So justisan, I landed in the wrong document. Found it now. Learned a few things again. Thanks a lot.
if you try to develop some strategy which is depending on the opening time being 01:15CET/02:15CEST you probably can’t do it when going deep into the past for backtesting if your trading directly depends on this precise time-indication –
Nah, that’s not the issue (and I don’t trade the gaps with autotrading) … it is about the results of functions probably being off (but I did not test it yet). And such functions might be used by everyone. Thus, when the average price of the past hour at night would be e.g. 16960, in that one-hour gap during the summer period it will be 0. When I’d look at 2 hours, it will still be e.g. 16960 but in the summer period (when looked at at 03:15) it will be 16960 / 2 = 8480 and nothing works (because it is not true).
I spend also lot of the time “behind monitor” as well, but one would not be able to detect it just looking at the trade number per day…
Haha me neither. What I meant was : at being there anyway, I would observe what happens at the opening. And that while almost always having position in the DAX.
Part of the fun (sort of) is observing what happens with what PRT shows for portfolio profit, knowing about the 17:30 settling time. And you will probably know that PRT (IB) virtually presents that double. Thus like Wednesday huge profit which began 20:00 and which shows in the portfolio for the daily profit at Wednesday night (say 23:00), while the next morning that same profit shows again in the portfolio (because then it starts at the settling of the previous day); it shows double, but is there only once in reality, of course. Just fooling yourself, and don’t look when it goes the other way around.
So I have positions in (financial) futures everywhere and days like today can be quite stressing (because of the expirations and changes required, plus the off-winding of everything in a best fashion (have the old and the new contract in parallel and ditch the old in the best possible way). For fun below part of a screenshot (2nd pic) I made this morning of some of the old-contract futures and how they trail for the best since yesterday, all unwinding superbly this afternoon. In the 3rd screenshot bottom chart, you see the only 45 minutes or so left before expiration (14:30) and how any second later than that moment, would have given less profit. So yeah, that is how always something is going on, because it is still half-automated by e.g. trailing stops like here, and how they should have the best possible distance (which I may change underway). No huge slippage because of a market order without buyers, just the most optimal way (I can do) and the big smile when it works out.
And that for half of the day.
Besides the above, which is all about manual trading, yes, developing strategies takes an enormous amount of time. For me too counts that I can’t work on more than one “instrument” at the time. Various variations for that instrument develop under way, and sadly within IB that is useless because we can apply/try only one at the time (OK, one per account); we talked about that.
Have a great weekend and thank you again,
Peter
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