No changes to the systems today.

Daily still showing A's, the rest have disappeared.

One of the ES Bear long's took an initial entry at 4008.50, previously both were showing a long.

A late rally off Nvidia earnings prevented the DVDS Short that matt closed manually last week from exiting. If you are still holding you might consider taking profits.

I have included the stats for the Bear Long that triggered

Yes, it will be a full position.

ES doesn't close until 5pm EST.

SPY system has already been confirmed.

The SPY Bear Long took an initial entry at 398.63, here are the attached stats.

ES Bear long Systems still showing an entry that will be confirmed after 5pm EST.

ES DVDS Short that Matt manually closed last week still showing an exit for a healthy profit.

Matt is currently traveling, it's screen shot based, I do not have the vertical capacity to update it, nor does he on his laptop, I will try and stitch some screenshots together later after the close to update it.

See his post from this morning with details and a link to the spreadsheets on google:

https://breakpointtrades.com/blog/post/392152/

Both ES Bear long systems are now showing a first entry, we will only follow the more profitable one, Bear Long is also now showing a trade on SPY, and the DVDS Short Matt manually closed last week is currently showing an exit for a healthy profit.

Trigger price on Bear Long for ES is 4008.75 or below. At 4009 or above there is no trade.

You can find the current system charts and stats here:

https://breakpointtrades.com/blog/post/392114/

The trades are triggered off ES, but yeah we trade MES.

After talking to Matt, he wants to take half a position on ES, so we're now long an initial entry with 1 contract at 4005.75, and will be tracking it as a website trade.

I was using the definition of swing trade that I am familiar with which is, "Swing trading refers to the practice of trying to profit from market swings of a minimum of 1 day and as long as several weeks."

Which is roughly the time frames most of our systems trade for. I guess you could classify these as bounce trades as well, but I suspect our options traders are more likely to be closely managing their positions than the majority of people just waiting on email alerts. They're the ones who want to know at the exact close if a system has signaled, which is impractical from the administrative side.

https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/trading-investing/trading/swing-trading-setups

All of the trades are reversion to mean trades except for the breakout long, which means that the vast majority are counter trend trades. The only really trend following stuff on the website is the KISS section, breakout longs, and updates from the newsletters. Steve and Matt do a pretty good job talking about where they think the market is trending at the moment.

We've done a lot to reduce drawdown on the systems over the last 3 years to make them less painful, but they are still going to be buying when the market is selling, and selling when the market is buying.

Next bar open would be with entries on the open of the following trading day. We're currently finding a mix as to whether or not performance is better or worse using this approach, for subsequent entries we're actually generating limit orders, but the initial entry is just always at the open of the subsequent bar.

Our current approach is the best guess trade 20 - 15 minutes before the close, with confirmation at the close, the message I put out at around 3:40 EST saying the STrap would go to the wire was because the trade was turning off and on every few seconds, price needed to be below about 399.39, we obviously got there at the close, but leading into the close it wasn't clear we would.

We've played around some with artificial trading days, ie: excluding the last 30 minutes or rolling that data into the next day but performance has been worse than doing next bar open, and it doesn't address a core complaint of some of our users, ie: having to be around at the market close to execute trades. I suspect most swing traders will prefer the next bar open approach, while a minority of day traders will be annoyed by it.

There is a lower profitability version of STrap taking a long on ES at the close in 15 minutes, if Matt were here he might take a half position.

I've included the stats for you guys if you're interested in taking the trade, and Matt will provide updates on it, but we're not taking it for the website.

System signals have always been confirmed at the close, I let you guys know 20 minutes before the close that at least one of the trades was going long today.

Unfortunately I had problems with tradestation, which happens on huge volume days, and had to reboot my machine about 5 minutes after the close.

I realize it's not perfect, and it's why we're developing a next bar open system, but it is what it is, and is outside of my control and is a non trivial part of why we stopped providing options signals in the first place.

Yeah frustratingly it now looks like the trade might close out positively, although it's still holding as of today.

Goes to show that there is tough psychology on the system design side of things too, we've tried hard to limit drawdown on these systems because we feel a lot of pressure from the community when a trade is going against the market, but it's also often not the best way to maximize alpha.

I know Matt is planning to revisit that trade in the future to make it a little less painful to sit through, but if it ends up exiting as a positive trade we'll be kicking ourselves for bowing to pressure. 

Both the QE BTS system and STrap system have triggered an initial entry on SPY at 399.09 at the close.

I've included their stats below, with the QE System being the first set of stats.

Dealing with infamous EOD tradestation issues, will try and have the update out shortly.