Hotch's 25 pips a day

[Hotch]

Always wanted to do one of these. Varengold competition seemed like some fun, so here we are. Will post results here, and probably put it on myfxbook.

In my defence:

1- I don't normally trade the afternoon, but had to today for reasons I will give later.
2- I am currently getting 1kb/s off mt4 (my internet is boned for the next couple of days), so I had some... interesting slippage.
3- I was in a rush.

Oh well, done now.

1 done, 63 to go.

 

[Yoshie]

Damn i missed it; cant register now

 

[Hotch]

Not a pretty day. I'm not even going to bother with excuses .

3% of the way there!

 

[Hotch]

Believe it or not, I think I may be improving, by very small amounts. I had a bit more patience this morning, of course, was still over trading far too much. Again, If I had stuck it out I would of been fine off the first trades.

However all that has faded into insignificance with the ridiculousness that was NFP. Now I quite like NFP normally, and I've got a very good record with it (never been down for starters).

Today, I missed it. To make matters worse, I had some stops I was getting rid of still on. I was busy with a few things, came back and all **** was breaking lose. The day had already been pretty crap, and now I was down over 10%, it was not good.

The way varengold is doing things, I needed to sort it out by 2 (about 15 minutes away). So might as well gamble because I'm not recovering otherwise. Bang on some epic longs. Try to figure out where I want to exit, and get slipped way into profit. Far too much.

Now I am in the position that if I leave my P&L as is, I'm still out of the contest, so I desperately try to lose money.

It's freakin impossible! Made a load more money I didn't want. Then lost more than I needed. Caught a couple more points to get me roughly level. With 3 minutes to go I was figuring out what best to do, and managed to pay the spread on the correct lot size to get me down to my target level for 2pm.

Sure it's a demo contest et all, but it would never of happened with real money, I was cracking up most of the time.

In other news, my longs on my real account are doing just fine .

 

[Fionn mac Cumhaill]

Hi Hotch,

I am also in the varengold competition, best of luck to you... will keep an eye on your journal.. fair play to you for putting detailed statements up......good luck

 

[Hotch]

To you too, think I've screwed up, thought it updated at GMT, not GMT +1. Along with me thinking they've been 3 days when there's only been 2, oh well.

 

[Hotch]

In 47th place

Even knowing that they're calculating the standard deviation wrong, and how they're doing it, I can't get their numbers. Oh well.

 

[Hotch]

Done of the day for now. Due to them not doing calender days etc my Std dev is a bit screwed according to them, so I might do a bit more later, waiting for their explanation to try and find my mean.

 

[Hotch]

Up to 18th.

 

[Hotch]

Well, finished up for tomorrow as well. Varengold support got rather quiet when I introduced the maths of why their standard dev calc is wrong. Saying that, I've probably made some embarrassing mistake.

 

[Shakone]

If you treat the first day before comp started as 0%, how far off is their standard deviation to yours?

 

[Fionn mac Cumhaill]

Well, finished up for tomorrow as well. Varengold support got rather quiet when I introduced the maths of why their standard dev calc is wrong. Saying that, I've probably made some embarrassing mistake.

going well hotch... keep it up!

 

[Hotch]

If you treat the first day before comp started as 0%, how far off is their standard deviation to yours?

They're doing standard deviation on daily returns. However a "day" is defined by them and isn't every 24 hours (stops a fair few grid traders).

They took days at 2pm on Thursday, 7am on Friday, and 2pm on Monday (GMT+1), in which case you get returns of 2.01%,0% and 2.01%. Which I'm pretty sure is a std dev of 0.9475

In the FAQ they've used the estimation formula instead of normal standard deviation, but that's not what they're using now seemingly either. Not much of a response from support.

I mean, they're all probably going to be off so it might not effect the comp much, but it'd be nice to know what's up with it.

 

[Shakone]

But the day before the comp started, they had up a 0% for the day before. They may have used this in the calculation, since they need to use something, otherwise if you got 1% a day or anything constant, you would have 0 st dev, and hence infinite returns.

 

[Hotch]

The 1% a day and 0 std dev is the reason why they're picking the hours at random I believe. I asked them about that and they claim it's just the 3 figures so far. In any case, I have tried using 0% for a first day and any other variant I can think of, and don't get their figures.

 

[Hotch]

9th, crash is coming

 

[arabianights]

Does it not bother anyone that varengold are obviously dodgy as ****? They even wrote their own Wikipedia article

 

[Hotch]

Not until the check bounces.

 

[Hotch]

Done for tommorrow, went a bit more than 1% to try and get the average level.

Honestly though Arabian, I was unaware of varengold being dodgy (wouldn't surprise me), elitejets put me onto them, but it appears she may be exaggerating on a few things of late.

 

[DionysusToast]

They even wrote their own Wikipedia article

Who doesn't ?