The SiteMoney Blog

Investing powers in the Myers Briggs personality profiles

David Smith — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:53:48 +0000

I’ve recently rediscovered the power in the Myers Briggs personality profiles and now I’m wondering if they can be used to help you invest. I searched around on Google for a site that would list something like the 16 personality types and give well matched strategies for how each type should invest. I’d want to see where the investing powers are in addition to their weaknesses and blind spots for each type. I’m going to dig deeper but if you have any hints into this, I’ve created a question for it on investery.com.

Update to the Dow Jones Industrials Percent Advancing Indicator

David Smith — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:41:11 +0000

I’ve updated the Dow Jones Industrials percent advancing indicator for StrategyDesk to use the latest 30 stocks for the DOW. You can get the code for it from here.

Investery.com is now in public beta

David Smith — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:49:07 +0000

My StrategyDesk postings have have been a little quiet here for the last couple months. Here is a new site that I’ve been working on. Investery.com is now in public beta. Come help start the site off by asking (or answer) any investment questions you might have. You can ask questions without having to signup for an account. If you have any questions or problems with the site, feel free to contact me at dsmith at jetpad.com

Dow Jones Industrials Percent Advancing Indicator

David Smith — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 21:43:18 +0000

Here is another example of me trying to work around the limitations of StrategyDesk. I wanted to look at the percent advancing indicators like the $NYAD but they don’t work in StrategyDesk. So I made my own. I initially created one for the S&P 500 by putting a line in a custom strategy for each S&P symbol like this

(Bar[Close,D,0,ABT] > Bar[Open,D,0,ABT]) +

and wrapped them all in a set of parenthesis, divided by 500, and then multiplied by 100 to convert it to a percentage.

But unfortunately it was just too much information for StrategyDesk to be pulling the quotes for all 500 stocks for each bar so it would never update the chart. Instead, I created a smaller one of just the Dow Jones Industrials.

{ DOW Percent Advancing Stocks v1 }
{ (c)2009 by David Smith - dsmith at jetpad dot com }
((
(Bar[Close,D,0,BAC] > Bar[Open,D,0,BAC]) +
(Bar[Close,D,0,GE] > Bar[Open,D,0,GE]) +
(Bar[Close,D,0,PFE] > Bar[Open,D,0,PFE]) +
(Bar[Close,D,0,DD] > Bar[Open,D,0,DD]) +
(Bar[Close,D,0,AA] > Bar[Open,D,0,AA]) +
(Bar[Close,D,0,T] > Bar[Open,D,0,T]) +
(Bar[Close,D,0,VZ] > Bar[Open,D,0,VZ]) +
(Bar[Close,D,0,MRK] > Bar[Open,D,0,MRK]) +
(Bar[Close,D,0,JPM] > Bar[Open,D,0,JPM]) +
(Bar[Close,D,0,KFT] > Bar[Open,D,0,KFT]) +
(Bar[Close,D,0,BA] > Bar[Open,D,0,BA]) +
(Bar[Close,D,0,HD] > Bar[Open,D,0,HD]) +
(Bar[Close,D,0,AXP] > Bar[Open,D,0,AXP]) +
(Bar[Close,D,0,INTC] > Bar[Open,D,0,INTC]) +
(Bar[Close,D,0,CAT] > Bar[Open,D,0,CAT]) +
(Bar[Close,D,0,CVX] > Bar[Open,D,0,CVX]) +
(Bar[Close,D,0,MMM] > Bar[Open,D,0,MMM]) +
(Bar[Close,D,0,KO] > Bar[Open,D,0,KO]) +
(Bar[Close,D,0,MCD] > Bar[Open,D,0,MCD]) +
(Bar[Close,D,0,JNJ] > Bar[Open,D,0,JNJ]) +
(Bar[Close,D,0,UTX] > Bar[Open,D,0,UTX]) +
(Bar[Close,D,0,MSFT] > Bar[Open,D,0,MSFT]) +
(Bar[Close,D,0,PG] > Bar[Open,D,0,PG]) +
(Bar[Close,D,0,IBM] > Bar[Open,D,0,IBM]) +
(Bar[Close,D,0,XOM] > Bar[Open,D,0,XOM]) +
(Bar[Close,D,0,WMT] > Bar[Open,D,0,WMT]) +
(Bar[Close,D,0,DIS] > Bar[Open,D,0,DIS]) +
(Bar[Close,D,0,HPQ] > Bar[Open,D,0,HPQ]) +
(Bar[Close,D,0,C] > Bar[Open,D,0,C]) +
(Bar[Close,D,0,GM] > Bar[Open,D,0,GM])
)
/ 30) * 100

One nice thing about this one is that it’ll work over any interval in StrategyDesk. You can look at the advancing stock percentage on a daily or even down to the minute basis. Here is an example of it being used with hour bars.

Power Measure in StrategyDesk

David Smith — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 17:24:10 +0000

I’ve converted Brett Steenbarger’s Power Measure indicator into a StrategyDesk formula and you can download it from here.

It was too large to just insert into the blog post so I saved it in the closest file format that I could upload to wordpress (pdf).

If you look inside the file, it is quite a hack due to limitations on what you can do in StrategyDesk but it does work.

I don’t know quite how to use it yet but I’m now going to spend some time to see what it can do. You can get a few pointers on it from TraderFeed’s post on it and from his upcoming book.

Here is a example of using it with the symbol $INX for the same time period as TraderFeed’s post. I used $INX because I either don’t have access to the ES futures symbol in StrategyDesk or I just don’t know it. The results are about the same as in his example but I think he must be in a time zone that is one off my mine (EST).

PowerMeasure example

Custom Color Profit Column for StrategyDesk

David Smith — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 20:49:05 +0000

Here is a formula for a custom color column in StrategyDesk that’ll display a red/yellow/green color field for long and short positions. In the color field wizard, put in this formula and add these three rules.

{ Custom Color Profit Column }
(EntryShares < 0) * (EntryPrice - Bar[Close,1]) + (EntryShares > 0) * (Bar[Close,1] - EntryPrice)

When value is > 0 display bar in GREEN
When value is = 0 display bar in YELLOW
When value is < 0 display bar in RED

I entered 5 as the number of bars.  It'll then show you if you are profitable in each each of your positions for each minute of the last 5 minutes by just glancing at the column (the more green you see, the better things are going).

Strategy A for March 3rd

David Smith — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 21:36:45 +0000

Strategy-A is signaling a switch to long buys tomorrow. This’ll be the first day I’ve run it live when it wasn’t shorting stocks. The last time it signaled a long buying day was February 24th but I had some settings wrong so it never entered any positions on that day.

A simple volatility indicator

David Smith — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 21:56:17 +0000

When I first started working on my trading strategies, I looked very closely at the $VIX to try and understand how others were using it. I tried using it in StrategyDesk but the symbol wouldn’t update during the day (I’ve since discovered that the symbol that updates during the day is $VIX.X). Since I couldn’t get $VIX to work, I started trying to come up with my own indicator of volatility and settled on converting the daily range of $INX into a percentage change in relation to the size of the index. The StrategyDesk formula is:

((Bar[High,D,0,$INX]-Bar[Low,D,0,$INX])/Bar[High,D,0,$INX])*100

I’ve probably just re-invented the wheel but I don’t know what this indicator is called so I’m just calling it the SiteMoneyVIX for now.

Even though I’ve switched over to using the $VIX.X for the most part, I still use my volatility indicator for some things. One benefit is that it doesn’t seem to have the *memory* effect of the $VIX.X. If you look at where the VIX was when we were entering January of this year, it was almost to 40 but volatility in the markets had really dropped off. In contrast, the SiteMoneyVIX dropped down to the levels we were at in August of 2008 and I think pretty well reflected the volatility we saw as the year started. The indicator is now (in late February) around the levels we were seeing in September of last year when all the crazyness started.

If you display the indicator on a chart, you’ll notice that it is really spikey. If you want to smooth it out a little, you can replace parts of it with moving averages so that the formula looks like:

((MovingAverage[MA,High,5,0,D,0,$INX] - MovingAverage[MA,Low,5,0,D,0,$INX]) /MovingAverage[MA,High,5,0,D,0,$INX])*100

On this chart, VIX is shown in blue and the 5 day moving average SiteMoneyVIX is in red.

As part of Strategy A, I'm using it to check for days that have a volatility higher than 2.25. Here is the formula:

(((MovingAverage[MA,High,5,0,D,1,$INX] - MovingAverage[MA,Low,5,0,D,1,$INX]) /MovingAverage[MA,High,5,0,D,1,$INX])*100 > 2.25)

So far I haven't found any uses for it intraday but there are probably other ways to use this along with the real VIX.

About the SiteMoney Blog

David Smith — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 19:08:03 +0000

I’ve created this blog to talk about my exploration of trading systems and automated trading strategies. Like just about everyone else, the markets from last year hit my investments pretty hard. I was doing the buy-and-hold strategy and had diversified pretty well. But no amount of diversification would protect someone from what has happened. I changed my mindset and I now believe an active roll has to be taken to preserve and grow investments in the stock market.

I’m an engineer/programmer and really do best when taking a programmer’s perspective to problems so I started looking into creating automated strategies to trade stocks. Before now (except for a failed dip into day trading in 1998) I’d start to question myself if I sold a stock in the same year that I bought it. Now I’m looking at strategies that would put me in-and-out of a stock multiple times each day.

I started out looking at a lot of different platforms that would allow me to backtest strategies and settled on TD Ameritrade’s StrategyDesk. It definitely has its limitations but I haven’t outgrown it yet. So there will be a lot of talk about StrategyDesk and how to create a successful strategy in it.