In this week's episode of Line Your Own Pockets, we answer a multi-part question from long-time list member Chip D.S. (name used with permission).

The first part of his excellent question:

We discuss:

• Why optimizing separately is a good default, but not a set-in-stone rule
• Look for commonalities when optimizing the long versus the short trade sets
• How "directional" columns are useful when combining long and short trade sets
• When going live with an Amibroker strategy, how to strip down the code to make it run fast

And much more...

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Before you go!

The next time you find yourself in a drawdown, I want you to stop what you're doing and head on over to betterbacktesting.com to sign up for my free backtesting email course.

I hope to see you there!

We interview Steve Bravo from Massive (formerly known as Polygon.io).

I passed along several questions from MabeKit Mastermind members, who brought up some good ones.

We discuss:

• Why there are so many data providers and what makes Massive unique
• Why the name change? (They changed from Polygon to Massive several months ago)
• How AI has changed the data business - dramatically
• Discrepancies between data vendors and what causes them
• What's coming next from Massive? (L2, fundamentals, etc)

And much more...

Thanks to Steve for joining us!

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Before you go!

The next time you find yourself in a drawdown, I want you to stop what you're doing and head on over to betterbacktesting.com to sign up for my free backtesting email course.

I hope to see you there!

In this week's episode of Line Your Own Pockets, we discuss a question I received from a reader named Sridhar.

He recently went live with 8 automated trading strategies - and none of them are performing well.

In his words (used with permission, excerpted for clarity):

Sridhar:

Hi Dave, I'm struggling at the moment, and you're the person whose judgement I trust most on this.

In less than 2 months, I found up to 8 intraday strategies, each with >1.5 PF, each researched to a locked backtest.

The results don't match the effort. I'm down about $16.8k net of commissions since mid-July, and I've been red on 22 of 35 trading days.

I hope things can turn around, but honestly, I'm losing spirit a bit. The process and the engineering are strong, and I'm still losing money. I'd really value your perspective.

We discuss this in detail in this episode, with concrete steps to improve and identify the mistakes.

Topics include:

• Start with 1-2 strategies rather than 8
• Trade tiny at first - you can learn a lot with minuscule size, so you can avoid "paying tuition" to the market
• How to plan for drawdowns before they happen
• Don't "build the pedestal" - use established backtesting software and focus on the important thing: the strategies
• Only scale after the market has given you concrete feedback that your process is sound

And much more...

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Before you go!

The next time you find yourself in a drawdown, I want you to stop what you're doing and head on over to betterbacktesting.com to sign up for my free backtesting email course.

I hope to see you there!