Thursday, October 11, 2018

I Will Do What the Model Says to Do


Maybe today will finally knock my tendency to not follow the model out of me, but I kind of doubt it. I am getting better though. Today, I closed my short position early. That's not such a bad move. But then near the close I went long, because I thought the model was saying to go long tomorrow. But I had forgotten the correct way to read that rule and read it wrongly – I used today's value of the indicator instead of the forecast of it for tomorrow. The model in fact says to stay short into Thursday. The market continued to plummet and took away most of my gains for the day. Still, I am up for the month, for now.

I must fast-track model automation. First step is to convert the decision rules, which I now execute manually and record in an Excel spreadsheet into computer code (in my econometrics package) that can make decisions without errors. Then I need to get better at just doing the decisions at the right time while learning Python etc in order to build an automated system or getting someone else on board to do that. In the meantime, I will stick to trading a single contract to minimize risk.

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