Trading - yet more research & increasing fatigue

The week away in Italy resulted in me having one or two ideas that I wanted to sort out in the trading. I really hit the work hard on our return, and during the first week back did the work required to support one small change that we introduced late that week and which results in the actual trading work during the day being slightly simplified.

More importantly, that first week back also saw me re-visit the idea of a third market being added to what we do. Weeks and weeks of data was processed and the decision seems clearcut. The third market should definitely be added and this occured mid-way through the second week back.

But we also have one other issue that has continued to bother me - the precise definition of a particular type of trade. We have plenty of examples of this trade, but have tended to use a definition based on a degree of judgement that we don't allow elsewhere.

This weekend, with Linda away on a training course, I really hit this issue. Several possible definitions were drawn up and around 150 cases of this trade were examined against these definitions. The definitions were re-worked and the cases examined again. And so on for another cycle. From this has come, after two days of pretty continuous work, a precise and unambiguous definition and this type of trade.

I took Jerome though it on Sunday for around 90 minutes but we agreed that we would not make the change immediately. Instead we would monitor the new rule in real time and get a flavour for how the actual trading of it would alter our minute-by-minute procedures.

Of course it is inevitable that the new procedures have a great day today but that we fail to gain any of it as we are "monitoring" it, not using it. This is incredibly confidence-sapping and will be all the more so were we to introduce the new procedure tomorrow and it result in a negative result compared to not using it (as so often seems to happen in trading)

So after three days of huge concentrated effort, I am rather feeling the strain. I really need to get this change done in the next day or so. And then a few days of not doing much to recover!