How do I paste a picture into this post? I want to share my strategy and backtesting results and get some help. I have done a screen print but it doesn’t seem to let me paste into here.
I have to say this post is pretty typical of my last few weeks. I am so close to making some money on forex but it keeps going wrong cos I can’t get the technology to work!!! It’s coming to something when you have to ask for help pasting a picture in a thread.
This is one frustrating journey!!
Got the picture to work!
So this strategy is what I call my daily trader. It’s so simple, I place a trade (in this case at 8am GMT on GBPUSD) with stop loss of 40 pips and take profit of 80 pips. I have other versions on other currency pairs. I have various ways of choosing the direction but the example I am backtesting above is to take the simple moving average of the last 35 minutes, if price is below sell, if price is above buy.
Wouldn’t mind some opinions on the strategy.
My thoughts are it works because of the risk reward ratio and how I have chosen the time of day to be when the market opens. I reckon the direction predictor is rubbish (tossing a coin may well work just as well). This however means lots of scope for improvement. I am going to look at other things like adding a long term trend filter.
Suggestions welcome.
I have so many problems with it from a backtesting perspective and from the actual implementation. I’m starting to get a bit hacked off. Need help but I’ll go in to the issues later. For now I would really welcome people’s thoughts on the strategy.
So the above was supposedly results from 2006 to 2014 but I can see from the results tab that it is only really the end of 2006.
So to get around it I have been backtesting other years. These results are supposed to be 25th Sep 13 to Sep 14 but I can see that it has only placed trades up until 2nd Jan 2014. So really it is just three months of trades.
Why can’t I get it to just backtest one long period of time? Do you think it must be a problem in my EA?
when comes to daily trading strategies, it means a short term trading style, oftenly scalping strategies. one a must have requirement for scalping strategy is, a fast execution broker (to preven price slip), a lower spread price so thre’s would be a faster profit, because the lower spread is means the lower cost of each order. and keep your strategies accuracy above 70%, too many trade with low accuracy means too many losing trade.
here’s my ea backtesting result :
using armada market price data, which is had a low spread ( at picture it shown 2 at 5 digits, means 0.2 spread on eurusd).
as result from true ecn price data feed, 95% accuracy achieved. lower spread 0.2, means lower cost for each trade, as result drawdown 3.18%.
if you had armada market platform installed PM me i will send you investor password of my trading account using the same EA used on the backtest result shown above.
My honest opinion: I have built about a hundred moving average strategies, and all I can say that they never work 
Market is just too complex to predict with MAs.
I also think that risk to reward ratio can’t be calculated from sl and tp, because if you have for example SL 1 pips and tp of a million pips that doesn’t mean you are about to get million pips every other trade. The bigger the pip value the “harder” it is to achieve.
Your system seems to just follow the chart of gbpusd, check the correlation between result and chart:
I have always used mt5 to build my EAs and have never had those problems with data missing from certain timeframes. But, of course brokers cannot save every data in history, for example they don’t have m1 data from the 70s, you have to use d1 if you want to go many years back…
And about ontario’s backtest, it sure looks okay but I would never make any decicions based on results from only 40 trades… It is possible to flip a coin and, using martingale for example, make 200 trades profitable
well it’s only using 3 months 2014.07.02 06:00 - 2014.10.23, reason is, the modeling quality on any demo account including armada market demo account feed i used, are would giving a low modelling quality. my past experience is, any kind of backtesting result are not exactly as is. there’s many market condition which lead a differ result when an EA running on live trading (market gap, widen spread, widen stop level, freeze level and many more).
hi 5astelija, nice catch on your comment regarding the trade result. but it’s not a martingle type system, or even a flip coin startegies. moving average is one of lagging indicator, oftenly repaint. if you having thousand strategies and only use on backtesting, then you will need to a forward test result too, sometimes a good BT result happen to be opposite when it traded live.
when your backtesting with metatrader you need to download as much of the history from your broker as you can. I use FXCM and they only have maybe 2 months of data at a time, probably not even that. Unless you keep the software running and it gathers all the data. You can try and download a data set from somewhere, but unless it’s coming from your broker you will get different results.
Like ontario said back testing results sometimes don’t pan out, personally , I have stopped back testing all together for the most part, I had an EA making millions with back testing using a scalping strategy, but when running live it just tanked most of the time hitting most of the SL’s. I prefer setting up a micro account and just running live. Plus in demo accounts sometimes factors are taken out, like slippage.
there’s many site which offer free tick data history for free.
i have collecting many data for pas 2 years. both downloaded and collect from mt4 chart, there’s also an ea who can help you out collecting data from your mt4 chart. BT are important but forward test are much important, for now i’m no longer put more time with backtest, and do forward test while enchance the setting.
Hi Alldayevery306,
Your FXCM MT4 account login will allow you to access our Trading Station Desktop platform where you can download years of free historical FXCM data for back testing. As you said, there are other sources you can use to load generic historical data on your MT4 platform.
You mentioned that you stopped back testing, but if you ever decide you need FXCM-specific data going back over 10 years to use on MT4, then another option to consider is the Historical Data Downloader from FXCMapps.com
