Introduction
My name is Markus Lenzing. I was born and raised near Osnabrück, Germany. Selling computers (i386SX, remember that?) and writing software provided income during my time at the university where I studied physics. Since software and computers are also quite interesting, my studies took longer than usual to say the least. In those days, I wrote software for computer graphics and many other things, partly for money but mostly out of interest. This was also the time when I came into contact with embedded systems. Following that, I worked in electronics development (also embedded systems) and presently support customers in the automotive industry with respect to the design and development of electronic control units for passenger cars. This includes systems that are safety-critical and could cause severe harm if they fail during use.
When I first came into contact with a computer and its BASIC interpreter, I realized that this is a machine of limited performance but unlimited possibilities. I am convinced that the Internet, data centers, and mobile device have brought many changes to our lives but this is only a tiny glimpse of what is yet to come. Let‘s hope that social networking not only helps us to share holiday photos, but also to tame the powers leveraged by information technology in a way that will benefit everyone.
Brief background about your trading
With the above said, my first experiences with trading was well before 2000. Back then, I was not aware of the existence of brokers and software APIs for trading. So I resorted to parsing quotes off of financial websites and entering trades manually using online banking. This did not work and I stopped further efforts and eventually lost sight of trading altogether.
In 2016, I came across a German platform that offered a simple automation system for real-time trading. So I subscribed and implemented a few simple systems. I wasn’t satisfied with the flexibility and started to look for more powerful platforms. This finally brought me into contact with forex brokers and MT4. At that time I developed my manual trading skills based mainly on price action. Also, I did a lot of theoretical and automated analysis of the market behaviour itself, candlestick patterns, noise, cycles and other things. However, manual trading was not an option for me and I started to look into automated trading in more detail.
What you learnt at Trade View
The In-House Systems Building Workshop taught me a lot about financial instruments, risk and trading, and also gave me an idea of the mindset and approach applied by Trade View. The scientific and pragmatic way employed by the team and the friendly personal contact appealed to me. Besides the basics provided in the Intermediate Workshop, I found the videos very useful and learned a lot about trading systems from these. This really helped me to gain confidence in my own activities and goals.
With my background on software development, I used to do a lot of manual implementation in MQL4. However, doing things in EALab turned out to be really quick and efficient. Now I use manual coding for the implementation of indicators and do all my EAs with EALab.
An eye opener has been portfolio analysis with Analyser. I did exhaustive optimization runs on my EAs, and selected EA parameter sets that looked robust and offered acceptable draw downs. For these, I ran the back-tests and added all reports to Analyser. The results shown in Analyser are very helpful to check a variety of aspects. Personally, I use it to check the resulting overall projected equity curve and also if each EA provides a reasonable share in the entire generated profit.
Please share some of your successes and failures as a trader
One obstacle I had to overcome while learning to trade surely was over-excitement. I got too involved with each individual trade and wasn’t willing to accept losing trades. This caused me losses on several occasions. My worst experience in this regard was trying to short US indices while they went from one all time high to the next over several month. So I learned from that as well. By now, I‘m able to collect some pips in discretionary trading, mostly with level-based trading. However, currently I‘m keeping my fingers off of manual trading and leave the trades to my EAs.
What are your future goals?
Over the last weeks and months, automated trading really worked for me. Firstly, one focus for the near future is to slowly build up a pool of external capital to trade and improve the trading systems and their robustness. The optimization features of the trading platform are tempting to squeeze maximum profit out of the trading systems, but my personal preference is to look for robustness, diversification, and low draw down. The yield of my portfolio already exceeds anything that any bank in Europe offers by far. Secondly, I plan to continue my research into AI systems. I imagine these are not going to be magic wants that cry out “Buy!” or “Sell!” with infallibility, but additions to already existing systems. Let‘s see how that works out!
