Trading rules that keep you trading

I have written the difficulty in trading and testing short strategies. I had stopped trading my short strategy because it was too hard to trade psychologically for me. About nine months ago, I revisited my short strategy to see how it had been doing since I stopped and of course it has been doing just fine even during these very bullish times.

As strategy developers we often add rules to improve some metric, for example CAR or Sharpe Ratio. But just as important are rules that will help you keep trading the strategy even if the rule worsens your metrics. That is the case of what I did with my short strategy. I added two new rules that made the results worse, but I believe will make it easier for me to trade in the future.

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XIV Barbell Strategy

Well that was fun! I have been telling my trading buddy and anyone else that would listen that I fully expected XIV to open at zero one day. Now I did not expect it to happen so soon or the way it did. I trade a strategy that can be long XIV or long VXX or in cash. Because of the very likely possibility of XIV blowing up, I had constructed my portfolio using ideas from the barbell portfolio and this post, Taming High Return and High Risk. I was lucky and not in XIV when it did implode on Feb 6, 2018. Could a buy and hold trader of XIV made money even after the crash using these concepts? I was curious.

Barbell Portfolio

The idea of the barbell portfolio is that you put a small percentage of your assets (say 10%) in a very risky, high return asset like XIV. Then with the other 90%, you have it in something very safe like cash. Then at predetermined periods, you rebalance to be back to 10/90 allocation. These rebalance periods can be monthly, quarterly, semi-annual and yearly. What rebalance period you choose and the when can have a huge impact on your results.

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Trading the Equity Curve

A popular method for determining if a strategy should be kept trading is trading the equity curve. What this means we apply an indicator, say 200-day moving average, to the equity curve. When the equity curve falls below this value we stop trading. We then continue to paper trade the strategy until it gets above the moving average and then trade it live again. The general idea being that you get out when the strategy is doing poorly and get back in when it is doing well. Also once a strategy breaks, this gives you a simple way of getting out of it.

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Equity Curve Monte Carlo Analysis

Imagine the following. You spent time developing a strategy with a compounded annual return of 24% and max drawdown of 18%. Profitable 10 of the last 11 years. An average 21 day rolling correlation with the SPY of .20.  Passes your out-of-sample testing. Passes your parameter sensitivity testing. Raise your hand if you would trade this? I would be the guy jumping up and down saying “yes!”.

Now you trade the strategy and the first year you lose money. Do you stop trading it or keep going? What about after two years, your average return is only 11%, half the backtested results? Do you stop trading it or keep going?

I would have a hard time trading it after two years. I can say I have done this before with strategies. Here is the issue, the above one year and two year scenarios are quite possible.

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How to turn a losing strategy to a winning strategy with commissions

A mean reversion strategy I trade was developed with another researcher. This strategy enters on a further intraday weakness with a limit order and typically exits a few days later when the stock bounces. Recently this researcher sent me and email saying “Try the strategy as a day trade. Enter at the open and exit at the close. Surprisingly good results.”

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Do you have a plan for your screw ups?

You should have a plan for when you screw things up because I can guarantee it will happen. This is the screw up I did last night and how I handled it this morning. Enjoy this unplanned post.

The Nightly Ritual

Each night for 250 days of the year, I do the following for my trading.

Step 1: In the early evening, log into InteractiveBrokers, get the executions for the day, update my current positions and P&L spreadsheet. This is all done with a push of a couple of buttons. Last, push button in Excel that starts code that waits for data to be updated for the day and then runs my scans in AmiBroker and imports results into Excel. Time to do 2 minutes

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External Strategy Rule Evaluation. Too many rules?

A common question I get is where do I find all my research ideas. My main source is Quantocracy. He does a great job of curating posts because the work is manually done. Then there the Better System Trader and Trend Following Radio podcasts. Usually from these sources I get a nugget of an idea to research or a simple strategy. Sometimes the post/podcast will recommend a book.

From one of these sources came the recommendation of the book “Trade Like A Stock Market Wizard” by Mark Minervini. Fortunately for me, my local library carried it. The strategy he covers in the book is a mixed of fundamentals, chart reading and technical analysis. Not something I would normally care about. I really enjoyed the chapters on risk management. In one chapter, he has very specific technical rules that all stocks must follow. On seeing this, I wondered could these rules be a basis for a trend following stock strategy? My second thought was, there are lots of rules there. Are all the rules necessary? The latter question is what I will focus on this post.

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Weekly Mean Reversion Rotation Strategy on S&P500 Stocks

A reader emailed me about testing a weekly mean reversion rotation strategy on S&P500 stocks. My first thought was, why had I not done this type of test before? The very first strategy that I worked on with Larry Connors was this type of strategy. The strategy I will be testing today is a simpler version and different universe but how well will it hold up?

Basic Rules

Testing period is from 1/1/2007 to 10/31/2017.

Setup

• Stock is a member of the S&P500 index
• Stock is trading above its 200-day moving average
• The SP500 index is trading above its 200-day moving average

Each weekend, take all the stocks that have setup and then rank using one of the mean reversion methods below. Buy top 5 that are most sold off. Hold 1 week and sell. Then buy the ones that are now the most sold off

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The ABCs of creating a mean reversion strategy – Part 2

This post is the continuation of the steps for creating a mean reversion strategy from the first part of The ABCs of creating a mean reversion strategy – Part 1. You can also listen to part 2 of my interview on Better System Trader here.

A quick recap of the topics covered in part 1. I covered trading universe, indicators to measure daily mean reversion, combining multiple mean reversion indicators, and last bar mean reversion.

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The ABCs of creating a mean reversion strategy – Part 1

I was recently interviewed on Better System Trader, click here for part one of the interview, about the steps for creating a stock mean reversion strategy. I will be covering and expanding on the topics from the interview. These steps, for the most part, would apply to any strategy one is creating. The focus will be a long stock mean reversion strategy using daily bars.

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