Jim Dean Sage   Posts: 3022 Joined: 9/21/2006 Location: L'ville, GA  User Profile | The three starting-point components for testing and tweaking are: the Strategy the Focus-List the Time-Period This post will address the Strategy. Since most of the OT package and most of the addons are dealing with Strategy alternatives, it would be a bit much to try to discuss that component here. However, please review the two nutshell statements at the end of the prior post. The step regarding Strategy choice and use that most people overlook is the LEARNING and UNDERSTANDING process. It's so tempting to get that shiny new gizmo (ok so it's a boring flat CD that you load in your computer and put away in a dusty shelf somewhere, but humor me here :~) ... and immediately hook it up by just opening up the Strategy list in ToDo and putting checks in the boxes of whatever shiny new Strategy variations it contains, and presuming, based on the glowing reports of the marvelous marketing brochure, that by using it you'll be rich beyond your wildest dreams within a year! Whoopee! But ... it doesn't work that way. If you have not learned this yet, I hope that you are not trading with any money that is important to you. Before you can effectively use a new Strategy, you need to STUDY IT. Start off by (gasp) reading the manual - no, the brochure is not the manual ;~) ... it's found by pressing the Help button. Read it through fully once, then go back over it slowly, and play with the individual features that it discusses. Play with it in a vacuum ... don't activate other Strategies or do any major surgery on it. Not yet, anyways :~) One of two things will come out of this process, if you do a thorough job of it (more likely, a mixture of the two): 1. you will, by fiddling around with it in a controlled way, gradually come to understand not just how it's supposed to work in an ideal situation, but how it really DOES work. This is done primarily by looking at CHARTS and the VOTELINE ... lots and lots of charts, playing with parameters as you go. Seemingly-odd things might happen ... that should impel you to dig even deeper. ... OR ... 2. you will generate a list of QUESTIONS - hopefully ones that pinpoint areas of confusion ... simple things like definitions of words, or involved stuff like interactions of input variables. Questions are GOOD. Bring your specific questions to the Forum ... the (eventual) answers that will come most likely will assist many other folks as well. The goal is to not only intellectually understand how the strategy works, but to develop an appreciation and gut feel for how it performs in a wide variety of different market conditions. Take NOTES as you go. Anything less than considering at least a couple hundred charts is probably not enough. And, none of this has anything to do with backtest reports, optimization of parameters, or interaction with other strategies. Details about what to look for and what to play with vary widely for different strategies and for different components of the strategy. The best general guideline is to fiddle with ONE THING AT A TIME, till you understand it, then move on to the next fiddle-factor. This process actually can be fun! As long as your goal is to UNDERSTAND things, regardless of whether they work out well or not. ... I'll continue with general comments about the other two areas, later this evening ... [Edited by Jim Dean on 6/23/2010 5:52 PM] | |
