Transition to Live

Becoming CP has a last step: the transition from SIM to real money trading. This is not always an easy transition. It's not a trading issue but purely a psychological issue.

People who have more capital seem to cope with it more easily. The fear of loss is greater if your trading account is smaller and you trade a larger contract. If you read this blog from it's earliest days, you will see a number of posts talking about this problem. 

Transitioning from SIM to live should be done trading the smallest size and with the most modest expectations.

Trading SIM allows you to perfect your trading skills without risking any money. It develops that muscle memory. When you add all the backtesting that I have suggested, it makes you a believer in your methodology. It makes you believe in your skills when you see your weekly stats as a consistent and satisfactory set of numbers.

Transition to live should just be the addition of one variable: changing the account number of your execution app from your SIM account to your live account. Everything else should be the same. By the time you are ready to take that last step, you should be able to carry out the two steps of instant trade recognition and instant trade execution, in your sleep, without any real thought as your muscle memory should be taking over. 

Until you reach that level, CP in SIM and instant trade recognition and execution, you are not ready for live trading.

This was our last day in Hungary. We were at Lake Balaton today, the Gold Coast for the Hungarians. Summer is over now and things had wound down. Back to France tomorrow for Mrs EL and me and back to London for the rest of the clan.

I'm looking forward to going back to work on Sunday.

Ask us your Google Places for business questions

A little more than a year ago, we collected your questions and feedback on Google Places for business via a Google Moderator page. You sent us some great feedback, and we had a blast responding! Check out our video responses here on YouTube, covering things like features of a listing, Report a problem and ranking.

It's important to us to continue hearing your great feedback — and we suspect you've had a lot of questions and ideas throughout the past year — so let's fire up another Moderator page. Starting today and for the next two weeks, you can submit your questions and ideas, as well as vote up other submissions from users. We'll answer some of the more popular questions directly on the page and post a new video or two to the Google Places YouTube channel.

Start sharing your ideas right now, and stay tuned to us here on the Small Business Blog to see a roundup of responses.

Posted by Vanessa Schneider, Google Maps and Places community manager

Backtesting and Walking Forward

The process I use for backtesting is different depending upon whether I want to use the algo for fully automated trading or for Hybrid Trading, where I will manage the exits.

I do this because I am looking for different things in the backtesting.

Before I start looking at each type of optimisation, I run a full optimisation testing all the main inputs in order to validate the model.

For a fully automated strategy, I want to see the most money made, but I need to qualify this with a number of prerequisites, including in no particular order:

• Average Trade Size big enough
• Maximum Drawdown small enough
• Win Rate high enough
• Outliers should have minimal or no impact on results
• Walk forward analysis pass  

Walk forward analysis  is important in order to have the best possible robustness of the algo.

For a Hybrid Trading backtest they include:

• Win Rate (most important)
• Stop Loss levels

My main required metric is a high win rate, as the true profitability in using the algo will depend upon how well I manage the trades.

The process of building the algo and testing it is quite a complex one. As I have said before, I first was involved in the process in the mid 1980's and learned how to create algos successfully by trial and error. There was a lot of error. I discarded auto trading a number of times over the years as the technology just wasn't there to do it successfully. Teaching Kiki to trade was responsible for me getting back into auto trading once again in 2009.

The way that the data is used in the process and the way that an algo is created based upon sound trading principles not math and squiggly lines has proven to be the key to successful algo building. There are numerous biases that need to be taken into account, not the least of which is that position bias that has resulted from the way that the data trends. Building the algo requires the elimination or the accommodation of the type of market activity that is revealed in the historical data.

It is because of this complexity and because of the difficulties that I have seen  very smart traders have had with the process that I decided to do the workshop in November.

The technology available to us, retail traders, has reached the level required for doing this successfully. We can't easily, if at all, trade many times a minute but that is NOT my aim. The aim and the arbiter of success is profits in my trading accounts. No number of successful computer runs mean anything. It's the making of real money in real time that counts. Of course I test in a SIM account because I know that if I'm not profitable in SIM then I can't be profitable with real money.

The November Workshop will break down my principal trading pictures into their components so everyone has a full understanding of how and why they work so well. We will then put the components together into trading logic for a computer.

Whether you want to use the algos for just signals and alerts, or hybrid trading  where the algo takes care of the instant trade recognition and instant trade execution and you manage the trade, or you want to fully automate your trading, this workshop can provide you with the tools you need to be self sufficient.

One more day in Budapest and back to France on Saturday. It's been great here. Last night we went to the world premiere of a 3D production of the opera, Bluebeard, written by Bela Bartok. I really liked the opera and using 3D projection of the scenery was very novel.

Suburb announcement very soon...

Hi Everyone


This week has been non stop driving! Finding out parking options, what's nearby, local businesses we can help support, transport options, you name it, i now know where it is. I'm really excited about  moving to a new area and finding all it's hidden gems, and very soon, i'll spill the beans about which suburb we'll be in!

I cannot tell you how excited i am about all of our fabulous designers officially on board now. Parents are going to be like kids in candy stores. 

I am in the process of setting up the website and store product system now,  i should have the product spreadsheets ready in the next couple of days.  I have also set up the official Kids Style Hub email system now too, so from now on you will be seeing emails from me as nicoleh@kidsstylehub.com.au. The old email addresses are still valid for another year as i phase them out though. 

Our launch date is still slightly adjustable and will be between the 1st and 15th October. It just depends on how quickly i can move into the premises and start fitting out. Oh how i wish i had a magic wand and could just make things happen when i want them to! 

Is everyone a KSH facebook liker? And as designers, make sure you also sign up to the style mag and customer newsletter roll out here so you can keep up to date on how we market your products and offer any suggestions of what you think we should include. We're all part of the team! 

Right off to do a million things at once! Keep any questions rolling in, i may be busy but i'm never to busy for our gorgeous designers. 

Happy designing


Nicole Herrick
KIDS STYLE HUB


Blog I Style Mag I Facebook

Computer Glasses

I've been wearing glasses since I was about 3 years old and have gone through a number of phases as a glasses wearer. My first phase started when I was 3 and I had one of my eyes covered with a patch.

The next phase was on the floor when I had difficulty seeing the big boards around the exchange and reading books. It turned out after having had three sets of glasses made, the time had come for reading glasses, so I chose varifocal lens. This was in about 1987 when they were new and not as good as they are now. I spent two days falling down steps, as I couldn't judge the distance with the varifocals.

For the last few months I've been struggling to see my screens, all 24 inches of them. My eyes got tired and things went fuzzy. My next phase had arrived. After some research, I worked out I needed computer glasses tuned to see just the distance to my screens. Luckily, both my French optometrist and my French speaking were good enough and I learned that they made a variation on the varifocals, just for computer use.

I'm wearing them now and my world has changed again for the better. Ain't technology wonderful.

Chinese Terracotta Army

In London, it was impossible to get tickets to see the Terracotta Army. Here in Budapest I could reach out and touch them, if touching had been permitted. The photo below shows how close we were.

The first emperor of China was buried and he was buried with his terracota army. In fact, about 200 hundred of his real soldiers were killed and buried with him to help him on his way to the then Chinese equivalent of  "heaven".


I can't help but see similarities between the discipline of the terracota soldiers and the discipline and regimentation needed to successfully day trade the markets. We need the same systematic routines repeated every day that the Chinese army of Qin Shi Huang, the first Chinese emperor, had in order to successfully conquer and unite all of China.


We had cakes at Gerbeaux, the famous Budapest "cukrazda". There are a few famous food palaces that I love in the world, including Demel in Vienna and Maxim's in Paris.


The stock markets are continuing their realignment, as I have discussed a number of times. This run to the end of the year continues to provide lots of opportunity but requires that stops and targets be adjusted in line with the volatility at the time of the trade.

Back from the dust...

I fixed the hacked blogger script that was redirecting.
In the process of removing 23 layers of dust from the RV.
The whole pack up and go to the desert for 5 days thing made me really think about the scale of whats needed to actually colonize someplace off planet. More later.
The wedding went off well and was kind of fun.