I have created a EA based on Captain Currency’s 3 Duck strategy.
The EA looks for the same entries as the manual strategy on the H4, H1 & M5 charts. Once found, it will open a pending order, which will be the number of pips your broker has set as your stop level for that currency pair, away from the current price.
It also sets a SL & TP of 30pips, and has a trailing SL which keeps the SL no more the 30pips away from the current price. So if you start with a SL of 30pips and the position moves to +20pips, your SL will have moved to 10pips away from your opening price. In this example, if the position starts to go against you, the SL will stay at 10pips from the open price.
I have been running the EA since 7th May but I was tweaking the trailing stop and got it fixed on 8th May, so fixed EA has been running since the 9th. You can see in myfxbook that from the 9th May with the improved trailing stoploss, performance has improved.
I have only been running the EA off a laptop which hasn’t been running overnight so far but I am going to be running it going forward on a VPS.
I am also setting the EA to only open trades from Monday morning @ 6am GMT onwards, and close all trades @ 5pm GMT on Friday until Monday morning again.
I plan to run the EA for another 2-3 weeks before going onto a live account.
Have you had a bad experience trading the 3 Ducks or do you think it will fail for some other reason?
Additional Info.
After reading some of your posts, particularly the one about MT4 and trailing stops, I’m going to ignore your comment. You clearly haven’t done your research.
Can you post your EA to download !! I already apply this strategy to my trade. Look like someone get the same ideal with me :3 I will test it with my demo account first
I already run 3 ducks manually for few weeks, using 2 methods, 1st method will be the candle cross the red line as entry , 2nd method will be using the previous low/high . I found out that the 2nd method is more profitable compare to the first one. I personally set 20 TP , 25 SL for 1st method , 15 TP 25 SL for 2nd method. The problem that I faced on 1st method is fake signal.
With your first method try waiting for the price to come back to the 60sma, maybe even cross and then when it re-cross’s again in the right direction enter your trade. Basically what I am saying is enter on a pullback.
Also be aware EURUSD can move 120 pips in a day but EURGBP will only make 50 pips, so your TP and SL will depend on the pair you are trading. If your entry point is to far away it may not be worth taking the trade as todays move will already be exhausted at that point.
I am building a EA to trade the 3 Ducks system and was doing some backtesting on 2013 data today which proved very interesting as my EA lost money on EURUSD, GBPUSD and AUDJPY. However, on EURJPY and USDJPY it made nearly 16 pips a trade on average.
What I found was that the problem was caused by volatility i.e. swings of 50 pips or more. To counteract this I added a volatility filter which was basically a 20 sma which had to have crossed the 60 sma before a trade could be entered and this worked well on the two Yen pairs. Also I think the Yen pairs tend to trend better anyway.
1 more thing, for EurUsd and GbpUsd , try to trade during the london open, from 10:00 GMT+3 until 17:00 GMT+3.
These time range are more profitable. Can try on it.
I do plan to backtest different times today and work on the position sizing algorithm. For a stop I use the 60 sma as my initial stop and then trail on a 48 period look back of the lows if I am long as I feel I need to trap as much of the move as I can.
The beauty of backtesting is that you can see periods of when the system fails and then go to that period and see what caused the problem. Violent volatility seems to be the main cause, so I am working on some form of active filter to not trade if it gets above a certain level.
This is also a high priority on my list for today.
I have been tweaking the EA and to reflect the changes I have opened a fresh demo account which can be found here - 3 Ducks EA System | Myfxbook
The same EA is running twice on the same account, one with a trailing SL, the other with a set SL. To filter between the two on myfxbook, I have assigned magic numbers, magic number 1 for the EA WITH NO trailing SL, and magic number 2 for the EA WITH the trailing SL.
