Last friday I experimented a bit with short strategies.
Without thinking too much about it, I turned the ranking system that I use for active trading from ‘higher better’ to ‘lower better’. Just to see what that would bring me.
Looking at my Manage page today, I thought it was quite unusual that I had so many transactions to be filled for the coming week.
After inspecting the companies a bit more, I realised that I ended up buying the exact oppositte of what i wanted to buy for my long only strategy.
How do I deal with this now?
I cancelled the orders already, but of course I would prefer to rebalance and reconstitute again, but this time in the usual way - with the ranking system being higher better as usual.
One of those things you do wrong only once.
Sidenote: please don’t tell anyone about this, surely people will remind me of my silly mistake for years to come.
EDIT: What I tried is to change back the ranking to ‘higher is better’ and update the ranks in the underlying live strategy. However, the live strategy still shows the stocks with ‘lower is better’ in the holdings tab. Do I have to wait a day?
Currently it’s way too easy to break or mess up a strategy that you are deploying with real money.
We have talked about a way to lock down the components of a system, but it’s quite involved to do it 100% right. For example you could be referencing a second ranking system with Rating(“other ranking system”), so we need to parse your rules. Also to find which custom formulas are used we need to parse all the rules.
However we could just start somewhere. It’s better to do something rather than nothing. For example when you “lock down” a strategy we prevent you from editing a ranking system and the universe.
Is it possible to do something like revisions? Where a ranking system and universe can be “released” and you have to revise or save it to make a change?
Wrapping up a portfolio’s universe, ranker, variables into a standalone, inseparable bundle may be an approach. Conceptually, something like a zip file with copies of all the resources that get unzip into a work space and then run.
I usually make many revisions of base ranking systems and that leads to many very similar file names floating around. Managing all those names is a pain. I save the older ones just in case I want to roll-back a change. Having some kind of RCS would help control the chaos. But that chaos may be unique to my workflow.
Your file system works pretty well for me. Anything funded is in an active folder. If I want to mess with it I copy whatever (port or ranking system) and move it to a different file and rename it —play.
It is human thought. I don’t blame anyone beside myself, but I have used the filter and entered a rank name not paying attention to which folder I was in (filtering to an active rating system).
But I would never have a reason to intentionally mess around with an active anything.
