my journal 2

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listen...

Listen, something good is bound to come out of my 79 systems.

Yesterday I was at just 66 systems. Between yesterday and today, I've put together another 3. I have another 10 futures to go, and hopefully at the end I will have my 79 systems.

The things, in random order, I should keep in mind from now on are the usual ones:

1) Do not expect to make 100% a month, lol, like I've been doing for the past several years. Do not expect it from your discretionary trading, do not expect it from your systems. You'll just end up with making it happen two months per year, and blowing out your account for the rest of the year. You want to make money in the long run or just to break a world record for one month and blow out your account for the rest of the year?

2) Do not expect all your systems to work. Do not expect any system to be magic, nor have good "feelings" about any system. Do not get attached to any system. Not just this, do not expect half of your systems to work. You can rely on about 25% of your systems to work enough to be traded. Some of them might have a drawdown too large to be traded, so you might even be able to just trade a few systems. So what? The objective is to preserve capital, make it grow, and not, once again, to blow out your account.

And now I'll go to buy my goddamn melatonin by the kilos. E' un mondo difficile...


E' un mondo difficile
e vita intensa
felicita' a momenti
e futuro incerto...
 
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interesting stuff on hitler

...an eyewitness account tells of Hitler watching movies (which he did very often). If ever a scene showed (even fictional) cruelty to or death of an animal, Hitler would cover his eyes and look away until someone alerted him the scene was over. The documentary also commented on the German animal welfare laws that the Nazis introduced, which were unparalleled at the time...
Click to expand...
Adolf Hitler's vegetarianism

You know, things are not as black and white as they depict them to be. For example, I have always been a great friend of vegetarians, and I thought all vegetarians were good people. Instead here we have a clear example of this not being the case (see quote and link above).

In addition to being a teetotaler and a non-smoker,[1] Adolf Hitler is often said to have practiced some form of vegetarianism.[2] It has been theorized that Hitler's diet may have been based on Richard Wagner's historical theories[3] which connected the future of Germany with vegetarianism.[4] Hitler believed that a vegetarian diet could both alleviate personal health problems and bring about a spiritual regeneration...
Click to expand...
It sounds just like all other vegetarians. Except we're talking about the famous german dictator. This is not an irrelevant detail.

Extreme sensitivity can be paired with other extreme characteristics. He was extreme in a lot of features of his personality. I guess we have something in common.

Now I am doing a search to find all the home movies of Eva Braun, for historical research. Such as this one, but I want to find them all:


You know, I want to be there with them and see what went on in those days. I want to see all this stuff. I want to understand history. Not just the typical bull**** that back then was "hitler is god" and now "hitler is the devil". We have to go beyond that bull**** if we want to learn from history.


You see, he's saying the same I just wrote. I am getting there. If I'll find the link of someone on youtube who has the videos I will post it here.


I mean if you understand hitler, you can understand any event in history. I think this is lip reading at work. Yes, look here:
Read my lips: Hitler and Eva's home movies brought to life


There you go, once again this academic is stating my same points: Hitler is not a monster. Humans are all monsters. The dynamics of humans are responsible for what happened in World War 2, not just one person as history books seem to claim.

Finding more and more. Here's a very good one:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2763127556620650689

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1193023/
http://www.ask.com/wiki/Frank_Hubner
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Lip_Reading
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Rietti
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magda_Schneider
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romy_Schneider
http://www.fpp.co.uk/Hitler/staff/Paolini/Times090603.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armin_lehmann

Actually, the above is not the home movies themselves, but a documentary on those movies. I still have to see where I can find the movies themselves, dubbed.

This is also important research I've been doing on the general subject, in the past week:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

Very important table there, in the middle of the page. Roughly 60 million people died in ww2, one third of which were russians. One sixth were Chinese. Basically if you put Russians and Chinese together... and Germans and Polish, you get 75% of all deaths in ww2.

Maybe these are the movies, but then I'd have to find them one by one:



Besides, I thought there would be many more of them than just these four I could find on the channel. Oh, wait: he just took them from that history channel documentary. So I need to dig elsewhere and deeper.

Screw the dubbing. I'll keep on looking for Eva Braun's home movies.









Look at this:



The Eva Braun's home movies with Hitler are always the same everywhere, over and over again. So my conclusion is that they're not that many. Yes, I am definitely missing some, but they just can't be found on the web, or not easily. I would have to ask hubner himself.

Eva Braun's movies are definitely a lot, hours, but they can't be found either, all in one place.

So I am quitting this task. I am satisfied with what I found out.

One thing I must add. It is disturbing that there were many people involved in all this stuff, such as Romy Schneider, famous actress. But everyone is ok with the fact she was hanging out with hitler throughout her childhood. Today it seems that the only person who was bad was hitler. Just as it is ok for the daughter of berlusconi, a known crook, to give interviews where she shows how good a person she is, while she is enjoying all the money stolen by her dad. This kind of sucks. You first give back the money stolen, then you can give interviews.

The same with all these people who voted for berlusconi, and all the people who were for fascism in italy, and for nazism in germany. If you didn't at least try to leave the country, you can't just pretend you're innocent and that the only bad guy was hitler. If you voted for berlusconi, you can't say **** against him now.

It really pisses me off that the only people responsible are the leaders. The friends of the leaders, the family of the leaders, the voters of the leaders... they are never in trouble. Bush is dick, yes absolutely. And so are the millions of americans who voted for him. They are just as bad as he is.

Things didn't just go wrong because hitler and mussolini were born. Things went wrong because there were many people on their side. Let's stop blaming Saddam, Bush, Hitler, and Mussolini and start realizing that half the population isn't any better than them.

I need to find a country where the population is better. That is the only guarantee for someone's future. Somewhere in northern europe, like luxembourg. Italy is crap for example. On the other hand, there's germany next to luxembourg and we know what they are capable of, so let's go further north.

Yeah, north people is the ideal place. But Norway might be ok, too. Holland, too, sounds good.

The French are pretty good as well. You know, it's not the leaders. It's the people that are dangerous. Don't tell me the problem is bush.
 
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Today I wasn't supposed to do any testing because then i have nightmares and I can't go to work.

I nonetheless did about 4 hours of testing.

The new system does not work on all currencies.

It works on gold, natural gas, es, ym.

So far I have exactly 70 systems.

I still have to test it on CL, GBL and ZN.

Then I will reach maybe a total of 73.

79 will have to wait. The best I'll reach is 73.
 
back to work, back at work

A lot of work awaits me.

Today is the last day before Christmas and Vito is not here. The day will feel like a vacation. We are all praying (me and all the people I complain about him to) for him to get shot on New Year's Eve by some stray bullet.
 
Hello friends,,,I like it......."At least you know what to expect with your chosen trading platform, given the small set of uncertainties generated by IB TWS. Using NinjaTrader like I do lets me do pretty much anything, but the cost is that I have to spend hours sometimes the whole day nursing the application through work-arounds to cope with the bugs. So your frustration with your semi-evolved simian colleague is probably equal or less than mine with NinjaTrader. I feel like the monkey who is trapped by the narrow-necked vase with a big handful of nuts in his hand. He can't get his hand out of the vase because of the nuts in his hand, but he won't let them go either. So we all have a monkey on our backs"......
:clover::clover:


Seo Services in Delhi | fengShui Consultant| SEO DELHI | Vastu|
 
Finally some feedback. Yeah, that's Adamus. He has his own blog, you can spam him, too.
 
Dude, this week, too, we just kept on falling. It seems that my bad luck never ends...

Snap2.jpg


Here's the profit by system:

HTML: 
GC_ON	2,629.18
GBL_ID	2,011.84
CL_ON_2	1,947.54
YM_ON	747.00
NG_ID_2	166.84
EUR_ID_5	-126.06
GBP_ID_3	-233.51
ZN_ON_2	-369.31
CL_ID_3	-612.34
YM_ID_2	-808.00
ES_ID_3	-983.00
ZN_ID	-1,103.69
GBP_ID_5	-1,756.78
ZN_ID_2	-3,499.99

A lot of work awaits me.

On the other hand, the good news is that what seemed like a correlation with USD and SP500 is no longer there:

Snap3.jpg

The excel "correl" function returned .6 and .7 and now returns .45 and .65.
 
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Não sei se outro dia haverá

Manhã tão bonita, manhã
De um dia feliz que chegou
O sol no céu surgiu
E em cada cor brilhou
Voltou o sonho então ao coração

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22DEBZzi_vE

Depois deste dia feliz
Não sei se outro dia haverá
E nossa manhã, tão bela afinal
Manhã de carnaval

My translation:
It was such a nice morning
Of a happy day that came
The sun rose in the sky
And was shining in every heart
And then the dream came back to one's heart

After this happy day
I don't know if there will be another one
It is our morning, so beautiful after all
Morning of Carnival



 
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funny family

It's a funny family, that emerges on Christmas eve: as my aunt says "your dad loves you". Yes, but he has a funny way of showing it: he is an asshole, he doesn't seem to care at all about what I say or think. He only cares to talk and lecture, not just me but everyone else. Or at best he interrogates you. He has to run the game.

In the same way I guess one could say that I love my parents, too. I avoid them as much as possible. Even when, like tonight, they're in the same house.

Every time I meet them it is not a pleasant experience, emotionally speaking. They might even give me a gift, but that will in turn remind me of how much crap and unhappiness I had to take from them throughout my life.

If we say that my dad loves me, we could just as well say that I love him back. He's an asshole to me, and I avoid him like the plague. Nice little family we are.

I didn't mention my mom, right. She's a stupid bitch, his sidekick. Always on his side, regardless what the debate is on. She's always on the side of the strongest asshole hurting someone else. She will teach you to show the other cheek, like she does, instead of teaming up with you.

Oh, yeah, by the way, that's why he married her. He didn't want anyone who'd be arguing against him the whole time. He found someone who'd agree with him all the time, because she thinks she's stupid (which causes her to be stupid) and that he's smart.


http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073817/


So, Christmas after Christmas, my dad is there lecturing my mom about life, or whatever unlucky relative is at dinner, and I am here writing a journal, talking by myself. Despite the consequences, my dad never even tried to change. He's too proud for that, which is why he is an asshole in the first place. He's probably even wondering what is wrong with me, instead of listening to me when I tell him, every day for a few decades: you never listen, you never show interest, you always disagree even if you said the same thing a minute before... it's impossible to have a pleasant conversation with you.

Yeah, Aunt Francesca. I love my dad, too. He is incapable of showing emotions and empathy and I am incapable of not avoiding him. I love him in my own way, too. Please tell him so, just like you keep telling me that he loves me.
 
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Damn, this stupid bitch has bought ipad and now I'm having to download 100 megabyts of itunes mother ****ing software to get her ipad up and running. I should have stayed in my room, all locked up as I was.

Usual bitch who buys stuff and I end up doing the work for her, because she can't use it. She probably spent hundreds on it, and she'll lose it or break it within one month, as usual. Stupid people should not be allowed to handle computers and other precious technology.

You should need a license to use a computer. Or at least I should not help them. I can't believe I am doing this. I said recently that I'd never risk getting a virus to help one of these bitches, and here I am again. Not risking a virus, but installing crap on my computer.
 
Damn it. As usual, I helped her, and fixed her Ipad, which I had never seen before. It is a piece of ****. It doesn't work basically. No mouse, keyboard with limited functions, screen with limits... software with limits. You're basically with your hands tied. Only morons can buy that product and insist that it is great and make other morons buy it.

I would never buy it, and I would consider morons those who praise it.

We spent half an hour trying to figure out how to scroll the screen to read an email. Double touch, double fingers... a piece of **** is what you call something where you have to spend half an hour and still can't manage to scroll a page.

Anyway, I went to talk to my dad a little bit, and I picked a Christmas card I had helped the office prepare for everyone, because the boss's secretary asked me for help, and I ended up doing the whole thing.

My dad showed some interest in what I was telling him for half a second, then, as I was telling him about my work, he looked back at his iphone and then back to me... as if he could not dedicate 10 full seconds just to what I was telling him. I didn't spend 10 minutes with him for the whole day, and then he gets a chance to talk to me, and he looks at his Iphone after 3 seconds.

This is what I do at work with vito, because I try to make him stop talking to me, because he would abuse my kindness otherwise.

I've been treated by my dad like a nuisance, all my life. I know how vito feels because my father treated me my entire life like I treat him.

The problem is that vito fully deserves this treatment, since he's an adult, he's abused my patience, messed with my stuff, and overwhelmed me with questions for 3 months. And i am there to work and not to baby-sit him.

The other problem is that my dad was instead supposed to show some interest and patience and gratification to me, which he didn't. May he burn in hell forever, with his Iphone stuck up his ass.

 
woke up and back to work

After listening to that lady for about two straight hours (i saved the .flv file and played it over and over again), I fell asleep. I think it does help.

This stuff does help me to relax. What I probably need is a girlfriend or a nurse to put me to sleep every night, with that kind of voice. In many ways it reminded me of when I had a girlfriend. I could sleep easily back then. Or like your mom did when you were a child. Not my mom, because i can't remember that. I remember my parents arguing all the time, and yelling at each other, about me. Especially my dad - he was always the one starting the arguments with some pretext.

Sick people, these two guys.

Anyway, I went back to work on my systems, and that system I was working on, failed on CL. So far it has failed on the currencies, too. It worked on ZN though, in a slight variation. The out-of-sample confirmed that i wasn't doing any curve-fitting.

So, right now, besides the previous 66 systems, I will have to add this new system, as far as: ES, YM, NG, GC, ZN. It is a large sample of futures, and it worked on all their out-of-samples (at the first try of course). This system has a small edge, but it does not fail -- I mean it seems a very reliable (small) edge.

That is why I always recommend building a lot of systems. If you were looking for the holy grail, you'd be discarding all these 100% a year return systems. When I say it like this, it seems a lot, but one would ideally look for a 200% a year system. However, if you put them all together, you have a very reliable and long-term edge at the end. Instead if you set out, like many insist, to build one great system, you will end up throwing away a lot of good ideas, and in the end, you probably will not produce anything profitable, and will need to start all over again with my approach.

Anyway, I still have the GBL to test. But so far the new systems are these: ES_ID_5, YM_ID_4, GC_ID_3, NG_ID_3, ZN_ID_4. They're all quite close in the numbering, so this will help me remember them.


I just keep on working like this loop.
 
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genetically optimizing variables

Here's my little trick, that I've learned on tradestation. The markets tend to go up and down, over and over again. But you can never actually understand that rythm. But I have devised this little variable optimization on tradestation which rarely fails to figure them out.

...hmm, I was going to list the code, but it's not safe to do it any more, the way i used to. I am getting too good at backtesting. This stuff is precious.

However, I will say this, regarding the parameters to optimize on (also for future memory, to myself). The genetic optimization recipe has four ingredients (in this example for a long entry): a little pinch of optimized entry time, a little pinch of price is more than optimized x days ago's close, a little pinch of price is less than optimized x days ago's close, and a little pinch of price is (again) more than optimized x days ago's close. This will produce maybe a few hundred combinations of parameters to optimize and be checked by tradestation. But it's not just luck or curve-fitting. It produces profitable systems.

It is a four ingredient recipe. And I call it "genetic", because even though the software itself has nothing "genetic" at all (no smart optimization, but only brute-force optimization), I applied my brains to it, and added the genetic factor, or simply the reasonsing, basically. It's brute-force optimization with an intelligent choice of various parameters. And this is probably even better than that software I wanted to buy (ts-evolve), because by now I am putting to work the great knowledge I have of optimization and of the markets (on a given timeframe and data sets).

As they say in Italy, "la fame aguzza l'ingegno", which means "necessity is the mother of invention". If I had been rich, or rather, if I had felt i was rich enough to waste 200 dollars on that software, I would not have come up with a better solution, and would have wasted my money and my time on that software, whereas now I probably have come up with something better.

In this sense, the fact that my trading in general and my systems in particular, recently, have given me such a hard time making money, is only a cause for more reasoning, and more inventions. In some way it is good that I haven't suceeded that fast, or I would have halted my thinking earlier.

In the same way, also my ignorance of formulas and programming has had similar advantages, in that it forced me to try my hardest to keep things simple. I could not make a complex system, because with my skills, it would not have been reliable: you know, even just one unreliable ingredient leads to an unreliable system. So one has to create something where everything is perfect, or else it will fail. So, with my skills, I had to work on very simple things, but this may have been an advantage, because those other folks, the programmers and math people, may have gotten into something too big even for them, thinking they were up to it. On the other hand it is still early to say I have been lucky or have done the right thing, because it is still true that after over 13 years trying to make money, I still haven't made any.

-----

That thing didn't work on the GBL. The system only works on the four mentioned futures (this doesn't have anything to do with the optimization recipe, which is still good).
 
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giving them one more chance

Since they're still here, I am gonna go to the living room and give the asshole and the stupid bitch another chance. I will bring my systems and tell my father to ask me questions and show some interest for what I am doing.

If he won't get me pissed off, I will stay for dinner. Otherwise, I will come back to my room.

The times when I went to my dad and asked him to tell me about the political situation are over. For over 10 years our relationship was only limited to me asking him about politics, just because that was the only way to have a relationship since he won't give a damn about how I am doing and what I am doing. He never asks, and if he asks it's about how many people there are at the office, and the surface of the building, and other bull**** questions. He will never ask me if I am happy at the office, and won't listen if I ever tell him anything about that. May he burn in hell. He treated me my whole life as if I were a guy he met at the bus stop.

Ok, I am going now. Anything beats listening to my mom singing stupid tunes while in the kitchen, probably out of spite, to annoy me. She is a spiteful bitch, among the other things. She's stuck at adolescence, mentally.

-----

Back from dinner, several hours later.

He showed a lot of efforts, finally. I guess he's so used to being an asshole that to act like a normal person he has to make huge efforts. By default he's totally unpleasant.

Anyway, I showed him my systems, among the other things, and he taught me to draw a scatter... "scatter plot":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scatter_plot

As soon as he saw that i was appraising my systems' performance according to two variables (more, actually), he said we should do a scatter plot.

It was a good idea.

For the rest we saw the amazing features of Ipad (playing two piano keyboards at once, google maps features, newspaper features), which is not that bad after all. It's just that I can't expect it to be like my work computer. My HP 6730B laptop is to Ipad what a tractor is to a convertible. That car is not very useful in the farming business. And I am a farmer, so that is why I was looking down on it. On the other hand, my mom is using a computer for leisure mostly. Let's hope that she won't break it or lose it within a few weeks, as is often the case with her stuff.

Thanks to walkenbach's Pup v6 add-in, i managed to add the lables for the systems' names, which had become a huge issue to solve tonight and at one point both my parents and I were working on a search to solve the problem. Of course my mom was almost falling asleep, while I was doing my search on adding labels to a scatter plot (in English, which she doesn't understand):
http://www.google.com/search?num=10...1&as_qdr=all&q=excel+scatter+plot+with+labels

There's many suggested solutions, but ultimately let's say that, as far as excel 2003, the labeling problem on scatter plots is so widely recognized that even microsoft suggests using a macro, which is basically like saying "fix it manually".

View attachment scatter_analysis_of_sharpe_vs_trades.xls

The above workbook basically analyzes the relationship of my systems' performance in terms Sharpe Ratio vs. number of trades. The systems on the top right are the ones we prefer best, because they have a high sharpe ratio and a large number of forward-tested trades.

My father also correctly identified the importance of variability in returns - without being a trader. And I told him there's a formula, the sharpe ratio, which measures the average return vs the average variability (or something like that, because I don't fully understand it).

But then we said, hey, if a system has traded twice, we can't count on that ratio to be a reliable one. Then we went further and decided that a system's forward-tested trades had to be above 50 for its sharpe ratio to be meaningful.

So here's what we came up with, with green circles on the best systems I have that are being traded, and red circles on those that should be traded soon because they are good. We totally ignored the systems with a sharpe ratio lower than zero. And placed on the left of the y-axis those systems with less than 50 trades. So the systems in the remaining window, top right window, are the ones that are any good.

Actually I will mark in green all those that we trading, regardless of whether they traded enough or not. Also, conversely, I will mark in red those that we should trade regardless of our assessment of the 50 trades minimum we have set today on the chart itself.

For axis scaling purposes, I also had to get rid of some systems that had traded too much (ZN_ON) but had a very low sharpe ratio and could be ignored, and others that had a very high sharpe ratio (e.g.: NG_ID_2) but had traded too little and could be ignored.

Snap1.jpg

I got rid of CL_ON_2, which is why we're not trading it, despite its good performance. The reason is that potentially it has a drawdown of 15k, and we can't risk it right now.

GBL_ON should be included but it's not because after tweaking the systems to trade for 6 months, I promised to the investors that from here on at the worst I'd be taking them off but not adding any new systems.

I am very satisfied with the representation given by the scatter plot. And I am satisfied that I am largely trading those that appear as the best systems.
 
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