Why I took a 5-day Moving Average instead of the 9-day Moving Average?

As I promised in the last post, I will review my decision of taking a smaller moving average. My purpose wasn’t to overfit the model, I was looking for a drawdown in which I feel comfortable. 

How did I start?

I had an idea about a day trading system. My objective was a good performance with adjusted risk. I’m a big fan of the stop loss. If you, as a trader or an investor, can avoid drawdowns bigger than 20-25%, you will be successful over the time.

Our example

The good point about the way I run the backtestings is that it’s easy to change some parameters and adapt to different indicators. Obviously, I ran the strategy with different moving averages in order to know what parameters generated a smooth performance curve avoiding big drawdowns. 

       Max drawdown and final balance from the different MA, own elaboration

As you can see the best profit to drawdown ratio was the system based on the 5-day Moving Average. This seems logical as it’s a daily trading system. The reason behind the bigger drawdown, in the MA3 system, is that the there is more noise in the entry signals and it´s not accurate enough with the tight stop loss. In the case of the MA9, MA15, and MA50, the signals are more accurate but the retracements and the close stop loss don´t allow the systems to perform as well as the ones with lower moving average. If you see the MA9 system's figures, you will understand that the profit is exactly the same as the MA5 but the drawdown is worse. 

        Max drawdown  from the different MA systems tested, own elaboration

This chart is complementary to the table and the explanation above. Surprisingly, at least for me, the MA50 has a lower drawdown than the MA15. If we think about it, probably the best system would be between the 3 and the 9-day moving average. As I said before, I didn’t optimize the system. 

         Performance of the different systems tested, own elaboration

This chart is more important than the ones shown above. Here you can see how the MA5 system has barely stayed under the initial balance invested. Even after its worst drawdown the system was up more than 5% while the other ones went under 10K (and the worst one, under 9K) The main reason is that a “small drawdown” is not as painful as a big one, in simple terms, capital preservation will assure you better financial future. Imagine that you could have avoided all mistakes in the stock market (or futures) or at least you could have limited your loses. I’m sure that today, you will be better off. The reason is the asymmetrical leverage.

(second part of this post: First lesson for an investor )

 Having said that, I would like to add that I´m not questioning your investments decisions. I´ve made so many mistakes in the past and some of the trades were good considering the expected value of the trade. 

          Final balance of the systems tested, own elaboration

To finish, I wanted to show you the chart of the final balance after 3.56 years. The best system has returned 56.6% which is a little bit more than 18% per year.

Final thoughts

I hope that you like this post. The main purpose was to show you how to analyze the systems and even extrapolate the basis and test different indicators or the same indicator at a different level. The stop loss can be painful but I wouldn’t place an order without knowing my stop and target. As I said the asymmetrical leverage is very important because recovering small losses is easy while recovering big drawdowns can be really difficult. You have seen this concept with the system reviewed. Thanks.

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

#trading #MovingAverage #Backtesting #Drawdown #Analysis #QuantitativeAnalysis

Trading system based on proprietary indicator, Part 2

Today I will show the trading system behaviour from October 2008. Let me introduce the macro situation before I review the backtesting results.

Brief description

The financial crisis started later in 2007. The stock market suffered a big correction in 2008. The volatility was far higher than nowadays. The central banks implemented the quantitative easing programs in order to stabilize the economies around the world. This is an example of the German Dax index and the Eurostoxx index.

     Source: TradingView, DAX vs Eurostoxx futures, daily, from 2008 to 2018

Results from October 2008

      10 Yrs Backtesting results, own elaboration with Excel and RStudio

The main difference is the volatility in the underlying. As you can imagine later in 2008 the volatility was really high and the stock market was in free falling until it bottomed in 2009.

As you can see the big bounces in 2008 are the reason for the big range shown in the backtest.

Comparison with the 5 Yrs Backtesting

                                          Comparison between the 5Yrs and 10Yrs backtesting, own elaboration

You can see a big improvement in the 10 Yr study vs the 5 Yr. The average profit was 151.28 EUR vs 95.86 EUR. The standard deviation and variance were higher due to the volatility from 2008 and 2013. The range is bigger as well because the stock was trading higher. Considering the strict risk management, I´m surprised about the winning trades percentage. I believe that a mean reversion strategy was the best one at this time, even more with the actions taken by the central banks. In addition, the return’s distribution changed and it shows higher extreme figures (in the positive side, which means a high probability of bigger profits) The system traded 733 times vs 130 times in the last 5 years, the profits are concentrated in the first 300 trades. The Sharpe Ratio is slightly worse.

                                          Max Drawdown, own elaboration using RStudio

I´m happy with this figure, losing 2820 EUR was the equivalent to 3.16% of the portfolio. This is a very conservative figure which I consider ideal. Sadly this is not applicable to another kind of strategies because the system opens and closes the positions on the same day.

         Portfolio growth, own elaboration using RStudio

There is not much to say about this chart. You can see the change in volatility from the first years to the recent years. The biggest profits are concentrated in the first 300 trades. The initial portfolio was 20000 euros. I haven´t included the commissions.

Sum up

We have seen how this system behaved during the last 10 years. You can think that is overfitted and this post doesn´t have value because I tested the system in the right period. This is not the purpose of this little article. I´m surprised with the performance but if you had bought the Dax in 2009, you would have multiplied your portfolio’s value by almost 4. In the next post, I will compare the trading system vs the DAX. I hope you like it. Thanks for reading.

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

Trading system based on a proprietary indicator Part 1

This is a new concept. I will do three parts to analyze the trading system in a better way and compare it with a benchmark. The idea is introducing the trading system, showing the backtesting (last 5 years), comparing with the 10 years backtesting, studying the system vs the benchmark and applying money management to see how the performance and risk parameters change.

Brief explanation of the trading system

The system is based on a proprietary indicator as you can see in the title. The idea behind this system is mean reversion. The levels are chosen from the study of the returns’ distribution. Does it sound familiar to you? In addition, a strict risk management system has been applied. The maximum loss allowed is 0.5% as we will see in the next points. The trading system trades 1000 shares in each trade (in the future I will apply money management) The initial portfolio

 

Results after the last 5 years (backtesting)

     Backtesting statistics from RStudio and Excel, own elaboration

As you can see the system makes 95.86 euros on average per trade. I would like to make clear that the system traded 133 trades and the commissions are not included. The maximum profit in a trade was 1650 euros while the biggest loss was limited to 100 euros.  The return was 12750 euros which is the equivalent of 63.75% in 5 years (around 12.75% per year). As you can imagine, considering the strict risk management, the losing trades percentage is higher than the winning trades percentage. But the average winner is higher than the average loss. The Sharpe Ratio is 4.32, which confirms the profitability of the system.

                                  Max Drawdown, own elaboration using RStudio

This is the measure that I like the most. The system only loses 925 euros in the worst trading period. If we check in percentage terms, it represents a 3.53% loss. According to the asymmetrical leverage rule with a gain of 3.57%, we offset the loss. This shows the importance of risk management.

      Trading system track record, own elaboration using RStudio

Here you can see how the portfolio has been performing. The most important is its consistency.

As a curiosity, performance comparison with different initial capital

With these numbers, we would be tempted to invest 5000 euros or less. The system doesn’t require a lot of capital. The main problem with a 5000 portfolio is that we will struggle because the costs are not included and we couldn´t trade 1000 shares each time.

Conclusion

This has been the first part of a series of posts about the same trading system. In my opinion, the performance and the risk metrics are good. In the next post, I will review the 10 years backtest. The purpose of that is to check that the system hasn´t been overfitted for the last 5 years and show how it performed in a longer period. I hope that 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