Collaboration is Good

NeighborTrader has been making some comments lately about a trade he has been backtesting.  At first, he was trying to work out a way to make it an intraday trade so that he could run it at the office as part of his job.  A fairly new trader like him tends to prefer that route, because he has a lot more resources to throw at it sooner if it goes well than if he has to save his money to cover the margin.  Unfortunately for him, after playing with a lot of different variables he came to the conclusion that the trade worked best on daily charts, which means long-term holding times.  Since our firm has a day-trading culture and isn't really set up from a risk-management standpoint to hold trades for more than a few hours, that pretty much precludes him running it as part of his job.

Knowing that I've been running long-term trades in paperMoney, he chatted with me yesterday about his trade and the methodology he was using to backtest it.  I have to admit, I'm pretty impressed at how rigorous he's being with it considering: (a) he has no academic or professional experience with formal backtesting; and (b) it's something he's doing for himself on the weekends and committing very little capital to.  He even went so far as to buy historical data, something most of the guys at the office don't do for their big trades.  He also bought a book to learn proper backtesting methods to minimize the chance of sample bias and curve-fitting.

Since it's his trade, I don't think it's right for me to go into it in detail on a public blog.  He gave me all the information I need to run it myself, and suggested some products to run it in, and I plan to do so, although I can't think of a good name for it right now.  But I'll leave the parameters a little hazy to protect his intellectual property.  Suffice to say that it is pretty similar to CS|MACO in that it looks to enter positions contrary to market consensus, but only to do so when it isn't fighting a strong trend.  It seeks to buy dips and sell spikes, and it's purely technical, using indicators widely available on most charting packages.  It also trades very infrequently, so I might have to run it on more than one product just to avoid being bored.

He's been running it in S&P-500 Futures (it needs a lot of leverage to succeed, and he understands futures very well since that's his job) and a couple of other products.  He just exited a trade in it today for a nice fat profit.  Since I already have CS|MACO running on SPY (the S&P-500 ETF), and I have other trades running on other equity indexes (Iron Condors on Russell, Collars on Nasdaq-100), I think I'll run it against US Treasury 10-year Note Futures.  This trades at the CME since they merged with CBOT, and it's available in paperMoney. 

Speaking of CS|MACO, it's been quiet for a while now.  Individual investors have stayed bullish (they've been right for once), and SPY has stayed above its 25-day moving average.  Long+short = flat, so I've been watching this whole move from the sidelines.  The last couple of weeks haven't been good for any trade except iron condors, with the stock market going pretty much sideways.  Something has to give with CS|MACO soon, though, because the 25-day moving average and the closing price are converging.