Last trading day of the year

Today was the last day of this year when one could actually enjoy making some money in the markets and normally what follows is 2 weeks of spending a part of the amount traders made in this year. If you ask me, these two weeks I would be able to spend everything I make in a year and not give a shit about it knowing that next year I would make it back. However since not a single one of you wise people seem officially interested in trading strategies I would have to do something else than spending during these two weeks when the markets are closed. The first thing that comes in to my head is to finish the mechanical strategy that I`ve started to create. I`m far from the finish and as I said its not something very appealing to me since I know I would not use it but it would be fun to see it in action. I`m currently in the phase of back testing and this phase is far from being done, actually I did not even start the real back test rather I`ve put some of the parts of my future back testing engine together. Working slowly , the software that I use (Amibroker) is capable of doing anything at the "cost" of not having something straightforward to follow -actually there is but its not useful for me. Which is a good thing, a straight forward path does not work in this business, you got to be creative and that takes time, time to think about ideas, time to think about coding the ideas and time to write the code and it all results in more work in verifying if the code is doing what you intended and so on so forth. For a good trading strategy to be developed, it would probably take months of testing, adjusting and double checking everything before real money could be put in to it and that only after you have algorithms that provide good market insights, which is also the explanation why an automated system that actually works is so hard to develop and so rare and I`m after the real thing just as in my discretionary trading so things are complicated enough. What I`m currently anxious to finish is the testing engine. The engine that can be quickly mold on any trading idea based on my trading algorithms and that is not so simple since the information provided by my trading algorithms and successfully interpreted in my discretionary trading is quite diverse and a lot and the machine needs more lines of code than I`m currently in the mood to write to properly interpret at least a part of it. After and if I manage to finish a testing engine that would at least partially satisfy me with its abilities I would have to feed it with information and do the actual back tests. The ideas of crunching the information`s are many and I do not expect to have the patience of testing and crunching more than a few of them before having a good automated strategy in place, as a matter a fact I was playing and testing some of the information in its most rudimentary form of trading and the results were quite good which makes me think that if I really put some work in to it the result would probably be an amazing automated trading system which I would not use. But having it does not hurt so the plan for this period of time its to do just that. In to what extent I would be able to finish it and what level of complexity it would have it remains to be seen. Other than that for now I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.