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The computers are actually flying the planes much
more of the time than most passengers would ever dream.
There are situations where you DO want a human on
board who can truly FLY THE PLANE though, and I recently
heard of an incident where a commercial pilot's experience
as a glider pilot is all that saved himself, his crew, and
the passengers during a power outage.
I sincerely believe I've achieved a balance between
surviving and even thriving in choppy conditions and
doing well in strongly trending conditions. Both 2003
and 2004 hourly data are provided in my backtest kit.
Forward testing (real trading) is going well.
A few months ago, I reached the point where I can
say I'd much rather trust my computers to trade my
systems than I would human traders to execute them
for me. My human abilities are needed two or three
times a week to restore the datafeed when there
are Internet service or online broker hiccups, but
that's all I'm good for in regards to keeping the system
running.
There are no secrets to what my systems do. The tactics
are straightforward. Setting a modest 22-pip or 26-pip
profitlock stop after an hourly close 40 to 50 pips in a position's
favor is obvious, effective, easy to understand, and easy to
implement. Tightening initial stops slowly after a certain amount
of time has elapsed is simple to understand and simple to
automate. Executing a trailing stop scheme where profit-taking
stops are slowly tightened according to the market action
as large moves go in your favor is also straightforward (though
this is the most complicated part of my systems, algorithmically).
The indicators to trigger trades are almost unimportant, but
not quite. You mainly have to make sure you enter in
conditions that are statistically likely to give many shots
at very good entry points. You don't want to mindlessly
toggle, as in crossover systems. I've proved to myself
that those systems are no good.
That about covers what I wanted to say.
I hope it makes sense to someone besides me.
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