Good (Saturday) Morning All!!!
Nick:
I'm sorry to hear about your VS trades. By the sound of things it IS what I expected though and that's why I've stayed away from it until now i.e. because the VS SAR adjusts itself according to the volatility I reckoned that it would be possible that if the price movement was JUST not enough to close above or below the VS SAR then the VS SAR could be 'gently nudged' away 'forever and a day' which could result in huge losses before getting a stop and reverse signal from the VS. I have been 'tracking' the VS on Gold on the four hour charts as I said and now have an entry to go long on Sunday night so I'm 'gonna give it a bash'. Maybe you DO have a point i.e. about the price movement on todays four hour charts being roughly the equivalent of the price movement on the daily charts back then. One other thing that I have noticed while 'tracking' the VS on the four hour Gold chart (and on the one hour chart of GBP/JPY) is that you DO NOT go long or short at market as he says to do in the book i.e. you place stop orders in exactly the same way as you would with the SI System i.e. yesterday on the one hour GBP/JPY chart the price closed below the VS SAR and the very next bar the price shot right back up again and closed above the VS SAR again. Had a person gone short at market when the bar closed below the VS SAR in this example the price movement in the very next hour would have resulted in a huge loss BUT had a person placed a stop order to go short 'a couple of ticks above the high or the low' of the signal bar then the order would not have been hit and you would either have been left in your current long trade if you were already long at that point OR you would NOT have got yourself into a trade that went immediately 'bad'. Of course (we have discussed this before) the other way is to actually reduce the constant and I'll wager that there probably is an 'ideal' setting for each instrument particular to a timeframe and THAT would be 'first prize'. The ONLY platform that I know of that would be able to perform backtests on this to find the 'ideal' setting is MT4 BUT I have not spent enough time with MT4 to know how to do it. I have an MT4 demo account open at Alpari so I will see what I can do BUT it's going to take some time because I have to create the VS for MT4 before I can do any backtesting and I have not done any MT4 scripting before so it's going to be a huge learning curve (I have not bothered with MT4 for the simple reason that as you know neither of my brokers are MT4 brokers). Unfortuanately neither GCI nor Deltastock have a 'backtest' feature on their platforms. Look: I DO believe that the concept of the VS is fantastic but it would appear that it's just one of those things where we need to do a bit more 'homework' and experimentation. I did at one stage remove the constant altogether i.e. made it equal to '1.00' which means that you are using ONLY the value of the ATR but I never got around to following a trade through from start to finish. You could try using a constant of '2.00' for example based on the 'logic' that sometimes people use 2 x ATR to place stop losses on other systems and that's ACTUALLY what the VS SAR represents i.e. it's a stop and reverse as opposed to just a stop. Again: the VS could possibly be THE MOST profitable system in the book but it DOES need some work done to it I think especially in light of what's now happening to you (Nick). There are just so many possibilites. On the other hand of course we have always known that there would be some losses along the way so maybe it's just 'bad luck' at the moment that your Gold trade did not work out and maybe when you stop and reverse as per the VS your loss will be covered and a nice 'big fat profit' will be the end result of the trade. Who knows. One thing is for sure though: without FANATICAL money management and enough capital I reckon that Wilder's systems (as good as they are) would also be able to 'wipe you out BIG TIME' if you're not careful because definitely the VS and SI System work on the premise that your account can handle HUGE swings and ranges before 'coming back to reality' as it were. Always bear that in mind.
As far as creating MT4 alerts is concerned: cannot help you right now on that one for the reasons mentioned above.
Boca:
I can't speak for Nick but I have all the systems 'coded' as indicators so I don't have to use Excel to calculate the ASI or the TISAR so it saves LOADS of time. Interestingly enough though: with the SI System I've started to be able to 'pick out' the HSP's and LSP's WITHOUT having to use my 'indicators'. I suppose it's like anything: sit and stare at the charts long enough and you HAVE to eventually 'get the picture'!!! The only thing I have found to be a problem is in the 'judging' of the TISAR i.e. sometimes it may APPEAR that the ASI has gone back on itself by 60 points but when you look at the ASI values it actually has NOT moved that far and I have found myself placing an erroneous order or two to stop and reverse where there should NOT have been one (fortuanately I've been able to pull the orders before they were executed). On the other hand (before I had finished 'coding' the systems into my platforms) I was using Excel no problem on the daily charts to calculate the ASI and did not have a 'time' problem. Are you sure that you're not trying to trade too many instruments at once??? While I doubt it because I figure you'd know better it needs a mention though.
As far as spreadsheets are concerned there is an easy answer for you: EMAIL ME (
dpaterso@forexbrokersonline.net)!!!