Multi Trend Cross Strategy TemplateToday I am sharing with the community trend cross strategy template that incorporates any combination of over 20 built in indicators. Some of these indicators are in the Pine library, and some have been custom coded and contributed over time by the beloved Pine Coder community. Identifying a trend cross is a common trend following strategy and a common custom-code request from the community. Using this template, users can now select from over 400 different potential trend combinations and setup alerts without any custom coding required. This Multi-Trend cross template has a very inclusive library of trend calculations/indicators built-in, and will plot any of the 20+ indicators/trends that you can select in the settings.
How it works : Simple trend cross strategies go long when the fast trend crosses over the slow trend, and/or go short when the fast trend crosses under the slow trend. Options for either trend direction are built-in to this strategy template. The script is also coded in a way that allows you to enable/modify pyramid settings and scale into a position over time after a trend has crossed.
Use cases : These types of strategies can reduce the volatility of returns and can help avoid large market downswings. For instance, those running a longer term trend-cross strategy may have not realized half the down swing of the bear markets or crashes in 02', 08', 20', etc. However, in other years, they may have exited the market from time to time at unfavorable points that didn't end up being a down turn, or at times the market was ranging sideways. Some also use them to reduce volatility and then add leverage to attempt to beat buy/hold of the underlying asset within an acceptable drawdown threshold.
Special thanks to @Duyck, @everget, @KivancOzbilgic and @LazyBear for coding and contributing earlier versions of some of these custom indicators in Pine.
This script incorporates all of the following indicators. Each of them can be selected and modified from within the indicator settings:
ALMA - Arnaud Legoux Moving Average
DEMA - Double Exponential Moving Average
DSMA - Deviation Scaled Moving Average - Contributed by Everget
EMA - Exponential Moving Average
HMA - Hull Moving Average
JMA - Jurik Moving Average - Contributed by Everget
KAMA - Kaufman's Adaptive Moving Average - Contributed by Everget
LSMA - Linear Regression , Least Squares Moving Average
RMA - Relative Moving Average
SMA - Simple Moving Average
SMMA - Smoothed Moving Average
Price Source - Plotted based on source selection
TEMA - Triple Exponential Moving Average
TMA - Triangular Moving Average
VAMA - Volume Adjusted Moving Average - Contributed by Duyck
VIDYA - Variable Index Dynamic Average - Contributed by KivancOzbilgic
VMA - Variable Moving Average - Contributed by LazyBear
VWMA - Volume Weighted Moving Average
WMA - Weighted Moving Average
WWMA - Welles Wilder's Moving Average
ZLEMA - Zero Lag Exponential Moving Average - Contributed by KivancOzbilgic
Disclaimer : This is not financial advice. Open-source scripts I publish in the community are largely meant to spark ideas that can be used as building blocks for part of a more robust trade management strategy. If you would like to implement a version of any script, I would recommend making significant additions/modifications to the strategy & risk management functions. If you don’t know how to program in Pine, then hire a Pine-coder. We can help!
Tradeautomation
VIDYA Trend StrategyOne of the most common messages I get is people reaching out asking for quantitative strategies that trade cryptocurrency. This has compelled me to write this script and article, to help provide a quantitative/technical perspective on why I believe most strategies people write for crypto fail catastrophically, and how one might build measures within their strategies that help reduce the risk of that happening. For those that don't trade crypto, know that these approaches are applicable to any market.
I will start off by qualifying up that I mainly trade stocks and ETFs, and I believe that if you trade crypto, you should only be playing with money you are okay with losing. Most published crypto strategies I have seen "work" when the market is going up, and fail catastrophically when it is not. There are far more people trying to sell you a strategy than there are people providing 5-10+ year backtest results on their strategies, with slippage and commissions included, showing how they generated alpha and beat buy/hold. I understand that this community has some really talented people that can create some really awesome things, but I am saying that the vast majority of what you find on the internet will not be strategies that create alpha over the long term.
So, why do so many of these strategies fail?
There is an assumption many people make that cryptocurrency will act just like stocks and ETFs, and it does not. ETF returns have more of a Gaussian probability distribution. Because of this, ETFs have a short term mean reverting behavior that can be capitalized on consistently. Many technical indicators are built to take advantage of this on the equities market. Many people apply them to crypto. Many of those people are drawn down 60-70% right now while there are mean reversion strategies up YTD on equities, even though the equities market is down. Crypto has many more "tail events" that occur 3-4+ standard deviations from the mean.
There is a correlation in many equities and ETF markets for how long an asset continues to do well when it is currently doing well. This is known as momentum, and that correlation and time-horizon is different for different assets. Many technical indicators are built based on this behavior, and then people apply them to cryptocurrency with little risk management assuming they behave the same and and on the same time horizon, without pulling in the statistics to verify if that is actually the case. They do not.
People do not take into account the brokerage commissions and slippage. Brokerage commissions are particularly high with cryptocurrency. The irony here isn't lost to me. When you factor in trading costs, it blows up most short-term trading strategies that might otherwise look profitable.
There is an assumption that it will "always come back" and that you "HODL" through the crash and "buy more." This is why Three Arrows Capital, a $10 billion dollar crypto hedge fund is now in bankruptcy, and no one can find the owners. This is also why many that trade crypto are drawn down 60-70% right now. There are bad risk practices in place, like thinking the martingale gambling strategy is the same as dollar cost averaging while also using those terms interchangeably. They are not the same. The 1st will blow up your trade account, and the 2nd will reduce timing risk. Many people are systematically blowing up their trade accounts/strategies by using martingale and calling it dollar cost averaging. The more risk you are exposing yourself too, the more important your risk management strategy is.
There is an odd assumption some have that you can buy anything and win with technical/quantitative analysis. Technical analysis does not tell you what you should buy, it just tells you when. If you are running a strategy that is going long on an asset that lost 80% of its value in the last year, then your strategy is probably down. That same strategy might be up on a different asset. One might consider a different methodology on choosing assets to trade.
Lastly, most strategies are over-fit, or curve-fit. The more complicated and more parameters/settings you have in your model, the more likely it is just fit to historical data and will not perform similar in live trading. This is one of the reasons why I like simple models with few parameters. They are less likely to be over-fit to historical data. If the strategy only works with 1 set of parameters, and there isn't a range of parameters around it that create alpha, then your strategy is over-fit and is probably not suitable for live trading.
So, what can I do about all of this!?
I created the VIDYA Trend Strategy to provide an example of how one might create a basic model with a basic risk management strategy that might generate long term alpha on a volatile asset, like cryptocurrency. This is one (of many) risk management strategies that can reduce the volatility of your returns when trading any asset. I chose the Variable Index Dynamic Average (VIDYA) for this example because it's calculation filters out some market noise by taking into account the volatility of the underlying asset. I chose a trend following strategy because regressions are capturing behaviors that are not just specific to the equities market.
The more volatile an asset, the more you have to back-off the short term price movement to effectively trend-follow it. Otherwise, you are constantly buying into short term trends that don't represent the trend of the asset, then they reverse and loose money. This is why I am applying a trend following strategy to a 4 hour chart and not a 4 minute chart. It is also important to note that following these long term trends on a volatile asset exposes you to additional risk. So, how might one mitigate some of that risk?
One of the ways of reducing timing risk is scaling into a trade. This is different from "doubling down" or "trippling down." It is really a basic application of dollar cost averaging to reduce timing risk, although DCA would typically happen over a longer time period. If it is really a trend you are following, it will probably still be a trend tomorrow. Trend following strategies have lower win rates because the beginning of a trend often reverses. The more volatile the asset, the more likely that is to happen. However, we can reduce risk of buying into a reversal by slowly scaling into the trend with a small % of equity per trade.
Our example "VIDYA Trend Strategy" executes this by looking at a medium-term, volatility adjusted trend on a 4 hour chart. The script scales into it with 4% of the account equity every 4-hours that the trend is still up. This means you become fully invested after 25 trades/bars. It also means that early in the trade, when you might be more likely to experience a reversal, most of your account equity is not invested and those losses are much smaller. The script sells 100% of the position when it detects a trend reversal. The slower you scale into a trade, the less volatile your equity curve will be. This model also includes slippage and commissions that you can adjust under the "settings" menu.
This fundamental concept of reducing timing risk by scaling into a trade can be applied to any market.
Disclaimer: This is not financial advice. Open-source scripts I publish in the community are largely meant to spark ideas that can be used as building blocks for part of a more robust trade management strategy. If you would like to implement a version of any script, I would recommend making significant additions/modifications to the strategy & risk management functions. If you don’t know how to program in Pine, then hire a Pine-coder. We can help!
Gap Reversion StrategyToday I am releasing to the community an original short-term, high-probability gap trading strategy, backed by a 20 year backtest. This strategy capitalizes on the mean reverting behavior of equity ETFs, which is largely driven by fear in the market. The strategy buys into that fear at a level that has historically mean reverted within ~5 days. Larry Connors has published useful research and variations of strategies based on this behavior that I would recommend any quantitative trader read.
What it does:
This strategy, for 1 day charts on equity ETFs, looks for an overnight gap down when the RSI is also in/near an oversold position. Then, it places a limit order further below the opening of the gapped-down day. It then exits the position based on a higher RSI level. The limit buy order is cancelled if the price doesn't reach your limit price that day. So, the larger you make the gap and limit %, the less signals you will have.
Features:
Inputs to allow the adjustment of the limit order %, the gap %, and the RSI entry/exit levels.
An option to have the limit order be based on a % of ATR instead of a % of asset price.
An optional filter that can turn-off trades when the VIX is unusually high.
A built in stop.
Built in alerts.
Disclaimer: This is not financial advice. Open-source scripts I publish in the community are largely meant to spark ideas that can be used as building blocks for part of a more robust trade management strategy. If you would like to implement a version of any script, I would recommend making significant additions/modifications to the strategy & risk management functions. If you don’t know how to program in Pine, then hire a Pine-coder. We can help!
Overnight Gap AnalysisThere is a wide range of opinion on holding positions overnight due to gap risk. So, out of curiosity, I coded this analysis as a strategy to see what the result of only holding a position overnight on an asset would be. The results really surprised me. The script backtests 10+ years, and here are the findings:
Holding a position for 1 hour bar overnight on QQQ since January 2010 results in a 545% return. QQQ's entire return holding through the same period is 643%
The max equity drawdown on holding that position overnight is lower then the buy/hold drawdown on the underlying asset.
It doesn't matter if the last bar of the day is green or red, the results are similar.
It doesn't matter if it is a bull or bear market. Filtering the script to only trade when the price is above the 200-day moving average actually reduces its return from 545% to 301%, though it does also reduce drawdown.
I see similar patterns when applying the script to other index ETFs. Applying it to leveraged index ETFs can end up beating buy/hold of the underlying index.
Since this script holds through the 1st bar of the day, this could also speak to a day-opening price pattern
The default inputs are for the script to be applied to 1 hour charts only that have 7 bars on the chart per day. You can apply it to other chart types, but must follow the instructions below for it to work properly.
What the script is doing :
This script is buying the close of the last bar of the day and closing the trade at the close of the next bar. So, all trades are being held for 1 bar. By default, the script is setup for use on a 1hr chart that has 7 bars per day. If you try to apply it to a different timeframe, you will need to adjust the count of the last bar of the day with the script input. I.e. There are 7 bars per day on an hour chart on US Stocks/ETFs, so the input is set to 7 by default.
Other ways this script can be used :
This script can also test the result of holding a position over any 1 bar in the day using that same input. For instance, on an hour chart you can input 6 on the script input, and it will model buying the close of the 6th bar of the day while selling on the close of the next bar. I used this out of curiosity to model what only holding the last bar of the day would result in. On average, you lose money on the last bar every day.
The irony here is that the root cause of this last bar of the day losing may be people selling their positions at the end of day so that they aren't exposed to overnight gap risk.
Disclaimer: This is not financial advice. Open-source scripts I publish in the community are largely meant to spark ideas that can be used as building blocks for part of a more robust trade management strategy. If you would like to implement a version of any script, I would recommend making significant additions/modifications to the strategy & risk management functions. If you don’t know how to program in Pine, then hire a Pine-coder. We can help!
R3 ETF StrategyThis strategy is a modification of the “R3 Strategy” from the book "High Probability ETF Trading" by Larry Connors and Cesar Alvarez. This RSI strategy is for a 1-day time-frame and has these 3 simple rules:
Criteria:
The price must be above the 200 day moving average.
The 2-period (day) RSI drops 3 days in a row.
The 2-period RSI must have been below 60 3 days ago and below 10 today.
Entry and Exit:
If the 3 rules above are true, then buy on the close of the current day.
Exit on the day's close when the RSI crosses above 70.
How it works :
The Strategy will buy when the buy conditions above are true. The strategy will sell when the RSI crosses above 70. The RSI period/length, and RSI entry/exit criteria thresholds have all been coded to be adjustable with inputs.
Plots :
Blue line = 200 Day EMA (Used as Entry Criteria)
Disclaimer: Open-source scripts I publish in the community are largely meant to spark ideas that can be used as building blocks for part of a more robust trade management strategy. If you would like to implement a version of any script, I would recommend making significant additions/modifications to the strategy & risk management functions. If you don’t know how to program in Pine, then hire a Pine-coder. We can help!
ETF 3-Day Reversion StrategyIntroduction: This strategy is a modification of the “3-day Mean Reversion Strategy” from the book "High Probability ETF Trading" by Larry Connors and Cesar Alvarez. In the book, the authors discuss a high-probability ETF mean reversion strategy for a 1-day time-frame with these simple rules:
The price must be above the 200 day SMA and below the 5 day SMA.
The low of today must be lower than the low of yesterday (must be true for 3 consecutive days)
The high of today must be lower than the high of yesterday (must be true for 3 consecutive days)
If the 3 rules above are true, then buy on the close of the current day.
Exit when the closing price crosses above the 5 day SMA.
In practice and in backtesting, I’ve found that the strategy consistently works better when using an EMA for the trend-line instead of an SMA. So, this script uses an EMA for the trend-line. I’ve also made the length of the exit EMA adjustable.
How it works:
The Strategy will buy when the buy conditions above are true. The strategy will sell when the closing price crosses over the Exit Moving Average
Plots:
Green line = Exit Moving Average (Default 5 Day EMA)
Blue line = 5 Day EMA (Used as Entry Criteria)
Disclaimer: Open-source scripts I publish in the community are largely meant to spark ideas that can be used as building blocks for part of a more robust trade management strategy. If you would like to implement a version of any script, I would recommend making significant additions/modifications to the strategy & risk management functions. If you don’t know how to program in Pine, then hire a Pine-coder. We can help!
Multi MA Trend Following Strategy TemplateTrend following is one of the better known technical trading strategies. But, which trend should you follow? Today I am sharing with the community a trend following template script that includes a selection of over 20 different trends / regressions. Some of these are in the Pine library, and some have been custom coded and contributed over time by the beloved Pine Coder community.
How it works:
This template will plot any of the 20+ trends that you can select in the settings. The strategy component will buy if the trend line is moving up, and will sell if it moves down. If the line is green that indicates that the trend is higher than the prior bar. If the line is red that indicates that the trend is lower than the prior bar. This script is different from many moving average scripts in that it follows the trend itself and doesn't look for a cross of multiple trends.
How to use it:
When wanting to trend follow an instrument, you can use this template to help identify what approach you might want to take and/or which indicator you might want to use. You can also modify the strategy as you see fit and make use of the 20+ incorporated indicators. Incorporate your trade and risk management strategy, or use it as an indicator.
Disclaimer: Open source scripts I publish in the community are largely meant to spark ideas that can be used as building blocks for part of a more robust trade management strategy. Even though this example script might beat buy and hold over the back-test time-frame, I wouldn't advise using it as a stand-alone strategy without significant additions/modifications to the strategy and risk management functions.
Low-High-Trend StrategyWhen asked what the key to successful investing was, Warren Buffet famously said “buy low, sell high.” Was he onto something? Today I am sharing with the community a simple “buy low, sell high” strategy with an optional trend filter and take-profit target. I’ve found that this strategy works well in a variety of markets but has a higher tendency to out-perform buy & hold in markets that are ranging sideways.
How it works:
The strategy tracks the highest and lowest price over the last X number of bars (you select the look-back period). The highest price line is plotted in green and the lowest price line is potted in red. If the price crosses over the lowest price in the last X number of bars, then a buy signal is generated. Exit options include a take-profit % or selling when the price crosses over the highest price in the last X amount of bars. I.e. “Buy low, sell high.” An EMA is also plotted as a blue trend line, and there is an option to only trade if the price is above the EMA trend line.
Disclaimer: Open source scripts I publish in the community are largely meant to spark ideas that can be used as building blocks for part of a more robust trade management strategy. Even though this example script beats buy and hold over the back-test time-frame, I wouldn't advise using it as a stand-alone strategy without significant additions/modifications to the strategy and risk management functions. In this example the script is being used as a medium-term strategy with just 10% leverage over account equity, a $25k start balance, and back-testing 10+ years. Modifiable slippage and commissions are included in the model.
Green line = Highest price in the look-back period
Red line = Lowest price in the look-back period
Blue line = EMA Trend
