Too many fees and a new 'subscriber', guess who!

The last two days of the week were kind of neutral. No major losses nor gains. But we have noticed the algorithm selected too many stocks which were too cheap, and if I counted correctly we paid $114 in fees. That is too much, we can reduce fees to about $4/day if we trade more expensive stocks. Since we have not seen signifiant difference in results when removing all 'cheap' stocks, we will trade only stocks whose value is above $40, effective Monday. That would decrease our weekly fees to about $20/week.

And we have a new subscriber, guess who! Yes, we will dogfood our system using the recommended amount, putting our money where our mouth is! Our first day of trading was Friday, and we lost exactly $1. Does not match the exact results displayed on C2 because we manually trade. We wanted to use auto trade, but C2's support for IB (Interactive Brokers) is poor, requiring use of TraderStation or Trader68 to constantly run on your computer, which kind of sucks. But since IB just released their app for Android, now we can trade easily with our phones.

And here are our latest results.

6/24/11 9:30	SELL	800	AMD		6.98	6/24 15:55	6.89	Low	$56
6/24/11 9:30	BUY	100	A		49.23	6/24 15:55	48.47	Low	($78)
6/23/11 9:30	BUY	100	A		48.20	6/23 15:55	49.35	Low	$113
6/23/11 9:30	SELL	700	AMD		6.92	6/23 15:55	7.07	Low	($118)

First day without gains

Yesterday, our first subscriber used auto trading, set for 50% of the recommended amount ($10k), and he had $30 profit. The bad part: today we had 4 subscribers who run $50k, and they lost $500 :(. When I have seen how much they lost, I felt like a punch in the stomach, so naturally I eat 2 chocolate bars to help with the guilt.

Opened ET	B/S	#	Symbol		Price	Closed	Price	Risk	P/L
6/22/11 9:30	BUY	100	A		49.56	6/22 15:55	48.95	Low	($63)
6/22/11 9:30	SELL	600	MU		8.15	6/22 15:55	8.20	Low	($43)

Our subscribers pockets have been emptied a little. It was like a cold shower to remind us of real losses in trading. <sarcasm>But hey, our stats are doing great, our score was bumped to 935 and our system finally shows in the grid!</sarcasm>.

And some random stuff worth noting:

• Check this, we did ... $666 in less than 6 days. We should rename our system "The beast"!

Model Account Status

Started	$10,000
Buy Power	$10,666
Cash	$10,666
Equity	$0
Cumulative $	$666
Total System Equity	$10,666
Margined	$0
Open P/L	$0

• C2 fixed our first day stats, they do look into tickets and seem to be reasonable responsive.

• C2 forum can be both entertaining and informative.Check this: http://www.collective2.com/forum?when-i-suppose-to-get-subscriber-

• Our backtesting is 30% complete. We will produce stats soon based on hypothetical results of the last 48 months.

Yet another lucky day and 2 subscribers!

We were lucky again and we are profitable for fourth consecutive days! We made $60 today. I know it can't go forever, unfortunately according to our backtesting we are lucky if we make 6% in a month, but we did 6% (actually 7%, if we consider the 1% we lost because of issues with C2) in only 4 days. Nice!

	6/21/11 9:30	BUY	100	A		48.75	6/21 15:55	49.81	n/a	$104
	6/21/11 9:30	SELL	600	WFR		8.36	6/21 15:55	8.41	Low	($42)

And we got 2 subscribers today. We hope they will make profits too, so they will afford to pay fees in a few months.

Third's day results and Compliance Review of Promotional Material

Third day results were great again, both of our trades were green.

6/20/11 9:30	SELL	800	AMD		6.96	6/20 15:55	6.87	Low	$56
6/20/11 9:32	BUY	80	QCOM		52.53	6/20 15:55	53.39	Low	$67

Today orders were executes in time.

We received a "Compliance Review of Promotional Material" private message from C2 - this after having the description under review a while ago. Maybe they have two types of review. Now I am not sure what the first review was all about, but if there are still pending issues probably C2 should have not approved the description in the first place.

Anyway, not a big deal. The review was "The Long Description Text you submitted for the system Project Athena cannot be approved. Because we are members of the NFA and are regulated by the CFTC, text posted on our site needs to meet certain standards" then "Your text contains numerical performance claims. Due to NFA Regulation 2-29, no claim about *actual* performance can be included. Your system performance statistics on this Web site will need to speak for themselves." All fair.

Also we have noticed a button on the left of each trade, that lets you quickly file a ticket if the trade was not executed at the right price. Our first trades were executed at the right price but 15 minutes later losing about $100, so we filed two tickets.

C2's First weekly performance letter

The weekly performance letter is funny. C2 covered only one trading day (of the two I had so far), being explicit about the big loser "-0.2% in HPQ" and but being emotion free when talking about the +2% gain in MU. Hope the next week performance letter is less entertaining.


Here is the original weekly performance letter:

The week's highlights (and lowlights)

It was an uneventful week for Project Athena, which closed out its short position in ADVANCED MICRO DEVICES (symbol AMD) for a gain of +1.980% on system capital.Project Athena also had a big loser. It closed out its long position in HEWLETT-PACKARD CO (symbol HPQ) for a loss of 0.214% on system capital.

Start of Project Athena in Collective2.com

We started to put stock market predictions on Collective2.com (C2 is a independent third party reviewer of trading strategies).

http://www.collective2.com/cgi-perl/system62532506

So far we encountered one issue with C2: in the first day, 6/16/11, we placed two orders with "Park until time" 9:30 in the morning, but they got executed at 9:45am. Because of this issue we lost $100 in the stats. We did that day $300 (3%) so it is not that bad. Both of our trades were profitable in the first day. A great start!

6/16/11 9:45	BUY	200	HPQ		34.48	6/16 15:55	34.96	Low	$92
6/16/11 9:45	SELL	600	AMD		7.53	6/16 15:55	7.20	Low	$186

The next day, 6/17/11, we posted the trades for Market on Open, and the trades were effective at 9:32am. The second day we had 1% profit!

6/17/11 9:32	BUY	200	HPQ		35.22	6/17 15:55	35.11	Low	($26)
6/17/11 9:32	SELL	700	MU		7.99	6/17 15:55	7.82	Low	$105