Backtesting Settings For the Logical Trading Indicator V.1Since creating the Logical Trading Indicator, my trading game has changed in a big and positive way. But I have been curious as to how I can make an automated strategy with it and how much it makes. The Logical Trading Indicator has many different signals and alerts that you can use to create your own trading strategies that work best for your trading plan.
Over the weekend, I have been tinkering around with the base strategy of buy when I get a buy signal and sell when i get a sell signal. I have played around with both a long and short strategy mainly focusing on the BTCUSD pairing. I am really doing this to help me find the best settings possible for each time frame and letting the strategy do the backtesting for me. This really helps me to figure out how it does over the past year or so. So far, at least for BTC, a LONG only strategy has yielded the best results. Mainly because I couldn't get it to fire shorts the way I wanted it to. This is where machines still need some human guidance, as well as your trades, haha.
Dialing It In
What I am doing is going into different timeframes and finding the best settings for the ATR multiple and length in combination with basis length and the long period moving average. I have been recording the results primarily on the 5 minute as well as the 1 HR and 4 HR time frames because those are the main time frames I focus on.
I have played around with different variations of functions, but TradingView can't seem to get things to fire on the strategy the same way I can get the main indicator to fire. But based on this, I set the strategy to a simple LONG only strategy where it buys when you get a BUY signal and then closes when you get a SELL signal, with the addition of a stop loss function that let's me set a stop loss percentage to provide some additional risk management to help with the drawdown percentage.
In this backtest, the strategy was not taking the 'Take Profit' signals into account, or when I tried to include them in the logic, they weren't firing properly, so I kept it simple with just the BUY and SELL signals with a stop loss. If you used the built in take profit signals, you can do even better than these results.
On the 5 minute time frame, the most profitable settings ended up being:
ATR Multiple: 3
ATR Length: 1
Basis Length: 15 EMA
Long Period Moving Average: 50 SMA
These settings yielded over 100% profit for the backtesting period, which is about a year.
For the 1 HR time frame, the winning settings were:
ATR Multiple: 3
ATR Length: 6
Basis Length: 20 EMA
Long Period Moving Average: 100 SMA
These settings yielded over 200% profit for the backtesting period with almost 60% win rate! Again, you could maximize this even more by utilizing the take profit signals and using short trades when the trend is right and if you are trading on a futures exchange. I have been doing more spot trading on DEXs lately, so I have been trading long only lately.
The Importance of Backtesting
I cannot stress this enough, you have to back test your strategies to make sure they are going to be profitable. This can be done manually by going back in time on the charts and finding all of your signals and seeing if it was profitable, or you can create your own strategy like this using TradingView's Pinescript and let the program do the backtesting for you.
However you do your backtesting, just make sure it gets done! You don't want to just think an indicator or a strategy works, you want to KNOW it works! If not, you could be throwing your money down the drain.
This is Only A Test- But Great For Info Gathering
I am only using this strategy for my own backtesting purposes, not publishing it. I simply used one part of the strategy that is built into the Logical Trading Indicator, and it honestly doesn't properly utilize multiple options for exits as far as the automated strategy goes. I know that if I use these settings, but also use my built in take profit signals, I can do much better than these results are showing.
What is great about this is you can see the performance and find trades that you wouldn't have taken in the first place, or entries and exits that could have been done better by trading manually. For example, after looking at the list of trades, I saw several trades I would have either gotten out of for better profit using the take profit signals, or trades I wouldn't have taken in the first place due to consolidation or accounting for the larger trend.
When trying to program some of the other functions from the main indicator, TradingView would freak out on me a bit and not want to provide any results, or results that just didn't make any sense. But that is all a part of the process. It helps you figure out that the machines don't always have it right, and that having just a bit of 'human' in your trades can make your performance even better than the strategy suggests!
Living That Trader Life
This is the life of a good trader, at least in my opinion. Based on my trading plan, I do not trade on the weekends, even though the crypto markets are open, it isn't always the best time to trade. I like to take this time to go over my trading journal to see where I can improve, perfect my strategies, and hone in on the things I need to work on to get better.
What this development work does for me is show me that automated trading is great, but with the combination of a great indicator that can produce trading alerts, and my own trader's intuition, I can give the markets a serious beating and come out with some amazing gains, as long as I stick to the plan, as well as trade manually with the signals! This helps me keep the emotions out of the game and let's me use the data with the correct settings to make the best decisions possible in my trades for the biggest gains! So get out there and do some backtesting on your favorite strategies to see if you really are trading logically!
