Not sure that doriotcapital is still around, as s/he did not respond to my question, posted a week or so ago but after their initial flurry of posts.
Interesting back test you conducted, but not altogether surprising. As others have mentioned, ema crossover strategies are pretty common, although most do not limit themselves to one Pair, and the ‘check in ever four hours’ part was new to me, so this is an interesting thread.
I use emas pretty heavily in my own trading, and as others have said they suit a trending market well (if you’re a fan of them) but are (at least in my opinion) a waste of time in a ranging market. I do trade a ranging market, but I literally take the emas off the chart during those times as they just confuse the issue and don’t mean anything.
So OP might well be correct in saying that the strategy outlined in this thread has paid out over the year, even taking into account ranging periods, as long as one simply enters mechanically and does not miss too many setups. But this is presumably because it has paid well during trending periods, and the frequency and duration of the trends has offset any ranging lulls.
Perhaps a possible tweak could be simply to set some parameters to try to identify when the market is ranging, and then simply stop trading the strategy until resumption of trend? Although that is off the top of my head, and obviously would lead to losses/missed opportunities at each end of the range, which might throw out the overall results too far for such a measure to be worthwhile.
But a more important point I would make, which was behind my question of last week, is that following the SNB intervention will we see so much trending on this Pair in future? It is largely because of the sustained USD/CHF downtrend that the SNB intervened, after all. They have now pegged the value of CHF to the Euro, and have indicated the level at which they will defend their value against USD - so we will be likely to see far less trending from USD/CHF in future. All the indications are that the SNB will intervene in future, as often as they deem necessary. They certainly have deep enough pockets to do so.
So it might be that we have had the happy days of a trending USD/CHF and, therefore, that this strategy would need a more sophisticated tweak in order to deliver strong results going forwards.
But OP might have views on all of this, might have a sound argument in place for why the strategy will continue to work, which is why I asked my question about the SNB intervention last week, rather than going into all of this first.
But as you asked, and OP did not respond, this is the way that I am thinking. Trading should be simple, it is about repeating the same, simple thing and making money more often than not, so I would not dismiss this strategy out of court. However, I would want to explore better both a response to a ranging market, and the impact - if any - of the SNB intervention and the scope for repeats down the track.
Hope this helps - apologies for the fact that it is rather a stream of consciousness!
ST