Switching from Paper Trading to Live Trading

[emretezel]

Hi Everyone,

I wanted to pick your brains on best practices when switching from paper trading to live trading.

In my current setup, in live-trading I am running an old version of pysystemtrade and enter trades manually. I do have some positions on live-trading.

On paper-trading, I am running latest code base fully automated with more instruments than current live-trading. There is an overlap on instruments.

I am happy with the market data in my paper-trading mongodb and don't want to completely start with a fresh db and import market data from CSV.

Here are the steps I am thinking any comments welcome.

1. Delete manually the following collections from mongodb using mongo shell: order stacks, historic orders, capital, futures positions (by contract and strategy), optimal positions
2. Close manually the positions on the IB broker you are no longer going to trade
3. update capital
4. Run balance trade from interactive order stack so that existing positions on broker is added to position collections in mongo db (is this correct?)
5. run systems, generate strategy orders
6. start all processes

Best,
Emre

[tgibson11]

My thoughts:

Instead of trying to use the paper trading database, I would probably export the historical contract price collections. Run_backups will do this for you. Then start with a fresh database. Import the historical contract price collections from CSV. There's a script for that in sysinit.

That would eliminate the need for steps 2 and 4 (if I understand you correctly).

Then just do step 6.

I'm not sure why you have steps 3 & 5, as if to run them manually, but then you have "6. start all processes", which should include those processes as well.

[tgibson11]

Run backups saves everything (as a mongo_dump, and also as CSV files), unless you have modified it to not do that.

[emretezel]

Thanks, I would then need to create roll calendars, multiple prices and adjusted prices all over again for every instrument in the database, which could be time consuming.

[tgibson11]

You can generate roll calendars from the existing multiple prices. Generating multiple and adjusted prices in the new database will happen automatically the first time you run the daily price updates. Doesn't take long at all.

[tgibson11]

You can generate roll calendars from the existing multiple prices

There is a script for this in sysinit.

[tgibson11]

Generating multiple and adjusted prices in the new database will happen automatically the first time you run the daily price updates

Actually, you might need to run a sysinit script to generate the multiple prices the first time (it's been a while since I've done this). But it's still not that difficult.

[tgibson11]

I do have some positions on live-trading.

Sorry...missed this part. Please disregard my previous reply.