Dear friends,
Today I am writing about my views about the
'System Implementation Exercise' mainly with respect to the system I implemented. As on today, RPL and UTVSOF are still running without giving SELL signal yet.
The exercise was conducted with different systems and right at the beginning we faced a substantial crash in market. Almost all systems suffered because of the crash. However, we continued the exercise. Later on we again faced market crash but the exercise continued. As we were dealing with virtual money, there was no need for panic. Each system behaved differently even after the market recovered. Each of us had to figure out what is going wrong. May be it was incorrect Stop loss, May be it was stock selection criteria or some other reason. I am writing here about what I figured out of the whole exercise. Some of these views may be similar to what others feel and some views may contradict their views. We can discuss about these once others also express their views on the whole exercise.
The whole experiment can be divided into three parts:
- List of stock selected for the exercise.
- Stocks selected for trading and the criteria used to select them.
- Stop loss.
I will discuss each one here:
1) List of Stocks selected for the exercise: Each day the list of stocks was selected using an AFL given by Murthy. It mainly depended on price, Turnover, Average Volume and Total Volume. For each of these a lower limit was defined.
My Views: As the list was generated each day, the stocks figuring in the list varied each day. The number of stocks was about 200 but it varied each day. Though a specific group of stocks did not change each day, there were a few which would get included one day and excluded on some other day. In fact, if we consider all the stocks that qualified during the period the total is about 400 stocks. I feel proper attention was not paid to this problems and I feel this affected the outcome. In my opinion we should have selected a list of stocks prior to the exercise and stick to this list throughout.
2) Stocks Selected for Trade and the selection criteria: Each day the AFL was run on the selected list and BUY-SELL signals were generated. All SELL signals were implemented the next day but for buying there were restrictions. The rules stipulated a maximum number of stocks to be purchased subject to a maximum prescribed amount that can be spent on a day. There used to be quite a good number of Buy signals every day and we had select only a few of them for buying so that the rules are not violated. The criteria for selecting was mainly left to the individuals though there were some general guidelines.
My Views: Many times the stocks selected for trade turned out to be poor candidates while those excluded went on to give handsome returns. It is difficult to set particular rules to select a few stocks for trading. It would be better to trade all the qualifying stocks. But this is also not easy to follow as we can not trade about twenty stocks every day with limited resources. It would be better to get a smaller main list of stocks in step 1 above. Also some specific criteria have to be formulated to select really strong signals.
3) Stop loss: This was one of the hot items of discussion prior to and also during the exercise. Some advocated a fixed stop loss, some favored a trailing stop loss. There was also mention about no stop loss. In the last part of my tests I was not using any stop loss.
My views: I think this subject needs thorough discussion and only then we can apply stops intelligently to maximize the profits and minimize the losses.
In addition, I have one question which needs answer from the knowledgeable members in this forum: SHOULD WE HAVE A STOP PROFIT ALSO ?
These are some of the thoughts I wanted to share. You are all requested to give your views, comments and suggestions.
Regards
-Anant