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In particular I would like to make the system a lot faster, since it will allow parameter searches to be carried out in a reasonable time. While Python is a great tool, it's one drawback is that it is relatively slow when compared to C/C++. Hence I will be carrying out a lot of profiling to try and improve the execution speed of both the backtest and the performance calculations.

So, for an investor who wants to trade $100,000, a 1% margin would mean that $1,000 needs to be deposited into the account. The remaining 99% is provided by the broker. No interest is paid directly on this borrowed amount, but if the investor does not close their position before the delivery date, it will have to be rolled over. In that case, interest may be charged depending on the investor's position (long or short) and the short-term interest rates of the underlying currencies.

Risk Management - Many "research" backtests completely ignore risk management. Unfortunately this is generally necessary for brevity in describing the rules of a strategy. In reality we -must- use a risk overlay when trading, otherwise it is extremely likely that we will suffer a substantial loss at some stage. This is not to say that risk management can prevent this entirely, but it certainly makes it less likely!


Robust Strategies - I have only demonstrated some simple random signal generating "toy" strategies to date. Now that we are beginning to create a reliable intraday forex trading system, we should start carrying out some more interesting strategies. Future diary entries will concentrate on strategies drawn from a mixture of "technical" indicators/filters as well as time series models and machine learning techniques.

GUI Control and Reporting - Right now the system is completely console/command line based. At the very least we will need some basic charting to display backtest results. A more sophisticated system will incorporate summary statistics of trades, strategy-level performance metrics as well as overall portfolio performance. This GUI could be implemented using a cross-platform windowing system such as Qt or Tkinter. It could also be presented using a web-based front-end, utilising a web-framework such as Django.

The "philosophy" of the forex trading system, as with the rest of the QuantStart site, is to try and mimic real-life trading as much as possible in our backtesting. This means including the details that are often excluded from more "research oriented" backtesting situations. Latency, server outages, automation, monitoring, realistic transaction costs will all be included within the models to give us a good idea of how well a strategy is likely to perform.
In addition, I've had some comments from people suggesting that they'd like to see more varied order types than the simple Market Order. For carrying out proper HFT strategies against OANDA we are going to need to use Limit Orders. This will probably require a reworking of how the system currently executes trades, but it will allow a much bigger universe of trading strategies to be carried out.
Let's presume that the market keeps on going against you. In this case, the broker will simply have no choice but to shut down all your losing positions. This limit is referred to as a stop out level. For example, when the stop out level is established at 5% by a broker, the trading platform will start closing your losing positions automatically if your margin level reaches 5%. It is important to note that it starts closing from the biggest losing position.