Portfolio Trader Not Displaying Positions

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TrendFirst
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Portfolio Trader Not Displaying Positions

Postby TrendFirst » 03 Feb 2017

Hello

I've been running Portfolio Trader for the first time this week in a paper trading account. My signals are very simple and run on daily bars, and the instrument list is all ETFs. So far I've figured out I need different orders than are used in backtesting (buy this bar at close obviously doesn't work when the market is closed), tweaked the Money Management settings to my liking, wrestled with and kinda figured out Money Management Signals, and several other housekeeping things. Making progress. And thanks to MC for a nice feature like Portfolio Trader, I think I am going to use it a lot.

I have several questions based on this weeks work:

1) When PT auto-trading is turned on, the Order and Position Tracker picks up and registers the positions in my IB paper trading account. It even shows the proper profit/loss figures. I assume it is communicating with the IB account and getting these numbers. But.....the Portfolio Real-time Auto Trading tab shows flat positions for everything. I've run the script with and without MarketPosition_at_Broker_for_the_Strategy, and it doesn't seem to make any difference. Do I have a setting wrong? Do I need other commands in the script? It's not a huge deal, but it doesn't seem right.

2) I ran all week with the backtesting orders, such as "Buy this bar at close". After the first day I confirmed that it wouldn't work to actually execute orders, but I wanted to first see the orders it was generating (and I was to busy/lazy to do the extra work). I have found suggestions in the forum for several ways to deal with this, and hopefully I can get to it this weekend. I ended up taking the rejected orders and manually opening positions the next day at the open. These positions were picked up by PT, and basically utilized all the capital in the account. But.....the signals continued to generate orders, which were of course rejected by IB just after market close. PT does not seem to be honoring the total capital in the account, it would have easily spent double that this week. I think I've told it to use no margin and 100% of capital, but I don't think that's what it's doing.

I chatted with Angelina earlier this week and based on that conversation used these settings in Portfolio Settings:

Exposure 100%
Max % of Capital at Risk per Position 100%
Initial Portfolio Capital $100k
Margin value 20%

Answers, comments and good-natured jabs welcome.

TrendFirst
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Re: Portfolio Trader Not Displaying Positions

Postby TrendFirst » 06 Feb 2017

Chatted with Alex today and got the first part of this solved.....Thanks Alex. He pointed me to the documentation and I was able to fix it. I'll share the link here in case anyone else has this issue. I had to go to Strategy Properties/Auto Trading tab and check the "Show Always" box.

https://www.multicharts.com/trading-sof ... r_Settings

Now it's working, but this brings up another question. Now when I start up Portfolio Trader, I get the dialog box "Assign the initial Market Position at the Broker" popping up - for every instrument. I have 20 instruments in my portfolio. Is there any way to "Select All" so that I don't have to click Apply for every instrument? If not, that would be a good thing to have.

TrendFirst
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Re: Portfolio Trader Not Displaying Positions

Postby TrendFirst » 06 Feb 2017

OK, please ignore my question about the "Assign the initial Market Position at the Broker" question. While messing around with Strategy Properties, I found that if I select "Do not show the Assign the Initial Market Position at the Broker" radio button (which I had not seen previously), and then the "Use the actual position at the broker" radio button, it does not display anything when you start up auto trading. And it displays all the positions properly.

I will retreat to my corner and reflect on the MC docs for a bit, and not bother anyone.....

TrendFirst
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Re: Portfolio Trader Not Displaying Positions

Postby TrendFirst » 09 Feb 2017

I've solved the PT not displaying positions issue, and I have modified the script with a 5 min data stream and it is now entering orders in the last 5 minutes of the market session rather than at the close. Also the script generated it's first exit order today, so it has it's first round trip trade for a paper profit!

But I still do not have #2 in my initial post figured out. In other words, how to fill out the "Portfolio Settings" tab. I've searched through the documentation, wiki, faq, etc and nowhere have I found any descriptions of the items in this tab.

I have chatted with MC support twice regarding Portfolio Settings parameters. Got different answers both times. Color me confused. Based on what I think I know now, "Margin Value %" isn't really margin (it seems to control the amount of capital allocated to each position), and the "Max % of Capital at Risk per Position" applies to the portfolio, not per position. Like I said, I find this confusing. The only way I am making progress on this is trial and error. Some good info in this topic link, but I need more info. viewtopic.php?t=47527

So.....I will continue my trial and error efforts......unless someone would like to interrupt this multi-post monologue with some clear answers.

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Angelina MultiСharts
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Re: Portfolio Trader Not Displaying Positions

Postby Angelina MultiСharts » 10 Feb 2017

Hello TrendFirst,

In Portfolio Trader Margin value set to 0 makes your Portfolio disregard the Money Management Settings and initial capital in particular.
With Margin value set to 100% the full cash value of the trade is should be taken from the initial capital.

Exposure % - the amount that we can risk in the whole portfolio.
Max % of Capital at Risk per Position % - the amount that we can risk upon separate positions in the portfolio.

TrendFirst
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Re: Portfolio Trader Not Displaying Positions

Postby TrendFirst » 19 Feb 2017

In the event that anyone else has issues with Portfolio Settings........please double click Signals in PT to bring up the Format Settings dialogue. Go to Properties and see what you have for the Trade Size/Percent of Equity setting. Set it to 100%. Then with Margin set at 100%, the Max % of Capital at Risk per Trade will actually work as described in the documentation.

Note that reducing the Margin below 100% will increase the capital allocated per trade, which I find counter-intuitive. Once you understand how all this works, there is a lot of flexibility in allocating capital in PT.


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