Update on What's Going On
Monday, April 27, 2009 at 10:48PM I thought I had better make a post since I have been silent for quite some time. I've been busy on my OTHER blog Blog On Smog. It is an environmental blog and I'm restructuring it to have 7 bloggers, one for each day of the week. It has been a lot of work and lots of fun but it is starting to settle down so I have a bit more time for StockMarketStudent. This post won't be as fancy as my previous posts - I thought I would let everyone know what's happening.
I decided today to jump into the port that I developed: Industry Breakout 19DEC08. I bought 13 stocks today and will continue to buy the remainder of the port in the near future. As crazy as it sounds I have decided to make my holdings public. Here is the port for anyone wishing to follow along:
http://www.portfolio123.com/port_summary.jsp?portid=417595
This means that you will know absolutely how I am doing. I won't be telling any little white lies about my performance as you can see the performance for yourself. I have no illusions about how it might perform. We are heading into May - the time when smallcaps start to collapse. And the DJIA is having difficulty rising much above the 8000 (resistance) level. The final strike is that everyone is starting to say the bear market is over. Being a contrarian, I think this means that maybe we are headed downwards again.
In any case, I have some difficulties with my trading account because I am a Canadian holding my money in U.S. securities (money market fund or stocks). As the Canadian dollar edges back up to parity with the greenback, it will result in significant loss of capital if I sit there doing nothing. I also don't want to take the chance that the stock market bear really is over and miss the boat on a significant bull market.
Now there is a very high correlation between the plight of the Canadian Dollar and the U.S. stock markets. They rise and fall together. For all these reasons I am jumping into the stock market, for better or worse. Wish me luck.
By the way, I am not a financial advisor and am in no way advising readers to buy the same stocks I am holding. This blog is for educational purposes (and entertainment especially if I fall flat on my face).
The other event that has occurred is that one of my colleagues, Jerrod Mason, has generated an EXCEL spreadsheet that runs and downloads Portfolio123 screen backtests. Now I have promised not to release the spreadsheet but I will be testing it and posting on what I get out of it. If enough people beg for it then just maybe Jerrod will give the nod but right now it is private. So look forward to a peak under the hood in the next few posts.
Steve
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Reader Comments (4)
Glad to see you are back at it. I got my hands on Clarifi for a while. It is quite amazing how good P123 is for what it costs. I'd love to get the Excel sheet you mentioned.
Hello, all.
The Excel file is a huge undertaking, with almost 1500 lines of commented VBA code. For perspective, I reckon that's about 50% more than Stefano's add-in. So far I've given Beta versions to a very few people who have the expertise to validate the operation and who have been generous with me in the past.
I would be especially pleased if it helped Steve to multiply his productivity. It's great that he is willing to share his research, and I'm glad to help. I encourage Steve to share the outputs; just not the VBA code..
As for general distribution ... I'm reluctant to give away so much work, and may offer it directly or through Marco once I'm satisfied with the operation. [This will involve a lot of additional work at error trapping.]
Brief description:
Tthe project began as a way of helping Steve. I thought it would be simple, but kept running into glitches and ideas for nifty improvements. The idea is to It automate the whole process, from sign-in to P123 to production of an archive of backtest results. Each run produces a series of backtests, varying the max number of stocks/ETFs. On my computer, each backtest typically takes about 4 seconds in addition to time spent waiting for P123. Along with the graphical and time-series info provided by P123, the program also produces these performance measures for each of the tests:
Avg%Invested
CAGR
ProfitPerDay
ProfitPerTrade
AvgDaysHeld
GSD
DDMax
DDAvg
Alpha
Beta
RSI
Sharpe
Sortino
Ulcer
DDRecoveryDays
I'm making corrections and additions every day, in part from user feedback, and so welcome any suggestions. The next big thing, if Marco doesn't get there first, is an option to allow or disallow "piling on" when fewer than MaxStocks pass the screen. See the recent discussion in P123 at http://www.portfolio123.com/mvnforum/viewthread?thread=3917
Nice update. Now i am more updated on what's going on w/ the market. Thank for sharing.
etrade
That sounds like one huge complicated file