More stellar results published; a couple of possible resolutions to the automation challenge

Navigation Trading published November results ... profitable again (*yawn*) 😃It's not as useful as it could be, as they're vague about the size of account that's required to take full advantage of their trading plan (minimum, of course; one could scale this as high as desired if one wanted to do that).

So Navigation Trading for November:

+ $2581 

Their blog gives details on the "closing only" strategy, so please take a look at that.

Their Iron Duck strategy paid off this past week, as the market went mostly straight up:

As for my "short oil" strategy, I have a more traditional report of results:

+25.2%

Note that this is on a small account: $5400 to start, and the trade I put in took about 60% of the buying power available. On a larger account I wouldn't have risked quite so much on this single strategy, but you can see its potential.

But also: I

• sold the 59 call
• sold the 49.5 put

This is a neutral trade, not a short one ... what I will do when I have more money in the account:

• sell 2 calls
• sell 1 put

This is still neutralish, but with short bias ... and would have made even more money than the trade I put on.

As for the automation strategy: I had lunch yesterday with an old friend who's been down the same track I've been working lately of trying to get the Interactive Brokers API to work.

One piece of data he had: he said that they found that the live back end behaved differently than the paper trading account for the API .. some trades worked on the live API that didn't work on the paper API. Sheesh ... this defeats the whole purpose of trying this with the paper API!

As for Vela Trading, I finally talked to them and they're hugely too expensive: $20K per year per market ... whatever that means. (I am fuzzy on CBOE vs CBOT vs the 1800 futures markets) ...

So it's going to be Interactive Brokers or maybe TastyWorks ... I applied for the beta test program for their API.

More details next week ...