Understand, Expect, Evaluate

We work under the principles of understanding to become successful in automated trading. Trading profitably in the long term is very difficult and I believe it can only be achieved through a true understanding of the trading systems used. We will always be working towards a true understanding of our systems to bring us the confidence necessary to trade them successfuly. We will know exactly what to expect from our trading systems and we'll be able to know how these expectations evolve with time. Working like this enables us to eliminate the common fear of systems "not working anymore" due to changes in market conditions. If a system starts to become too risky due to new market conditions we will know for certain due to the fact that we know the exact risk profile from our extensive analysis of all the traded tecniques being used.

Sound Trading System Development

We develop trading systems with sound trading tactics which are able to adapt against changes in market conditions and generate profitable results in the long run. Trading systems are developed with long term profitability in mind. We are not interested in systems that may work for just a few months or years, we am interested in systems for the long term. We do not evaluate Martingales, grid systems or other systems which use unsound trading tactics with uncapped market exposures.

Extensive Evaluation

In order to know if systems fulfill our profitability criteria we need to evaluate them extensively. This is why in Asirikuy all trading systems are evaluated with back and live testing to ensure that they work correctly. All Asirikuy systems have 26 year profitable back-tests using forex-historical data as well as 12 year profitable back-tests using our Alpari data. Our systems are also optimized only through the 2000-2009 period on Alpari data (using a special technique we developed called "rank analysis") and they are then out of sample tested on 1986-2012 data from forex-historical. This procedure tests both robustness and broker feed dependency at the same time.

Most importantly, in Asirikuy we are very concerned about the in-depth understanding of our trading strategies so all systems are evaluated extensively in order to understand what their statistical characteristics are. In-depth analysis using Monte Carlo simulations and other statistical methods are made in order to gain a very good idea of how the system has performed in the past and what its statistical boundaries for the future might be. In Asirikuy we put a lot of effort into understanding how systems trade and what risk we might get into when trading them. The most important thing for us is to preserve capital and to have a good idea of what the risk limits of our different strategies might be so doing in-depth analysis of strategies is one of our most important concerns.

Beyond this we also develop methods to evaluate trading portfolios and the interactions between different trading strategies so that we can get a very good idea of how different systems might interact when being run on the same account. We perform different types of portfolio simulations involving different types of money management as well as careful risk measurements which have been developed through our years of trading experience in order to give us a better idea of what the overall portfolio risk might be. As with individual systems our main goal is to get accurate pictures of short/medium/long term profit and risk targets, making the execution of trading systems on live accounts much easier from a psychological point of view (since the statistical limits of our strategies and portfolios are well known).