The EasyLanguage Trading Community | Tradewithcode (2024)

The Background Story…

Hey, I’m Gianluca. For the last 20 years, I have been writing software code for a living. Now I am here writing words explaining the reason why tradewithcode.com exists.

Also, I’ve been trading on and off for the last 12 years. I wanted to make money quickly and thought I was very good at it.

Around March 2017, I bought $3K of Ethereum priced at $19 and sold it two months later, making a whopping 233% – what an idiot 😒. Patience wasn’t my best quality; the “quickly” part of why I was trading didn’t help either.

I had to find a way to keep my urge to tinker, change, and adjust my trades only to what was happening at that specific moment. The need to keep following my trading plan without me and my emotions being involved in the action, was a MUST.

Long story short. I started trading with code. I have been doing it for the last six years.

Takeaways

Emotional Trading: Many traders make impulsive decisions based on emotions, leading to significant losses. Emotional control and discipline are crucial for success.

Education is Key: A lack of knowledge and understanding of the market often results in poor decision-making. Continuous learning and seeking education in trading strategies, risk management, and market analysis are essential.

Risk Management: Not managing risk appropriately can result in substantial financial losses.

Realistic Expectations: Many traders enter the market with a gambling mentality and unrealistic hopes of quick profits. A long-term perspective and understanding that trading requires patience, strategy, and time is essential.

Community-Led Learning: Engaging with the tradewithcode.com community allows traders to share experiences, learn from one another, and get support. Being part of a community can fast-track the learning process, provide valuable insights, and reduce feelings of isolation often felt by solo traders.

I’ve chosen to learn EasyLanguage for coding my trading strategies. It looked simple and supported, with a forum where to ask questions behind it – and one of the people I respect and admire as a trader uses it for everything trading.

So let’s get into it. Here is what happened.

I bought a couple of training courses to understand the language’s gist and what to do with it. Somehow, it worked. I could write simple strategies and make them do something on the chart. I learned about Mean Reverting strategies and how to code them.

I still have the code for those strategies on my hard disk.

Here is a quick explanation of the code:

• The line at the top: buys the financial instruments (underline) next bar (on a daily chart) at the highest price of the day before,
• The line at the bottom is the exact opposite: sells the underline instruments next bar (daily) at the lowest price of the day before
• PS: don’t worry about the “limit” word for now. We’ll talk about it soon. I didn’t understand it either back then.

I picked the Forex market to test if the code was working as expected, and as I live in London (UK), I went for the British Pound and the Japanese Yen (no reason) currency pair – or “Guppy” in short 🤔.

Yes, currency pairs in the forex market have nicknames! Who knew?

Data-driven Discovery

Assuming that everybody knows or understands what a reversal movement is, I won’t dive deep into it, only to say that it’s a zig-zag movement with or without a trend.

Simplistic definition, but I hope that’ll do. Look at the shape of the movement below.

Below is the GBP/JPY Chart up to December 2018.

Do you see the same?

This is what I saw from left to right:

1. Significant uptrend at the beginning,
2. A massive downtrend in the middle,
3. Almost no trend at the end.
4. In all these three phases, reversal movements throughout.

Testing my simple reversal strategy would be a walk in the park.

Here it is.

Every white mark is a trade that the strategy has done in that timeframe (from January 2011 to December 2018), and the platform I used has done all the heavy lifting for me in seconds.

I use the TradeStation platform with the TradeStation Development Environment (TDE) to code with EasyLanguage (EL).

MultiCharts is another platform that correctly interprets and runs the EasyLanguage code structure and reserved words due to its PowerLanguage coding framework (as it is based on EL).

Now what? What do I do with it? Does it work? Will I be able to make money trading? Lots of questions.

It didn’t work.

The simulation result on a daily chart from 2011 to 2018 shows what I believed I saw on the chart was utterly wrong.

The trading system has lost money in the last four years, which aligns with points b) and c) when looking at the chart. Massive downtrend and flat direction at the end.

Mmmm, okay.

I decide to go nerdy and look into the data I have available from the platform, lots and lots of data from average winning trades to gross profit and info about profit factors and the number of trades.

8,527 trades in 4 years 😱 – can a human manage and handle that number of trades in such a short period? I doubt it. [the machine can]

Here is the problem.

This is not high-frequency trading, where trades are open and close in seconds, if not milliseconds. That way of trading is so far away and expensive for what I can do.

I kept digging deeper into the data.

This problem is a good learning exercise and understanding of what we are dealing with.

If I want to put those strategies live with real money, I need to have control of what’s going on, and I want to know the why of my strategies’ behaviour.

I spent days trying to make sense of the available data. The majority of the time was spent “scavenging” the internet and forums for good pieces of information that could give me answers to the million questions I had – a very challenging task.

For a beginner like me, it was like drinking from the firehose. Too much-unstructured information that made no sense, and it was painful trying to understand all of that alone.

Am I not the only one who has felt frustrated and overwhelmed while learning something new?

Is there a better way to learn all this, taking the frustration away?

As a software developer, I knew the drill and what to expect.

I had experience unpacking similar situations with my day job and started debugging the strategy components in isolation. Not everybody is a software developer. So what do we do? More on that soon.

As a result, I found lots of trades were entering and exiting within the same day (🚩red flag) and at the same price (another 🚩) within the data of my performance report.

The code I wrote was wrong! 😭🤬

My coded strategy was telling the machine to buy today – rather than sell for reversal – at yesterday’s highest price. The opposite was on the sell side of the command. I told the machine through code to do it – my fault.

The corrected code is below.

Did it work, then?

Is GBPJPY currency pair tradable with reversal strategies?

No. Reversal strategies don’t work on GBPJPY, was my finding.

Now what? Keep going, my friend.

I wrote another strategy to test if the nature of this currency pair has more of a trend-following or breakout nature. It is just the opposite of having a reversal behaviour. (I then later learned that it’s the nature of these currency pairs to be predominately breakout instead than reversal)

What do you think?

The equity curve is not pretty, but it goes up; we are not losing money at the end of the eight years. Even the number of trades comes down to less than 1800. It’s a start. It took time.

Now the actual work of strategy development can start.

We have some data-driven information to help us to define the context and narrow down what we are dealing with. No technical analysis, no underline fundamentals, and no macroeconomic research.

I was unlearning what I knew about trading and shifting to a new paradigm based on pure data. All were based on a financial instrument’s behaviour.

My view of the trading world has changed since then. I never looked back.

I could share at least fifteen more other experiences like this one, and every one of those has something in common:

1. I was alone in figuring out how to solve my problems – lots of trial and error involved. I asked a few questions on solving an issue with the platform and got an answer two years later 😱. Not very helpful.
2. The amount of information that I found online was staggering, daunting even. The tiny amount of what was actually valuable to me, was even more scary.
3. I had to put the work in to master it; I couldn’t just buy a similar strategy and run it. I wasn’t in control, which didn’t work for me.

Transforming Challenges into Opportunities with Tradewithcode.com Community.

As algorithmic trading newbies, we face challenges.

Stacking a few of them up…

1. the learning of a new programming language to perform trades with real money (that we don’t want to lose);
2. trusting the algorithm that we have built to do what we wanted it to do;
3. making sure that our trading theory/idea about the strategy has an edge (advantage) that we can “exploit”.

…are nothing we can master by reading a book or watching a youtube video.

It requires time, dedication, and a method that works for you. We can do it ourselves and go through the long and painful process, or perhaps here is an alternative??

You can actively be part of a community of people that can support and share knowledge with others along the way.

No matter where you are on this journey.

There is no guru here, just people willing to learn from one another and share taken notes and experiences while having each other’s back.

Tradewithcode.com empowers and enables individuals to create financial freedom by fusing trading and code.

Together.

This is a tremendous opportunity to jump-start on the right path to trading with code mastery and avoid at least the costly common mistakes other before you have made.

My commitment? I am here to set up and serve the community. Your active contribution will make it a success.

A Crazy Statistic to Wrap Things Up.

You have heard it already. 90% of traders lose money in the first year.

Not the statistic everybody likes to read.

I am not a fool. Trading the financial market is a sum zero game; one side of the trade wins while the other loses.

According to data compiled by VandaTrack Research, the average retail investor portfolio (this is us) has experienced a downturn of around 27% since November 2021, despite four double-digit bear market rallies and two significant rallies in tech stocks.

Emotional trading is a common reason for traders losing money, as the highly emotional nature of trading makes it challenging for many to remain objective and disciplined in the face of market volatility.

☝️ One of the many reasons to go automatic.

We won’t be able to remove the emotions from it. I wasn’t able to. We are humans, and we have emotions.

To control our emotions better, we need to build confidence in what we do and what we know through data-driven research, testing, debugging, discussions and building a comprehensive trading method that fits your need and your personality.

This community has been built with that in mind.

Also, you’ll have access to the following:

• live workshops with practical and actionable topics, online courses and discussion spaces to give you the best education about writing your strategies using EasyLanguage,
• a trading blueprint process to build confidence and address overtrading and lack of discipline,
• an in-depth risk and money management section to be ready to handle crazy market volatility and potential loss of money,
• A behind-the-scenes view of what it means to be an algo trader to have more aligned and realistic expectations and avoid a gambling mentality.

Now, in pure community spirit, it’s your time to share.

A Question For You.

Almost every blog post finishes with a call to action that offers readers a button to subscribe to something and offer any special promotions for events to new members.

I won’t do it here on this post – the first one.

I am asking you a question instead. Please use the comment section below to share your thoughts, or if you wish, contact me directly at gianluca@tradewithcode.com.

What would be the one thing you wish or wished to know to make your trading learning curve more gentle? What could our community do to support and help you better on that journey?