The Relative Vix Strength Exponential Moving Average

The exponential moving average (EMA) and the Relative Strength Indicator (RSI) are both very popular and useful indicators for algorithmic trading. So why no glue both together to get an even better indicator? That was the basic idea of Vitali Apirine’s TASC 3/2022 article. We’re measuring the relative strength of a volatility index (VIX), and use the result as an EMA time period. Do we now have the ultimate indicator to beat them all?

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Better Strategies 5: A Short-Term Machine Learning System

It’s time for the 5th and final part of the Build Better Strategies series. In part 3 we’ve discussed the development process of a model-based system, and consequently we’ll conclude the series with developing a data-mining system. The principles of data mining and machine learning have been the topic of part 4. For our short-term trading example we’ll use a deep learning algorithm, a stacked autoencoder, but it will work in the same way with many other machine learning algorithms. With today’s software tools, only about 20 lines of code are needed for a machine learning strategy. I’ll try to explain all steps in detail.  Continue reading “Better Strategies 5: A Short-Term Machine Learning System”

Is “Scalping” Irrational?

Clients often ask for strategies that trade on very short time frames. Some are possibly inspired by “I just made $2000 in 5 minutes” stories on trader forums. Others have heard of High Frequency Trading: the higher the frequency, the better must be the trading! The Zorro developers had been pestered for years until they finally implemented tick histories and millisecond time frames. Totally useless features? Or has short term algo trading indeed some quantifiable advantages? An experiment for looking into that matter produced a surprising result. Continue reading “Is “Scalping” Irrational?”

Boosting Strategies with MMI

We will now repeat our experiment with the 900 trend trading strategies, but this time with trades filtered by the Market Meanness Index. In our first experiment we found many profitable strategies, some even with high profit factors, but none of them passed White’s Reality Check. So they all would probably fail in real trading in spite of their great results in the backtest. This time we hope that the MMI improves most systems by filtering out trades in non-trending market situations. Continue reading “Boosting Strategies with MMI”

The Trend Experiment

This is the second part of the trend experiment article series, involving 900 systems and 10 different “smoothing” or “low-lag” indicators for finding out if trend really exists and can be exploited by a simple algorithmic system. When you do such an experiment, you have normally some expectations about the outcome, such as: Continue reading “The Trend Experiment”