UWTI Archives - SignalSolver

Oil had a rocky year, lets look at how our multi-algorithm approach worked on an oil related stock, UWTI (VelocityShares 3x Long Crude Oil ETN). In this post, I'm just going to summarize the results:

Briefly, the method used is to run SignalSolver to find trading systems which worked for a 250 day period, then run these trading system against the data immediately following the 250 day period to see how they performed. This is known as out-of-sample testing as none of this following data is included in the optimizations.

The methodology is identical to my previous posts. If you need more details you can download the results spreadsheets, or download SignalSolver and run the optimizations yourself. I have omitted the result for the Return optimization on the PB band this time because I think we have established that the Figure of Merit optimizations usually work better. They do here.

The idea is behind multi-algorithms is that using a single algorithm is risky, but running multiple algorithms at once averages out your risk and leads to more consistent and more efficient (since you are sometimes out of the market) results. Here, we averaged over the top 4 algorithms for each period.

You can see that the multi-algorithmic approach gave very good results for the 25 day (5 weeks of trading) and 50 day runs. If you look at the buy-hold profile you can see that you would have had a rough time guessing long and short entry and exits to get the same results. Not saying it couldn't be done, but using the multi-algorithmic approach would have given nice returns for UWTI with absolutely zero guesswork. And its based on sound numerical analysis, not hunches and tweets. Is anybody listening? 🙂

This UWTI trading strategy would have returned $676,147 for $10K outlay over a 2 year period. It was a very straightforward strategy with simple maintainence, once a day you would have put in either market orders to cover and buy or stop orders to sell and short before the open. This is another result discovered by optimizing minimum quartus returns, a SignalSolver backest optimization technique. A quartus is one-fourth of the data and we look for algorithms which give the best minimum return of all four quartus results. In this case it was 206% annualized for the period June 2013 to Jan 2014. It happened to be the fourth best result found for this particular scan of 500 algorithms but I chose it because the drawdown was significantly better than for the other 3 (30.7% vs 55% for short-hold).

Results for this strategy were not consistent, most of the gains were made in the period June 2014 to Feb 2015.