This TSLA trading strategy would have given a 1062% return over 2.1 years vs. a buy-hold return of 86% for the same period. The strategy is based on buying and selling when the stock price rises above specific thresholds. The buy side keyed off the day’s open price; the buy and cover signal appeared when the price rose 4.27% above the open price of the day, and the buy is at the signal price, so you would have to set up stop orders for the buy and the cover.

The sell and short signals came along when the price rose 2.82% above the previous day’s high, and the sell actions occured at the subsequent open using market orders. Every day you would have to recalculate the buy or sell point to find the new buy or sell price. SignalSolver will re-calculate the prices each time you update the prices from the web or enter the latest prices manually. Here is the list of trades.

The equity curve shows the return of $10,000 over time for the algorithm (yell0w) and buy-hold (gray):

This algorithm spent 64% of its time short. Looking at the signals at the bottom of the chart, you may notice that they are fairly thin, and there are 21 dual signal days, 28 buy signal days and 36 sell signal days. There is occasional reinforcement of signals, OK but not great.

From the performance table you can see that the long side of the algorithm worked much harder than the short side (the leftmost two columns), but the combination (always being long or short) gave annualized return of 223%.

Lets look at sensitivity to the buy and sell parameters.

The dotted line is buy-hold annualized return at 34.45%. The colored lines are the return for different values of buy and sell percentage in different time periods. The blue line is the overall performance for the whole 2.1 year period (528 daily data points), the other green, red, yellow and white lines each represent one quarter of the data (which I call a quartus). As you move the buy or sell point out of the region, you can see that some quartus’s would have been lossy. The worst performing quartus for the chosen buy and sell points was the most recent one, 02/19/15 to 08/26/15, and the annualized return was 161%. The algorithm was found by instructing SignalSolver to find strategies with the best minimum quartus return.

If you map the return for a large range of buy and sell points you notice that the overall surface is a little peaky.

While there is a fair amount of space under the peaks, there are also steep cliffs in the vicinity, so if the buy and sell points were to move around over time you would be in trouble. For that reason I would not expect such high gains in the future.

I will be paper trading this strategy for a while and will post the results from time to time.

Andrew

The above analysis has been corrected 12/29/15 for a bug in the short side return.

Update 12/29/2015:

Update Oct 21st 2016

TSLA Trading Strategy (Daily) Update Oct 21st 2016

TSLA Trading Strategy (Daily) Update Oct 21st 2016

Frequent reversals characterize this strategy for Omeros Corporation

This OMER trading strategy is signal rich; there were 174 dual signal days out of the 528 days in the analysis. Added to that 151 buy signal only days and 39 sell signal only days and you get 364 signal days, of which 250 were actionable signals leading to trades, of which only 146 were good. Still, all that activity led to a theoretical $311,341 profit from $10K invested over the 2 year period from 7/12/13 to 8/14/15.

The algorithm itself is a bit of an odd one with buys triggering off price changes from the open price and sells triggering off price changes from the previous day’s open price. Is it just a fluke that it has worked so consistently? In its worst quartus (132 trading days in this case) this algorithm returned 250% annualized or 93% actual return.

You can see from the list of trades and the equity chart that there were several periods of daily reversals from long to short and back again. You might think that ignoring dual signals would work better, but it doesn’t–it leads to an 80% reduction in returns.

This strategy was found by optimizing for minimum quartus returns and then doing some minor tweaking by hand, which is quite easy to do since the Scan charts in Signalsolver are interactive. I just moved the buy and sell points to areas away where there were lower returns. I’m just going to post the charts, if you need help interpreting them I would refer you to yesterday’s AAPL post where I discuss the methodology in detail.

By the way, OMER took off today gapping up 70% or so. I was working on it before that so this change doesn’t show on the data, but the proceeds would have jumped to $929,212. It would be cheating to track this strategy knowing it had already added 70%, so I’m not planning on doing so.

Andrew

Equity curve for the OMER trading strategy showing $545,057 in returns over a 2 year period.

OMER Daily algorithm–current and pending trades, if you are looking for synchronization info.

Follow up 12/29/2015

This algorithm peaked and then failed dramatically immediately after the 70% gap up on Aug 18th, very shortly after publication. Here is the 528 day equity curve:

Here are the stats:

Buy-hold would have been a much better option. For a profit, one solution was a buy point of 2.0% and a sell point of 4.4%, which would have given a return of $13,964 over the 94 days. Unfortunately, these parameter changes don’t appear to be predictable.

Andrew

In contrast to yesterday’s TNA trading strategy optimized for low drawdown, this one is optimized for minimum quartus annual return, a new feature of SignalSolver. A quartus is one quarter of the data, 132 days in this instance, and the minimum return was 99% annualized for the most recent quartus Feb 3 to Aug 11th 2015.

You can see how quartus annualized returns fluctuate with buy/sell parameters from the lifetime graphs. Note that this algorithm took both long and short positions–when you were not long, you were short. I have no idea how or why this kind of algorithm works–you would think the buy and sell signals are so similar that it would give more random returns, but you can see from the surface plot that the results are positive for most of the parameter space.

The “user defined price” was found by averaging the previous day’s high, the previous day’s low and the current day’s open price. Buying and selling was done at the daily close or next day’s open.

List of trades in .xlsx format:  TNA-D Trades

Update 8/26/2015

Trades since the original backtest endpoint on 8/11/2015:

Update 12/30/2015

The above analyses have been corrected for an error in the short-side returns. Overall gain of the original erroneous post was $104,971

Here are the updates for 12/30/15. The algorithm peaked around Oct 13th and now appears to be failing:

Update 10/20/2016

A bit of an improvement:

TNA Trading Strategy Update Oct 2016 Equity