Reporting For Duty

Wow, just wow. I look away for five minutes and things goto crap...

So, it’s been awhile since I’ve ‘put pen to page’ if you will, and boy has a lot happened. We got this COVID-19 virus running around, people are locking themselves in their homes, restaurants are closed, and the world seems to be hedging towards a global lockdown. On top of that Saudi Arabia and Russia are fighting for the bottom, overproducing oil at unprecedented levels. Now I have my theories and concerns about all of this but that not why I write this blog. I’m here to provide tools and talk about my own experiences in the hopes that others may learn from my mistakes. And without further ado let’s get into them.

So far this year my one big regret is not trusting my system. I spent several months last year developing a new system using the same rigger and criticisms that I had for my first systems. Though there was a time when I did cut corners (and I paid for it) this was not the case. However, the system’s first trades were losers and I immediately put it back into paper trading (though it had paper traded positively the month before). This knee jerk reaction cost me as the paper trades it entered averaged at about an 80% return the following month. These gains would have put me in a nice spot going into the COVID-19 scare. Alas they were only paper, and I went form +5% on the year to -7% when the news hit. I am slowly clawing my way back to break even and seeing how it is only March there is still plenty of time left before the end of the year and for things to get better… or worse. I’d prefer the first option.

Now that brings me to what I’ve been up to while remaining radio silent asides the endless tweets supplied by my bots. Coding. Yes, lots and lots of coding. I have my own tool that I have mentioned before (Overlord) as well as the open source node packages I manage. There was also a coding "challenge" thrown in there as well.

Grax-Assistant

Yes, a name change is coming soon. I’m thinking about slapping “down-to-crypto” where “gdax” currently is and calling it a day. As far as actual updates go, I have added several new indicators as well as provides some (not nearly enough) much needed documentation. Pivot points, MACD, ADX/DMI, EMA and a few others have all been added. I also made some changes to the candle objects giving them more measured values. I added them after finding many of my own strategies calculated them time and time again. Figured I’d save the line of code and just build them in for everyone.

Overlord

Now this has been the main dish of my at home work load in the past months. I added GUI to change my configuration files (what bots run where and on what pairs) as well as one to manage historic data. These all use to be command line tool but can now be done through a web interface. But fear not, I kept the old functionality incase any savvy programmers out there might want to write batch scripts and corn jobs to interact with the platform. Why do you care? After all this is solely my personal platform. Well there are plans, ill be it distant, to open source this. At the moment there are far too many nuances far too little (you guessed it) supporting documents for me to feel comfortable delivering this to the masses. Especially with the very real financial hard one could do to them self. I will do a write up and maybe even a video describing the platform in the coming weeks.

Conclusion

I currently am not under any type of quarantine but if I do end up in lock down and my health is still with me, the plan is to put in full working days on Overlord and the surrounding repos. Goals for this year are to break into the stock market and traditional trading assets to better diversify, as well as be open to more opportunities as they present themselves. Its only March but I can feel the time slipping past. I’ve manually (gross) back tested one of my more resilient strategies on the SPY and it did manage to outperform. At least I know there is a light at the end of the tunnel. The biggest obstacle I’ll have to overcome is acquiring the data. Exchanges make this info free for crypto, however that’s not what I’m finding with stocks and other commodities sadly to say.

All in all, it will be an interesting year. History is unfolding right before our eyes. For those who have their health be grateful and for those who are ill my prayers are with you.