SITREP 0824
What has happened, what is currently happening, and what is the next move. Quick and to the point.
Disclaimer: the following post is an organized representation of my research and project notes. It doesn’t represent any type of advice, financial or otherwise. Its purpose is to be informative and educational. Backtest results are based on historical data, not real-time data. There is no guarantee that these hypothetical results will continue in the future. Day trading is extremely risky, and I do not suggest running any of these strategies live.
August draws to a close and we find ourselves at the next SITREP already. I don't know how long it took you to get through this month but I swear I was just writing one of these articles a couple of days ago. This month (and many of the previous ones) flew by (for me). I used to HATE the days that never seemed end, the weeks that took months to get through and the years that took decades. Now, time just slips right past me like a fading memory. Where did it all go?
Just like last month, my goal with this post is to give a quick update on what was accomplished and what we plan to see in the future. I will touch on the newsletter goals for the coming month first, then the changes that were made to the Python tools, and lastly random updates and plans for the future.
If you read my last article, you may have noticed that it was free and not for paid subscribers. As a self-taught developer, I have always used and relied on my many open code projects to learn. This newsletter and coding project is my passion project and I don't want to have to keep it behind a paywall if I can help it. I currently put the majority of my articles behind a paywall but that is going to change.
Within the next week or so, I plan to go through my articles and convert many of my previous paid-only content into free content. I am doing this for a few reasons but the biggest reason is for transparency. I do not ever want to have sponsors or have to look at affiliate marketing for income with Hunt Gather Trade. Instead, I want to produce content that helps traders improve their trading craft and I want readers to pay for that content if they believe it is valuable.
So, I am going to start publishing more free content. Most of the free content will be related to the PQT library and creating a testing suite to help with trade research in Python. Strategy posts will still be locked and access to the GitHub will still be restricted to paid subscribers, but the initial code from my published articles will be available for everyone to view.
This will allow my paid content to focus on the parts that matter. Right now, that is at least 2 strategy posts a month. During the month of September, I plan on doing some research and trying to see if I can build a broad market (macro) report function in Python. The purpose of this will be to create a running macro-market report to help with planning trade entries during the week/day. This idea was inspired by the MKTCONTEXT newsletter here on Substack. I believe, like
, that knowing the broad market atmospherics is crucial to helping a trader plan trades. I also believe that there is probably a variation of this that can be done weekly and daily, tuned to help day traders get a broader picture of what type of trade to look for on that day.Once I have a minimal viable product (MVP), I will start to use the tool to create a weekly broad market report and eventually a daily/morning report. Since I am a futures trader, and I focus on trading equity futures, these reports will be tailored to that trader. These reports will only be available to paid subscribers.
Upcoming Articles: The only change from last update to this one is that I have dropped coding a multi-market indicator and opted instead to add some volume-based indicators to the library.
Volume-based Indicator
Strategy 11
Volume-based Indicator
Perhaps an article about building a macro-economic report function in Python?
Strategy 12
September SITREP
PyQuantTools (PQT) Updates/Changes: The pqt library got 4 new indicators added to it this month. There has also been some pretty heavy refactoring of the indicator report functions. Here is a breakdown of the changes (that I can recall). Of course, many of the changes can be seen in the repository.
4 Indicators added.
Report functions altered to use record arrays instead of data frames.
Some organization to math and stat functions.
Some indicator functions changed to return single values. This will likely get altered again.
Updates:
I have yet to dive into Sierra Chart. I am well behind on this. My SAHD responsibilities have increased and that forced me to drop one of my activities to adjust. That activity was trading for the month of August. Meaning I missed out on "the most hated rally". It sucks, but I think I have figured out the new routine, so I will be jumping back into in earnest this month.
I have started using the Norgate Data Python SDK to get historical data and not Yahoo!Finance. The next step is creating some functions that I can use continuously for formatting and organizing data before testing. This will speed up the research process a good bit.
I plan to start looking into the broad market report functions as early as next week. I think this would also be a good way to test out some machine-learning prediction models.
I think that's about it. Stick with me, readers. I am currently keeping this pace because it is maintainable, but my goal is to increase the frequency of published posts over the next few months and provide more value to the community.
The code for strategies and the custom functions/framework I use for strategy development in Python and NinjaScript can be found at the Hunt Gather Trade GitHub. This code repository will house all code related to articles and strategy development. If there are any paid subscribers without access, please contact me via e-mail. I do my best to invite members quickly after they subscribe. That being said, please try and make sure the e-mail you use with Substack is the e-mail associated with GitHub. It is difficult to track members otherwise.
Feel free to comment below or e-mail me if you need help with anything, wish to criticize, or have thoughts on improvements. Paid subscribers can access this code and more at the private HGT GitHub repo. As always, this newsletter represents refined versions of my research notes. That means these notes are plastic. There could be mistakes or better ways to accomplish what I am trying to do. Nothing is perfect, and I always look for ways to improve my techniques.