Got By with a Little Help from my Friends

In the end we had a bit of extra help coding Flo. For those who haven't read about Flo, she's a trading "bot" that Kiki and I created a few months back. A labour of love and very frustrating.

While there will always be money to be made by discretionary traders, I wanted to leverage my skills and be able to trade a multiple of markets at the same time. I realized that the performance of Flo couldn't match that of a discretionary trader but I believe the fact that she doesn't tire or lose focus and if Flo can consistently grind it out on 5 or 6 or more markets at a time, it would be worth the effort.

We had a number of issues with slippage and missed trades along the way but now feel that we are closer to what is possible for someone trading from Europe using commercial software. The recent help with an extra bit of code took us to the next level.

You can see the results for today. Awesome if I say so myself. The contract is December DAX - the German stock index future. Flo has two feeds connected: eSignal for analysis and the broker's feed for execution. The orders are automatic with no human intervention.

The numbers are Euros not $. I think that the draw down of 2054 Euros is great as are the other metrics.

The DAX is a very volatile and big tick stock index that trades on the Eurex exchange in Germany. It takes no prisoners. Using Flo to trade it is much easier than trading it live and almost as profitable for me.

One of the guys coming to the October seminar in Chicago (see details here) is a computer guy who wants to talk to me about automated trading. I'm looking forward to it as I always learn something when talking to other traders. We each have a different perspective and a way of looking at things. While the seminar will be about discretionary trading (and I will be trading live), there is a lot of back testing involved in becoming a discretionary trader and sharing ideas and techniques will be fun.

Flo starts work on DAX at 8am London time. There have been some great trades and she seems to have caught all the major turns. The entries and exits are marked and you can see the stats info below. There was a short trade still on when I snapped the pic.

The ES was just as good. The Euro FX future was also profitable but with more trades and a lower win rate. One of my main criteria for a system is the money earned per annum divided by the greatest draw down and this provides a good metric.