Midnight Marauder

a surprise strategy that saved a month

We all approach trading differently, and all of us change our view of trading and how to trade throughout our careers, whether those careers are long or short. Some walk away, some adapt. I chose to adapt. Those thoughts deserve a separate article, which will come shortly. For this writing, I’m committed to using an automated strategy for my trading into the foreseeable future.

One such strategy I use is titled Midnight Marauder. (I enjoy naming my strategies) It’s a strategy designed for trading the NQ during an overnight session from 0100 to 0600. I use a highly customizable template provided by DTB Traders. This article will discuss some of the optimization settings without discussing specific proprietary settings that may be used. It is a paid subscription, so we will skip over those items.

Working backwards, here are the results I arrived at through optimization. It’s a 30-day lookback. I start my optimizations with a 1-year lookback, then bring them forward. NinjaTrader will load my entire lookback period, so I keep it shorter when trading. When trading, I only load a whole week’s worth of data, always starting from Sunday.

Another good strategy. I start by examining the number of trades for the lookback period (164 trades, averaging 6.09 per day)—a profit factor of 21.81% and a Percent Profitable of 88.41%. The dollar figures represent a drawdown of $461.80, with a gross loss of $ 2,090.96 and a Net profit of $43,507.40.

I love equity curves looking like this. They are challenging to obtain and require considerable effort to optimize.

You may notice that this strategy only trades four days a week. That is by design to fit my new trading paradigm. I’m leaving Thursday and Friday as strategy-building days. I don’t plan on doing any or minimal discretionary trading. Those are pretty solid trading day results.

With this lookback period, we can examine and compare the actual results since I began trading this strategy on October 13th. Fortunately, it seems to be holding to the plan into November.

I will cry foul on October 14th and 21st. A problem with NinjaTrader caused issues with the order entry system, which prevented trading from ending at the specified dollar value. One day continued to be a loss, while the other continued to yield greater profits. The 16th did not trade because I forgot to start the strategy. These values include commissions.

I mentioned this is a strategy that saved a month. During October, I only ran three strategies daily. In a normal month, I could run seven or so a day. Losing the Midnight Rider strategy file tripped me up a bit, as I spent too much time trying to recreate it. Not all of my strategies have performed as well as Midnight Marauder so far, but some do! We will talk about the Christmas Fund (GC) soon - the joy of a metals future turning into a meme stock.

I said I would cover the strategy development. I will cover that tomorrow. I’ve had a few things come up that I need to address today. I apologize, but I will address it tomorrow.

My agenda for articles also includes discussing the publication of results. I don’t care for it, but it seems to be the norm on the futures side of trading.

Lunch Money (MNQ - evenings 1835 - 2200) and Midnight Rider (MNQ 0100 - 0600) were okay. I didn’t trade much discretionarily in October. As I said, Midnight Marauder saved my month.

Enjoy, trade well.