My First Year Trading
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Hey everyone, I want to share my trading journey over the past year – not just to tell my story, but also to offer some encouragement and insight for those just starting out.
In December 2023, I attended a trading event that sparked my interest in systematic trading. Before this, I had never traded, but I had been a long-term investor in stocks and index funds, so I had a basic understanding of the market.
After the event, I dove into YouTube, this forum, X, and the podcast Better System Trader. I started a trial on ProRealTime and experimented with creating strategies on a demo account. When the trial ended, I rented an algo to trade live with real money, allowing me to continue using ProRealTime “for free” while I still was learning. Since the event I have read, listened or tested strategies for a couple of hours per day.
I only had access to the complete version of ProRealTime (200k bars) in the beginning, which turned out to be beneficial. I tested numerous strategies from this website – 99% didn’t work at all, but a rare 1% did. I also began creating my own strategies. Although I couldn’t code at all initially, I managed to piece together simple strategies, often using snippets from ProRealCode.
By April 2024, I upgraded to ProRealTime Premium and got access to 1 million bars. I could now test my 30-50 strategies on extensive out-of-sample data. I discovered that most of my strategies were curvefitted – they looked great on the most recent 200k bars but performed poorly on earlier data. However, a few strategies held up, looking solid on both the 1 million and 200k bar backtests. This made me wonder if I had stumbled upon some actually good strategies.
I launched six of my own algos on my live account. As of today, my account has grown 75% since April 2024, which I still find hard to believe. The journey wasn’t without its drawdowns, but I’m confident in the strategies since they’ve performed well both live and on out-of-sample data. I also believe I haven’t taken any extreme risk, I had some safety margins to be able to handle the drawdowns my algos had.
So, what can you learn from my story? Either I’ve been lucky, or it’s actually possible to become a profitable trader in your first year, even without prior experience – if you’re willing to put in the work. The value of out-of-sample data and the dangers of curvefitting can’t be overstated.
Finally, I’m still very new to systematic trading, and I’m learning something new every day, especially from the people on this forum. Thank you all for sharing your knowledge!
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Thanks for your kind words!
Well as I said I am still very rookie, but some advice here:
- Play safe, and make sure to have enough money to cover drawdowns on your account. I think “margin + MaxDD * 2” is a generally good starting point as how much capital you need per algo. Then the drawdowns doesnt feel as hard in your stomage, and risk of ruin should be very low. (If your strategy is properly developed)
- Have incubation time (run them on demo) of 3-6 months of the algos you develop. I usually test a rough idea of the algo on 1M to see if the algo is profitable. If it looks promising I jump down to 200k units and develop and optimize the algo there. Then I maybe even do 2-3 versions of the algo with different trailing stops etc, and then try it on 1m. After you tried it on 1m, see the algo as untouchable. Because everything you do after is basically curvefitting
- I don’t use indicators that much, usually it some kind of price action/candlesticks formation/breakout together with some trend filters, like SMA or LinearRegression, and maybe an additional filter like increasing volume, not too high volatility etc.
- Try just do simple systems. For example, Enter after a new high when the long trend is positive, with a trailing ATR stop code could be enough.
- There is a lot of good read here on ProRealCode. Here is one example: https://www.prorealcode.com/topic/thoughts-on-profitable-trading-systems/
- And the good old classic rule – The holy grail in trading isnt one holy mega amazing algo, its a bunch of OK uncorrelated algos!
Good luck and dont forget to have fun!
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