The last 6 months

Trade entry and exit are from the last set of orange arrows on each chart.

They are not all winners.

 Sun was a long relatively fruitless trade, the only bonus being some dividends.

 MIN was not a disaster, but it didn't make much.

 I lost some money on this one and the next one.

July 2011

Only one buy signal was triggered.

The nicest sell for the month is shown below. I bought LYC for at $0.83 and got out at $1.88, 127% gain over 11 months on a reasonable position size. Not in the MSB trade league that I had earlier this year, but not too bad.

I am still offloading some positions for the month.

MSB trade

MSB turned out to be a big winner. I had a profit exit in April 2011 and exited at an average price of $8.97. Purchase price average $1.41, giving a gain of 537% over 17 months. It was nice to sell into a rising price on MSB.

I also had a couple of small losers, CFE (-18%)  and RED (-25%) but fortunately the MSB gains made these losses insignificant.

I didn't get any buy signals at the end of April, only sells.

stevo

Some Small Gains

These are 2 relatively short trades for me, considering that this portfolio has a couple of "trades" that have been running for well over a year.

IGR trade 14.3% gain

AVO trade 8.3% gain

I have been targeting getting in and out of stocks on the open or the close. I find that I can put through good volumes in these periods, although I should do a bit more reading about the process that occurs at these critical market periods.



stevo

First sell this year

Out of SBM at breakeven.

Just a chart

Just a chart for The Chartist

First post for 2011!

A couple of trades

Below are a couple of trades I exited recently.

These trades were taken using a weekly system. Both AND & KCN were bought in June 2009 so they were well over a year old. Andean Resources (AND)was a profit exit, although it's really an option I don't use much with this system. AND are a takeover target. Both of these are in my Super fund.

Computers

I have changed desktop computers 3 times this year! I find myself drawn to AMD based systems. I tend to go for the underdog. I like the idea of having strong competitors to massive companies like Intel and Microsoft. AMD systems tend to be cheaper and work just as well. AMD offer more bang for my dollar and my old penny pinching habits die hard.

AMD is not really a struggling minnow and has been fighting Intel for quite some time, as shown by the $1.25 bn settlement last year. Dell has also been under the spotlight for their "symbiotic" relationship with Intel. I think that it would be true to say that the concept of fair competition has been stretched to the limits when examining the computer giants.

Many of the worlds supercomputers run AMD and Linux so I am not in bad company.

Microsoft lost the plot with Vista and triggered my interest in Linux. There is a massive amount of software for Linux based machines and most of it is free. In Ubuntu I just go to the Software Centre and search for what I am after, including very good photo software (Digikam and Gimp), excellent browsers (Chrome, Opera and Firefox), a number of Office packages (Open Office or Libre Office, Gnumeric, Abiword) Evolution for emails, not to forget such gems as Virtualbox, GnomeDo, Tomboy Notes and Lucky Backup. I even have a virus scanner, although I don't use it much. Some of the anti-virus software really bogs down Windows based machines.

The Ubuntu Software Centre is a little like Apps on an iPhone or marketplace on an Android phone.

I have Windows 7 running on a virtual machine for downloading share prices. Windows 7 is also essential for running Tradesim.

Running a Linux based operating system is a bit like being a member of an outlaw bikie gang. A one percenter, Outlaw nerd, that's what I am. More than 90% of computers run Microsoft Windows. It's amazing that Linux exists at all given the huge user base Windows has.

So why change computers 3 times in one year. One reason is because it was very easy to do. I just pulled the small (32gb) SSD drive that holds my operating system out of the old computer, along with my data drive, and plugged them into the new setup, booted up and away it went! Try that with Windows 7.

stevo

Spreadsheets & Amibroker

 The chart above shows system performance without a profit target versus the chart below that has a profit target.

I haven't posted for a while. I find myself becoming quite secretive about trading methods and system performance!

But I have decided that I am happy to share some stuff about what can be achieved with Amibroker and some spreadsheets. The series of charts above were generated using a dummy variable in Amibroker to produce a range of outcomes from the Explorer. I have mentioned this elsewhere in this blog.

I use a template spreadsheet and just copy the data from Amibroker straight into the spreadsheet and up pop the charts above. These charts were produced using Open Office, not the best spreadsheet software on the market but certainly the cheapest - free. It is quite capable for basic tasks like the one above.

These charts are created using frequency distributions. The intervals for the distributions are automatically generated.

A profit target between 200% and 400% for the long term system (ave hold time of 290 days) shown above works quite well. Not a lot is gained by setting a higher target, and drawdown is slightly worse.