It uses candle sticks to determine when price has peaked or troughed and then goes the other way. It’s basically trading constantly during London and NY.
It adds to winners only when the candlestick says it should keep going up and cost averages when the candlestick says price is about to go up.
I use HA candles to smooth the price action and reduce entries, but it works on normal candles too.
It won’t work on any pair, it needs a pair that swings up and down even during trends. For a more volatile pair, you’d need to filter for only going with the trend. That was where this system started.
I’m sure there’s a way to ride the trend better and not get out as early, but everything I’ve tried so far results in holding bad positions too long more often than riding the big winners.
Adding to winners is a debatable subject. I can see lots of arguments either way.
This isn’t as much about adding to winners as it is taking every entry that says the next candle is going in your direction. Lots of small winners that should add up over time.
A slightly slower week, but still moving forwards with impressive results. Yesterday could have been much better if I’d intervened, but I decided to stick to the strategy and not interfere. Still an up day, but would have been close to 2% had I got closed all trades when I wanted to.
The system is probably on a break until Wednesday now, not sure if the markets are even open until then. Hope everybody has a great Christmas and New Year.
Yesterday I wanted to test how accurate my system is vs how much cost averaging is the main factor. I got some fairly interesting results.
Making a robot that only buys and trades every candle that says buy with cost averaging until it becomes profitable and the same with selling. Both algorithms combine to give more profit than the main system, although neither are as profitable individually.
The most interesting part was that even in a strong downtrend for EURUSD this summer, the buy bot still made very good returns. Less than half the selling one, but it was a downtrend after all. It also didn’t have a period going outside my maximum position count.
I know that the automated system makes small losses without cost averaging, but I was surprised that on some instruments the entry is almost insignificant to making a profit if you cost average this way.
Interesting week for the system. On Tuesday afternoon the market made a non meandering move that continued for about 30 hours. This meant I had a large position in a fairly big drawdown. I was incredibly tempted to suck it up and take the loss then run again without the loser stopping progress. But I decided to let the system play out as long as the unrealised loss was smaller than profits so far.
Ultimately I ran out of margin when the market slowed down, so I did manually intervene and close profitable positions every time it looked like price would head back up. This gave a few days of small profits and yesterday the retracement came that brought the losses back down.
I think adding that into the code when margin is low will help, but ctrader doesn’t use margin in backtests so it’s difficult to simulate.
Annoyingly, Thursday and Friday were perfect days for this system so if it wasn’t stuck trying to handle a loser, it’d have been a very good week. But up 1.95% is still good and I learnt how to handle potentially account busting moves.
I’ll add pictures later, can’t do it on the phone but myfxbook above has the details.
On that link of VPS servers, it talks about a program called cAlgo which has lower memory requirements. Is that still a thing, or is it now integrated into desktop only where you need 2GB?
A little confusing that the cTrader website mentions something that I can’t seem to find anywhere
@chesterjohn When cTrader was first released cAlgo (Now Automate) was a separate program/app to the cTrader platform itself… So was cTrader Copy… Analyse didn’t exist at this stage.
If you see the way cTrader package installs on your HDD… For reasons only known to Spotware… You will see that cAlgo and cTrader are still in separate directories.
So in summary… cAlgo has been integrated into the cTrader Platform as the Automate component.
Hope this answers your question.
To protect my algo’s from sudden news or other fundamental events… I use the spread to stop the logic continuing to trade…
ie: Say you have an algo running on SpotCrude (USOil)… My spread is normally around the 3 pip mark… If spread increases to say 3.8 - 4.8 the cBot will not open any positions until spread has returned to the average value…
Thanks for the reply. I figured that they’d integrated it but just wondered if it stills existed and works, which seems not.
What I was looking for is a way to run using less memory than the desktop app. It seems ctrader cli is the way to go. It means some coding changes needed so I can interact with it without the GUI, but that’s possible when I get time to figure out how.
The Christmas period hasn’t been great for this system. The moves have been stronger than normal which has meant the identification of when price pivots has been resulting in larger drawdowns than normal. The system has still been profitable with a reasonable number, but if the performance starts having the risk to reward ratio that I’ve seen the last 2 weeks, then I’ll be pulling the plug for a while. But I suspect this was just the timing of Christmas combined with a changing of sentiment from the fed. Friday behaved more like normal and was the best day in this period.
2.27% for the first 4 days of the year is still very good performance. It’s just the drawdown on one of those days was far bigger. Now I’m at a significant profit, I’m letting the system do its thing, but if equity goes down to deposits then that’s when I’ll hit the stop button. Ultimately, I know a big loss will come, I’m just looking to come out up. The big question is when do I start taking money out of the account?
I put before that the big question is when do I start taking money out of the account. Right now the account size is about right for the account to be able to deal with anything. I’m trading the smallest position size possible on my spreadbetting account, so logically the account would have to approximately double before I double the position size. But I could double a bit earlier if the markets settle to how they were before Christmas. Either way, this is a long haul so there’s no rush.
But this got me fantasizing about what it would take for me to make enough money to live solely from this. Not realistic, just fantasy. I’d want to make more money than I currently do after tax to justify this, so I’m going with my position size and therefore account needs to be about 10 times the size that it currently is.
Increasing the position size along with the account shows that it would take approximately 10 months to reach a level where I could live off the profits on the assumption that returns continue in the way they would have over the last 4 years.
Then there’s the insane unreality of letting position size grow to the maximum amount. Which returns millions per year, but there’s so much wrong with that scenario that it’s not worth considering.
So to answer my original question, to significantly supplement my income, I’d need to let the account grow to about £10K - £15k, then withdraw regularly from above this amount. I guess that’s the challenge. Can this system achieve that without blowing up in my face first.
After about 20 days of small profits, the market has finally decided to do something I wanted. I was on the verge of crying foul at my broker the way it’s suddenly stopped working
The system has sprung back into life the last week. I was happy with the small returns, but today the market has moved about as perfectly as possible for my strategy to pivot trade. I’ve got a huge temptation to increase the position size because there hasn’t been a large drawdown in weeks, but trying to keep my discipline and wait until it reaches the planned balance.
I’ve been considering modifying the system to have a different exit criteria. It gets bigger wins by running them for longer, but when there’s a lot of open positions, it risks getting caught out by moves against me. I think I’ll keep it as is for now, but it might be an option for different market conditions in the future…
Been super busy at work, but still running this bot, I call it Bob.
I was wanting to increase the position sizes in February, but the account wasn’t quite as big as I’d like so I put a little more in. Completely forgot that NFP was on Friday or I’d have waited until after that, but very glad I didn’t. NFP bought about 10% gain on the account and gave by far the best day so far.
The market has gone more volatile the last week or two which has seen sitting in drawdown for longer periods, but my method of cost averaging at these times has meant it’s been more profitable although this bit is not automated yet. I essentially try to close profitable positions if running out of margin to bank that profit and allow more profit to come if the market continues going against me.
Performance has been very good in February although I had to do a lot of manual intervention. It got into buy mode at the top of the chart a couple of weeks ago and then price moved down. I let it continue the cost averaging method, but it used up all the margin so I had to start closing profitable ones when price peaked. The bot has a mode to do this, but it’s not as good as me doing it manually, and I managed to get a real good run of profit despite the trade entry being poor. Eventually I closed all the buy positions with a loss because I didn’t have the time to be checking up on it all day, that’s where the down move on the chart is. Then it’s back in fully automated mode and doing well. This goes to show that this strategy can make money even when price goes against you.
I saw surprising results with your scalper robot, brother! Very nice automatic trading, no need to monitor all the time. I myself prefer manual trading until now. Because we don’t have a solid trading robot yet.
Gain surpassed 100% this week, almost exactly 3 months after inception. Not sure how this is calculated because it’s more than 100% of initial deposits, although extra was added.
Position sizes are increased to triple the starting size. It’s earlier than the backtest results suggested, but that’s because I added extra, right about on track otherwise. If this carries on, withdrawals should start about May and have withdrawn all deposits by June. We’ll see…
Can’t post a screenshot from my phone, but you can see the current progress here
Really need to sort out the VPS. it’s a pain in the butt turning it on and off with work travelling, especially when working away.
Getting 100% gain is certainly very enjoyable, so you can continue to maintain consistency. Automatic trading is very simple without much emotion involved. However, it still has to be maintained properly so that consistency remains good. Next week, hopefully we will get bigger gains.
