Introduction

Hi,

This is my introductory post, so it will not be very entertaining.
I have started this blog for myself - so I could collect my toughs about loosing trades and tested strategies in a single place. My trading experience is not very rich:

• I have started in Lithuanian market, where I invested without any knowledge, but now I would call it "buy and hold" investment strategy. I did not know nothing about technical or fundamental analysis, but with luckily in 3 investments I have gained 50-100%, those profits covered the loses in other positions and on average I was profitable.
• Lithuanian market is not very liquid, commission costs are high, so I have started looking at US stock market. I have read a little about technical analysis, about options and other instruments and in my first week I have lost 40% of my trading capital playing with earning volatility (option straddles). This experience was stressful, but I have learned new interesting terms (for example, "volatility crash") and pushed me to learn deeper.
• After reading some books ("Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" and others), different swing trading blogs and sites I have started creating my money management strategy which I still use today and it helps me to control looses. Strategy does not let me loose more than 2000$ per year and as I have invested some money into bonds, bond yields cover those looses.
• In about a year I had some profits, but pair of unsuccessful trades (which again involved writing options) moved me into break even position. So, I'm not a successful trader yet, I did not find a good swing trade strategy to hold on, so there is not much to learn from me.

As trading with my money management strategy is not very time consuming, several months ago I have also started looking at algorithm trading:

• I have created some artificial intelligence algorithms which after learning could guess next intraday bar direction with quite good precision and I could earn 200-400% just by using this algorithm, if only there would be a commission-free broker. Otherwise commissions would take most of the profits, so I did not dare to test this algorithm yet.
• I have created an intraday strategy back-test platform and tested it with several different strategies (breakout, candle reversal, IBS, stochastics, etc).

As of today there is only one strategy which was very profitable in back-tests - using 2012 year 5 min. intraday data it generates 500-700% profits (depending on stop placement) even after deducting commissions. For earlier year I have intraday data only for few symbols, but with this data strategy is profitable, but profits are just 10-20%. I am testing this strategy on simulated account and it generated 80% profit last week (mostly because it invested in NFLX day before huge leap), but strategy results are not very consistent, so I'm not ready to give it a shot with real money.

So, that is my story. I will post more after testing other strategies.