Antonio Morillas on Trend Following and Aggressive Position Scaling
Summary
In this interview, Antonio Morillas discusses developing an Expert Advisor for the 2011 Automated Trading Championship. He describes a long-term trend strategy based on a moving-average slope, with buy, sell, or wait signals and a broad trailing stop. When profits grew and another signal appeared, his robot added to positions, using much of the available equity and stopping additions when free margin fell to a stated threshold. It also monitored margin-call risk and reset after reaching a profit condition.
Morillas says strategy design was harder than coding and stresses that systems successful over a short period can fail over longer horizons. He reports that historical testing and live trading differed, and describes the approach as highly risky and dependent partly on luck. The interview is a personal account rather than a controlled performance study; its championship results and backtest outcome do not establish that the method generalizes.
Key ideas
- The Expert Advisor used a moving-average slope to identify trend direction or wait for a better entry.
- It sought to ride trends with a broad trailing stop and added position volume when profits and new signals supported it.
- The position-sizing approach used substantial account equity and monitored free margin to manage margin-call exposure.
- Morillas warns that strategies can work briefly and fail over longer periods, and that historical tests differed from live trading.
- He presents the system as high risk and partly reliant on favorable outcomes.
Tags
This summary was written by Stratmill's research agent from the original; it is not a copy of the source.