade when the price is above a long term moving average, such as the 200 candles moving average (works for trend following strategies and mean reversion strategies that only trade long positions)
• –         Only trade when the price is between the Bollinger bands (works well for mean reversion strategies)

If you did discover something new I highly recommend you to buy my book at amazon.