Ok, so I'm brand new to this wacky thing and trying to learn the ropes. Spent a great deal of the last week studying money management... it seems that this game is played a lot like blackjack. You pick a strategy that yields a small but present statistical advantage and then play that out over as many hands as possible... playing for the law of averages to bring in the returns. Losses come, wins come, it's all about repeating a known optimized strategy as often as possible and not letting a "gambler's instinct" get involved.
Anyway based on recommendations I signed up with an oanda account. Might not have been the best move, but it's at least a start. I'm not going to throw in too much money ($1k, maybe $2k) to start, but once I've got a bigger clue I'll add in more of my discretionary funds.
So the question thus comes "if I need a strategy that yields a small statistical advantage" then "how do I find one?" I'm not one to just trust what others are doing (and I've read a lot of theory, laff), I need to know how often something is working, any indications of higher risk (and how much higher), etc. So based on what I've read there's this thing called "backtesting" that people do. I've got some programming experience, but I don't see myself spending hours trying to write a custom app. Writing a small testing script would be fine tho.
So thus... how the heck do I do this? I have no clue which software to get, which platforms to test on, whether or not I can use the oanda tick data, or whether I should get another feed (doesn't seem like it matters much where the source is as long as it's reliable).
It would be nice if I could take this and also automate trades, seems that a person having to manually pick trades would only interfere with the performance of things, but I suspect that's a ways out still.
So one step at a time... how do I back test? Any way to compare an indicator or 2 in the same run, or will I need a billion IF statements to pull it off? What software is good for this? What does it take to get that software? Would I need to open up (and fund?) yet another account to do it?
Anyway based on recommendations I signed up with an oanda account. Might not have been the best move, but it's at least a start. I'm not going to throw in too much money ($1k, maybe $2k) to start, but once I've got a bigger clue I'll add in more of my discretionary funds.
So the question thus comes "if I need a strategy that yields a small statistical advantage" then "how do I find one?" I'm not one to just trust what others are doing (and I've read a lot of theory, laff), I need to know how often something is working, any indications of higher risk (and how much higher), etc. So based on what I've read there's this thing called "backtesting" that people do. I've got some programming experience, but I don't see myself spending hours trying to write a custom app. Writing a small testing script would be fine tho.
So thus... how the heck do I do this? I have no clue which software to get, which platforms to test on, whether or not I can use the oanda tick data, or whether I should get another feed (doesn't seem like it matters much where the source is as long as it's reliable).
It would be nice if I could take this and also automate trades, seems that a person having to manually pick trades would only interfere with the performance of things, but I suspect that's a ways out still.
So one step at a time... how do I back test? Any way to compare an indicator or 2 in the same run, or will I need a billion IF statements to pull it off? What software is good for this? What does it take to get that software? Would I need to open up (and fund?) yet another account to do it?
