Saturday, September 19, 2009

Weekend Robot Development

Now that the weekend is here it's time to put on the thinking cap and figure out how to increase earnings, reduce risk or both.

As mentioned in a reply to a comment on the previous post I've reallocated funds, put in a reserve amount and added a manual release amount.

The reserve amount holds back capital from the lot size calculation and the total margin available calculation. This capital is ignored such that the robot acts as if it only has balance - reserve under management.

The release amount, if any, adds capital into the margin available calculation but does not change the lot size calculation. The purpose of this is allow a series of discretionary actions to reactivate the robot once it has stopped trading due to an extended period of unhelpful price movement without adjusting the risk per trade.

The amount of capital released can be reduced as the price moves in a profitable direction. I'm also hoping that the robot will earn above it's target rate so that some capital can be painlessly shifted to reserved status each week.

Unfortunately, all of this might make it harder to report standard profitability numbers. Whether rightly or wrongly I'm going to use the unreserved capital balance as the measurement value of the account. It's what the lot size is based on and I intend to grow that amount X% per week. I'll also be using that value for my theoretical compounding calculations.

Remaining on the burner are concepts such as the meta-robot and email notifications to be issued when the meta-robot identifies various conditions suitable for discretionary decisions. If these turn out to be useful I might even set up some type of free mailing list.

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