Simple trading system, does it work in the Nasdaq?

Introduction

There are so many trading styles and the traders can take their decisions from technical analysis, important levels, value investment, quantitative analysis, price movement, and order book study. Some of them combine more than one method at least to have another point of view or to have another idea generation source.

Nowadays, it's easy to find resources for trading. There are plenty of resources online, such as videos and courses. If you are more traditional, you can search for books and see what the people are saying about them.

Some of the most successful traders are known for being contrarians. What does this mean? Maybe they are aware of how powerful the trends could be, however, they are not investing for the long term. They are looking for a quick profit in a short period of time (depends about the how big is the position, who is executing and what are the targets, it can last from a few seconds to less than 3 months).  How do they act? Basically, if a stock or a future has been raising for a while and has a strong trend, they can consider that the product is overvalued and that it will revert to the moving average or at least it will revert enough to make a profit.

The idea

Now, we know what they do. I always thought about it. One of the problems is the timing when I should enter into a trade like that. There are so many statistical methods that you can apply to that. It can be based on the number of days (imagine that the stock has been raising for the last 60 days and you think that every “X” days, there is a retracement), it can be based on the price change (that you can consider it overvalued), it can be a combination of both. We can see that creativity is another part of the trading research. Probably, I will write a post about the whole process in the future but today we are going to review a simple idea.

The trading system is contrarian so it will consider yesterday % change. If yesterday the stock or the underlying product went up, the system will sell it today. And the other way round, if the stock fell yesterday, the system will buy it today.

Nasdaq

I’ve chosen the Nasdaq index as an example. It represents the technology stocks.

    Nasdaq continuous future, daily, source: TradingView

It hasn’t stopped rising since 2010. I wanted to show the period 2014-2018 that I will study in this article. Considering the strong bullish trend maybe I shouldn´t use a contrarian system. I will show you that one of the most important aspects is the risk management (always combine with a profitable system)

Backtest example

Before we start, I need to explain a couple of things. In my opinion, the market behaves differently when it goes up than when it goes down. The falls usually are very sharp. This is why I decided to choose a tighter stop for the sells. I’ve chosen the stops randomly, the buys have a stop of 4 ticks and the sells have a stop of 2 ticks. Let’s check the results:

                                        Backtesting, own elaboration using R

Good news! The mean is positive which is a good starting point. However, making $9.53 per trade is not enough without considering fees and slippage. The system makes $2190 on the best day. The worst lost is $20. The kurtosis is really high because all the values are concentrated around 0. To be honest, the system only makes money on the 3% of the trades. So it’s not tradable even if it makes 103.65% in four years. It would be great if the system had more entry requirements and the number of trades would be reduced. That way the statistics would improve a lot. The Sharpe ratio isn’t great. 

                                                           Max drawdown, own elaboration using R

Considering that the trading system loses in 97% of the trades, the max drawdown is very good. Obviously, each time that it loses, the amount is very small (around 0.2% of the portfolio)

Trading strategy performance, own elaboration 

We can see the characteristics of the system. A few profitable trades and a bunch of losing trades. The probability of taking the loss is very high with our tight stop losses. In other hand, every time that we are right, we make a lot of money.

Sum up

Sadly, there isn’t a good conclusion for this post. I think that I have a lot of work to improve this system.  In addition, this is not a professional way of running a backtest. We should have a period of time in which we test our idea, another period for optimization and different windows of time to test the optimized parameters. Also, we should always consider broker fees and slippage. The system shown is not tradable but it shows that a sounding risk management system is very important. Another idea that we should take from this post is that even a contrarian system can perform in a market that has a clear trend. I hope you like it.

Have a good trading!

Disclaimer

I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions that shouldn't be used as a trading advice. Trading carries considerable risk due to the high leverage involved