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Mickey
Yes, you are correct, we do vary the weighting of our six components of our
SP39 signal depending upon which commodity we are tracking. Certain
components work better with different commodities. And yes, we do use
binary waves. Without going back to our source code (it's been a while
since we've changed these) I think each of our six components is a binary
wave. Our technique being, once we get a buy signal on that one indicator,
we set the binary wave to keep that buy signal in place until we get a sell
signal at which time we reverse it. We refer to this as latching. For
example (I guess this is because we're contrarians) if a certain indicator
is a buy, then we set the binary wave at -1 (or -2 if it's weighted x2,
or -3 if it carries a weight of x3). Our SP39 signal is the sum total of
our six components and can vary from +10 to -10 and we calculate it daily.
We then transfer the result to an Excel spreadsheet.
In actuality, we maintain 2 different SP39 signals. One we call MS and one
we call Original (not very creative). The reason for the difference is as
follows: When we first started using MetaStock in the old DOS days, we were
unable to come up with a way to code our momentum indicators because of
various limitations in MS. I spent about 4 months trying to get it to work
and finally had to develop modified momentum indicators for use in MS (we
have 2 momentum indicators, short and long term momentum). We called it our
MS SP39 signal. In addition, we still maintained our Original SP39 (even
though we really didn't call it that at the time) in Clipper. This was a
little pain because we had to manually enter and maintain our Clipper
databases while we were able to automate the MS one using Downloader. At
that time, I discovered TAS and reprogrammed our Original SP39 from Clipper
into TAS. With the advent of MS v6.5.2, we are now able to do all of our
calculations in MS and have discontinues the use of TAS.
We still enter about 25 commodities daily from the WSJ and use Clipper for
developmental purposes. All of our Intermediate Term Signals run in Clipper
as that's the language my dad uses. He has never really made the transition
to Windows, even though we have him on a Win98SE machine. He's been working
in a CP/M and DOS world for 26 years and doesn't want to take the time to
learn a new language (and I can't say that I blame him at 91 years old).
Finally, we don't do much with other commodities other than the S&P futures
right now. The S&P futures are working too well, the market is too big and
the volumes are too great to even spend time with the other commodities. We
maintain the other commodities out of habit in case we ever have to go back
to trading regular futures again, we'll have all of the data.
Guy
Paranoia...you only have to be right once to make it all worthwhile!
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-metastock@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-metastock@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]On
Behalf Of Michel Amelinckx
Sent: Saturday, June 03, 2000 5:37 AM
To: metastock@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: Time to Sell and [OT] as well
Guy, I want to thank you ONCE AGAIN for your great insight.
>From what I understand, you don't optimise. But you do play with giving
different weightings to the different indicators that you created, right ?
Like a binary wave.
Greetings, master and THANKS :)
Mickey
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-metastock@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:owner-metastock@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Guy Tann
> Sent: zaterdag 3 juni 2000 8:05
> To: Metastock User Group
> Subject: Time to Sell and [OT] as well
>
>
> List et al,
>
> Well that was one heck of a ride! We closed everything out
> an hour or so
> before the close and are in cash (equities and futures).
>
> As I said, we were waiting for the proper "contrary" and we are now in
> possession of a real sell signal.
>
> I'm not sure what we'll be selling short on Monday. We will
> be shorting our
> S&P futures naturally. But we'll need to do some calculations
> to determine
> how many to short in keeping with our money management
> philosophy. I'm not
> sure if we'll be shorting stocks or just buying some OEX Put
> options and/or
> our normal QQQ, DIA and SPY indices. I don't think we'll be
> quite as heavy
> on the short side.
>
> The problem being a contrarian is we trade opposite everybody
> else and we
> have to dance with the lady that brung us. That means, we trade all
> signals, no matter how nervous we feel. We know we are only
> going to be
> right 4 out of every 5 trades, on average, and we never know
> if the next one
> is IT.
>
> Now the following is to encourage those of you who have
> fairly good signals
> (like buys and/or sell signals) to make sure you take a good
> look at the
> ValueLine 1-1 stocks that we've been trading. Here are the
> actual results
> with my brother's granddaughter's account being an absolutely
> great example
> since he can't do futures in it or sell short.
>
> [OFF TOPIC] [NOT MEANT FOR BUSINESS, TROLLING or WHATEVER] MY
> DISCLAIMER!
>
> As an aside, I have some trade summary data to report.
> Before I do, I'd
> like to state officially that we're NOT looking to sell
> anything, we have NO
> web site, no newsletter, and are not registered CTAs. Even
> if we proceed
> with a newsletter sometime in the future, that's months away
> and our system
> might turn to crap by then, so everybody should consider himself (or
> herself, to be PC) warned. We're just private traders. Now that I've
> reiterated the disclaimer, a little stronger, here are some
> of our UNAUDITED
> results.
>
> First, my brother started trading equities, in addition to
> futures last
> June. We now have a complete 12 months of data in his
> accounts. He was
> profitable 11 out of the 12 months. Even with a couple of our famous
> screw-ups (like that big loss last November) he finished the
> year up 100%
> (he made a 100% return on capital). I don't want to give the numbers
> because that's his business, but we're talking mid six
> figures. Of course,
> the account is sort of back at it's original size because he
> had to pay
> Uncle Sam his due and he bought a lot for his retirement home
> and another
> country club membership to go with that new lot. Still, all in all a
> successful year.
>
> Second, on a lighter note, he opened up a Crumy Trust (I
> think that's a
> college trust and I'm not sure how you spell it) for his
> granddaughter on
> November 15,1999. He funded it with $10,000. Now, he is not
> allowed to go
> short in this account, so he's limited to only trading our
> buy signals. He
> closed out her positions today and put her in cash (money market fund
> actually). Her account balance, as of the close of trading today, is
> $24,231.84. Again, this is unaudited, but since we're not
> trying to sell
> anybody anything, too bad. His trading technique for Lucy's
> account is as
> follows. When we get a buy signal, he mentally goes down the
> list of the
> top 10 to 15 stocks we plan on trading in our own accounts (from the
> ValueLine 1-1 selection process I laid out earlier). He
> selects the top 3
> or 4 and buys these. I think she held LSI, AMD and one other
> one. Not too
> bad for a young lady who just turned 1. :) His target is $40,000 by
> November. I only wish him well, because that means I'll be
> on the same
> merry-go-round.
>
> On a final note, he opened up a $5,000 account for our sister also on
> November 15, 1999. Now she's always been the free spirit in
> the family and
> just started to mature in her mid 50s. She loved the
> Grateful Dead, has a
> couple of giant dogs (Newfoundland or however you spell those
> monsters) a
> new yellow VW Beatle and a new house that I'm sure her cats
> and dogs have
> already trashed. She lived through the 60s and 70s and can't
> remember much,
> if anything of it. :) I on the other hand already had two
> kids in the 60s
> so I wasn't able to not remember anything until after the
> divorce in the
> 70s. Anyway, enough reminiscing, her account balance, as of
> the close of
> trading today is approximately $10,000 (I didn't ask my
> brother for the
> exact number and he might have lied to me anyway :)).
>
> I guess what I'm trying to say, is that working with the ValueLine
> recommendations has a limited track record with us and has
> come through with
> flying colors, and has even compensated for those times we screwed up.
>
> [The RANTINGS of an OLD F**T]
>
> Happy trading to all. I'm in a great mood after this week,
> so I thought I'd
> share some additional thoughts with the list and try to
> encourage everyone
> to keep working to find that Holy Grail. A little proviso is
> to try to
> experiment with various, different approaches and not use
> anybody's tools.
> Develop your own. It's hard but can be done. As I've said
> several times,
> the only indicator we use in MetaStock that came with the
> software is the
> moving average. We use it on our own indicators or within our own
> indicators. Everything else in the 14 levels of calculations
> uses addition,
> subtraction, division and multiplication and that's it. You
> don't need to
> be a genius. You do need to develop a "feel" for numbers and
> the market.
> We don't use anything else! Nothing fancy. No advanced
> math, even though
> all of us have degrees in things like statistical economics,
> engineering
> math, math and statistics, etc. There's no easy way to do
> this. You need
> to spend the time and effort and grind it out. I firmly
> believe that the
> first year or two should be done without a computer, but
> that's my opinion
> and I've been working with computers for over 40 years now,
> and that you
> should paper trade a system at first. Secondly, don't use
> optimization
> tools. It either works or it doesn't and it works with
> numbers that make
> sense, not two out of a basket of 300,000. We don't
> optimize! We tried it
> and found that it cost us too much money. It's highly
> overrated, in our
> opinion, but we did spend a couple of years playing with
> MetaStock doing it.
> We do back test any new indicators we develop. We're firm
> believers in back
> testing, however we feel the more recent results are more
> important that how
> the indicator worked 5 years ago. Took us a while to understand that
> because of the dynamics of the market, you need to constantly
> monitor your
> indicators, etc. Actually, we constantly monitor our trading
> rules, but
> that's another rant.
>
> I hope everyone has a great weekend.
>
> Guy
>
> Paranoia...you only have to be right once to make it all worthwhile!
>
>
>
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