The Way of Automatic Trading System
Since automated system is rare to discuss, let talk something about this robotic system.
Most trader think robotic system is lame. It is system by engineer who has no trading experiences. It’s not wrong, but it’s also not completely true. Trading is a very complicated skill, need more experience and it comes to everybody who willing to learn. So, no limit who can be a successful trader.
Having engineering background, let me approach trading in a systematic ways. I don’t rely on intuition, even I can see ghost. The holistic approach doesn’t meet requirements to be a trader. When we are touching economic, we are dealing with number and data. Be realistic and logical with our life.
Developing automatic trading system, ones can just rely on optimization. We can just adopt a random methodology and do wide range of optimization. Surely we can find a good configuration to run the system. But, even though I may work, this is not a proper way to develop a system. Many automatic system designer doing this way, surprisingly many can generate profit from it. So can we just blindly do this way?
All will be our choice, nothing is absolute right and wrong. We are happy, we just do it. But there is always a proper way to design a system.
To have a good system, the developer have to have a solid understanding about technical analysis. Once we get the key, we need to find a way in formulating the key as a mathematical model.
For example, when you know the price action in an instrument, you know type of signal you are willing to use, find a method to interpret the signal. It can be Moving Average, oscillator, etc. Once we solve the puzzle, a system can be developed right away.
Simple, but the task is not stop here. A good trading system mostly quite sophisticated. It’s now just look signal and open position only. Since market is so dynamic, there are series of analysis will be required. It takes time to develop it, we need a bunch of tools to improve our system. We need to detect market’s phase, volatility, range, indicators and many others. So developing a good system is similar to build something with Lego blocks.
In the past, aroudn 2012, I had project with an investment firm. They had a very big system, partially in MT4. The code’s size was 55MB plus. If you know software engineering, a 55MB code is considered huge. The firm had developed the code for almost 8 years. So we can imagine how an automated system had been utilized since the old time.
I had also conversation with some brokers, as they told around 70% clients used robot trading, every year the figure was getting bigger and bigger. So from here, I can conclude markets nowadays are more dynamically structured which means market has structured movement but it’s aggressively wild. It moves fast, if we can’t follow, we will miss many opportunities. Our mind can’t follow the progress in the market. This is why automatic system becomes handy.