It’s been a full 12 months since I created a new live account and started publicly sharing the results of trading with the Icarus method.

Let’s take a look at how things have been coming along.

Here, we see that most of the gains were made in the first 7 months.

There was some under-performance in the last few months due to the market crash in late-Feb that led to some of the most volatile price swings I’ve ever had to trade through.

Thankfully, the account managed to make it to the end of 12 months with a positive return.

All in all, it achieved a net 22.76% gain with a 13.02% drawdown. The drawdown figure is larger than I would have liked, but given the market crash in February I suppose I should be glad the number isn’t twice as large.

Overall, I’m satisfied with the performance on this account, especially since it doesn’t take a lot of screen time to implement the Icarus method. Hopefully, price volatility will return to normal levels soon.

TF Strategy

Given how choppy the currency markets had been in May, there were virtually no trade-able opportunities with the TF strategy.

If this continues over the next few weeks, I’ll be shelving this strategy until the situation changes.

Algo Trading

Learning about algorithmic trading has broadened my view on how one might approach the markets.

In my usual (non algo) trading routine, I’m usually tuned in to the market sentiment. I spend time every week estimating the “mood” of the market by keeping up with the news and observing the ebb and flow of market prices.

With algo trading however, there’s no room for such subjective approximations. Everything works in black and white, which leaves out any appreciation of the “flavor” of the market.

The good thing about algo trading however, is that I can backtest multiple versions of a strategy over ten years of market price data, across 28 currency pairs, in less than a week (including the time it takes to code the algo).

What’s more, I can backtest combinations of different strategies simultaneously. This not only saves me a tremendous amount of time, it also allows me to approach the market in ways that I previously couldn’t have.

While algo trading isn’t great for detecting nuance (with my current understanding of it, at least), it opens up a number of trading paths I otherwise wouldn’t have access to.

Here are some of the backtest results of the strategies I’ve been working on:

Whether these results can be replicated in live trading, remains to be seen.

To that end, I’ve recently begun forward-testing a couple of algos on a demo account, and will be reporting on their results in future posts.

Is algo trading the future?

The more I think about it, the more it occurs to me that I should be dedicating more resources to algo trading.

It takes more time and effort to get started, but – assuming I can get the algos to be profitable – it’s a more scalable approach to trading with larger amounts of capital.

What’s your opinion of algo trading? Have you tried it? If not, would you like to?

Let me know your thoughts in the comments section below.