Consistent & Accurate Breakout

Trading Systems Free Forex Trading Systems
142

Hi All,

I have been trading Consistent Breakout (CB) and Midnight Trader (MT) live all week on a demo account and a live account. Midnight trader is almost identical to Consistent Breakout except that it places two pending orders one above the high and one below the low with no regard for market direction.

I started with a mix of both systems on both platforms but it became impossible to tell which was which on the charts, so I ended up only trading CB on the demo account with a fixed 0.1 lot size and trading MT on a live micro account using 1.5 % of £500 which equates to 0.8 – 0.1 lot size over the trading period.

Monday to Wednesday I had a few problems with slippage on the live account and managed to get the SL & TP values crossed a few times. On Tuesday I had to change the EA code on both EA’s as the slippage correction was not working properly. Also some of the trades only lasted a few seconds and others hours, wasn’t sure if it was real slippage or not.

Shortest today 3 sec usdjpy for a loss of 10 pips.
Longest Tuesday 12 hours 4 mins 55 sec eurusd for a gain of 24.8 pips.

Unfortunately I was still making tests and experimented with a few different SL & TP combination. However by Thursday night I had decided on TP=25 and SL=10 for a 2.5:1 ratio. Also by now I had increased the number of pairs I was trying to trade.

Overall for the week the live account was up £46.11 on an initial balance of £488.45, so a weekly gain of 9.44%.
The demo account was only up £18.89 for the week. As I was only trading a fixed lot size on the demo account its percentage gain is irrelevant.

By system MT was up £42.63 for the week and CB up £22.37. weekly total £65.00. MT will always make more trades than CB as it has no directional bias and places two trades on each pair every day.

CB will have periods of not trading when the price is between the weekly and monthly opens or the market gaps open.

MT will only never trade if the market gaps open or it can’t place a pending order because it is too close the the current market price.

CB trades. (0.1 fixed lot size)
Monday 5 trades. I had reversed the SL=5 and TP=10 on 3 by accident and all 3 were winners for £44.22 gain in my live account. The other 2 were also winners for £16.75 in the demo account. One trade with a SL=10 and TP=5 trade, but became SL=13.7 and TP=1.3 due to slippage.

Tuesday I messed up big time and used 1.5% of my £8,150 demo account with a TP=10 and SL=5 and so excluded these results as I was trying to use a similar lot size for all trades to make fair comparisons. The results were 2 trades one loss at -£122.31 and a win at £63.35.

Wednesday 4 trades all SL=10 and TP=25. Three losses -£17.63 and one win £13.85.

Thursday 3 trades all SL=10 and TP=25. Two losses -£11.71 and one win £15.97.

Friday 6 trades all SL=10 and TP=25. Six losses -£39.33

MT trades. (Mon/Tues TP=25 SL=20 Wed-Fri TP=25 and SL=10)
Monday 4 trades. Two losses -£17.59 and two gains £20.14.

Tuesday 5 trades. One loss -£11.02 and four wins £54.83.

Wednesday 7 trades. Six losses -£35.31 and one win £13.85.

Thursday 6 trades. One loss -£5.01 and five wins £52.02.

Friday 5 trades. All losses -£29.28.

Overall I am pleased with this weeks results, as both systems made money. I plan to leave them alone next week and get a better picture of the performance.

Problems with entry slippage seem to have been resolved, but I got stung by 4.8 pips on exit on just one trade on my demo account and 1.4, 0.4 and 0.1 on my live account today

My backtests indicate that CB and MT have the same performance but because MT trades twice as often it will always win twice as much or loss twice as much.

I will post the EA’s and their supporting file on this thread tomorrow as I want to wait until the markets close as I still have three pending orders open and don’t want to upset anything.

Regards, Trader9.

143

Hi All,

Here are the two EA’s called Archive.zip that I have been trading live all week and they go in the Experts folder of your MT4. The IncludeExample is placed in your MT4 includes folder and contains all the functions that the Ea’s may call.

External variables for the EA’s are for the most part self explanatory.
StopLoss = SL.
TakeProfit=TP.
PendingPips=pips above or below the last bar.
Slippage=the max slippage you will except on a trade.
MaxSpread=the current market spread has to be less than this for a trade to be placed.
EquityPercent=the % of you account used on a trade if DynamicLotSize=true.
FixedLotSize=the lot size if DynamicLotSize =false.
CheckOncePerBar=true. This enables only trading the new bar open.

Archive.zip (160 KB)IncludeExample.mqh.zip (3.17 KB)

Thats it check out on your demo account first so you get the hang of it then on a micro account with small amounts of money before betting the farm.

The name on the EA’s is Andrew Young as my EA’s reflect his EA building style taken from his excellent book "Expert Adviser Programming. 90% of the EA coding is mine and about 20% in the includes file. However I left his name on the files in case there were any copyright issues.

Enjoy, Trader9.

144

Hi again,

A quick note to all those that have not used an EA before. Your PC has to left on with MT4 open 24/7, you can use other applications.

I trade 24/7 using a dedicated windows based PC with Windows Updates switched off.

You can not allow Windows updates or virus checker updates to re-boot your PC. My PC has been on permantely now for 18 months. The original WD blue 400GB HD got to hot so I swapped it out for a Samsung 120GB solid state hard drive that is super fast and uses no power and stays cold.

I only use MT4, Excel and MS Access on this machine so 120GB is more than enough.

To prevent shutdowns due to power cuts I have a uninteruptable power supply (UPS) that will last for 12 hours and this also supplies the modem. The two are hard wired via a cat 5 cable to prevent any WiFi drop outs.

Any maintenance or updates can be done at the weekends when your broker servers are off line.

Thats it regards, Trader9.

145

Hi, Trader9.
Today I read all this thread and I installed your MT expert on 11 pairs, with Fixed lots = 0.01 on a demo account.
I’ll tell you about results. And you, what about your performances?
Thanks and best regards.

gynnex

146

Hi there, i read this yesterday and thought it sounds good. Tried it on my live account with 2 winners SL/TP

image-417684127.jpg454×700 24.5 KB

147

Hi gynexx

I am the impatient type and still looking for the holy grail.

I did trade MT on my live account on six pairs right up to the 19th Nov. But what I was finding was gaps on the Sunday night often prevented trades being placed on some pairs and the market not really moving in any one direction.

But the biggest problem is that the current market is going sideways a lot or there are a multiple inside days and numerous fake outs that are just tripping the pending order into a trade then reversing only to hit the stop.

The first week I made a 9+% profit on my account but since then I have only had a single win.

I have made 56 live trades of which 16 wins and 40 losses, so only a 40% win rate. And overall my account is now down 10%.

I always new this EA would make you a millionaire before the banking crisis but since 2011 the results have been poor. I had hoped the market would start to trend more and this EA would then start to be more profitable again.

All week I have been working on a new EA which takes a longer term view of the market and trades the H1, H4 and Daily timeframes on different pairs, dependant on the backtesting results.

I have now started trading this on my live account since 20th Nov but so far have had no completed trades.

This system I found in a book called “FOREX Patterns & Probabilities” by Ed Ponsi. It is designed to get you into most of the trend but keep you out of the market when it has no direction. It makes a lot of sense in todays markets so I am giving it a go. The system is called "The FX-ED technique.

Good luck with your trading the MT will work very well when the market co-operates.

Regards, Trader9.

148

Thanks
I waiting news about the new system and try to find that book.
It’s a technical problem with MT EA - not working until now (I will ask my broker call center).
Good luck!!

gynexx

149

Hi Trader9,
You mentioned your tests didnt work out up until the 19th with only 16 wins, was that based on your TP 25 and SL 10 ? or was that based on one of the options 1 or 2?

Would it not be better to take 5 or 7 pips and just increase the £ per pip?

Today i made 3 successful trades of £21 and one loss of £7 at £1 per pip, if that had been £10 per pip i could have had a net profit of £140 which seems far easier than trying to net 140 pips!

Anyone have any thought?

150

Hi Justinmih1

There are a number of issues when using my Midnight Trader EA (MT). None of which I fully appreciated before trading.

Backtesting showed fantastic results before the banking crisis of 2008/2009. However, performance seems to have worsened again since 2011.

I had hoped to hit a patch in the market where performance had improved/returned.

I had noticed the market had been bad lately, just look at AUDUSD for October 2014, the large mother candle on the 15th was followed by no less than eight inside days and a false break out on the 28th. This type of market action is a killer for this MT system as it needs good directional moves either above or below the previous days high or low. So I was hopeful that November would be better.

Initial other problems were gap openings on Sunday night which prevent a pending order being placed and a market open that is very close to yesterdays high or low preventing a pending order being placed, due to broker minimum distances from market price.
Also there is no slippage when backtesting. All of these things will effect the live performance.

I also noticed with live trading there was a lot of slippage sometimes when the pending order was triggered and became market order. I had to change some code to correct that after the event.

One extreme example was a SL=5 and TP=10 trade that became SL=13.7 and TP=1.3. A four pip slip from the pending price to the market price was not unusual.

I did build in a delay routine to avoid some of these problems. I realised that placing sixteen pending orders on eight different pairs at exactly midnight every night along with all the other broker server traffic may be a problem, so I added a delay routine to give the pairs I trade a unique number that would also delay each pending order request by one second difference from any other pair I was trading and not start placing orders until two minutes after midnight.

I spent the whole first week doing more backtests and analysing the live trades. I corrected the slippage on entry by reseting the SL and TP targets the correct distance apart but I can’t prevent a bad fill.

From watching hours of visual trading I was convinced that there had to be at least a ten pip stop. For instance I use what I call a System # and that has to be at least 100. For example if 50% of your trades are winners and your average win is twice your average loss i.e. a win lose ratio of 2:1. Then I multiply 50 x 2 = system # 100 and is worth trading.

Using SL=10 and TP=25 gave a backtested 51.17% win rate, an average win of £22.70 and an average loss of -£9.49 i.e. ratio 2.39:1, so system # is 122.4 so should work going forward.

This was calculated over 3,157 trades returning £22,297.00 in profits fixed 0.1 lot size.

Nothing below this came above a 100.

SL=15 and TP=30 was 102, but the problem now was could I make a TP=25 or more. Not in the current market I concluded.

You have to understand that the broker is going to make his spread, so even with a SL=10 it is really 10-spread or if you prefer to make seven pips and the spread is two the market has to move 9 pips in your favour.

If the spread is two pips a SL=7 and TP=7 trade is in reality a SL=5 and TP=9. Because the broker wants his two pips so you have to win 9 to get 7, or if you lose, your loss is 7, so you only have 5 pips of SL.

I don’t think you can win in the long run with only 7 pips profit. Using my system # with a SL=7 and a TP=7 ratio 1:1 you need a 100% win rate.

I would love you to prove me wrong. I agree going for 7 pips as instead of 25 is more achievable in fact I did test SL=7 and TP=7 and the system # was 64.55. Interestingly it had a 65.90% win rate with an average win of £6.76 and an average loss of -£6.81. £2,803 profit on 1,352 trades, so you never know but that is only £2.07 average per trade.

If you need any slight changes to this EA to make it more robust let me know and I will see what I can do.

Good trading next week.

Regards, Trader9.

151

Hi gynexx,

I assume you did place the MT trader EA in your Experts folder and the includes file in the Includes folder. Compiling the EA should prove everything is OK. Also you could try running it in the MT4 strategy tester. If you run it in visual mode, you should see it trading.

Regards, Trader9.

152

Well, you’ve done it anyway with your multiple 5000 word essays. Dude, go back to the beginning of this thread, read it all, try the system. Everything else belongs in another thread.

153

Thats funny, you asked who was trading this system and what were the results? I think I have gone some way to answer that question.

Regards, Trader9.

154

Then I believe that you have misunderstood my questions. It was really this simple: did anyone try THIS system LIVE? If so, what are your results. That’s it. I wasn’t asking about tweeks to the system, what people thought about it, if there was an EA, if people had improvements, or anything else. Pretty simple.
But that still has nothing to do with your extensive and excessive entries (just scroll back and look at the sheer volume of your entries) after saying you don’t want to hijack this thread.
Anyway, now I’M off topic, so I’ll end it here.

155

hi, what is the latest version on EA? does it trade based on the indicator? somebody did a back test?

156

hi, has this been backtested?

157

Hai… thanks for sharing this system. I’ve read about this ayatem a couple of times before and many people always underestimate the power of consistency in this system. I will try it on a demo account for a couple of months and then go live with 5000usd. Ine more thing that should be concidered is the trading fee. I think it is more important to concider the fees rather than the spread as it is alrdy included in the price.

Happy trading everyone. God bless us all

158

I just read the whole thread, not having seen it before, now that it’s been bumped. I strongly suspect that the reason this thread died out is that few people took Bobbillbrowne’s repeated, reality-based posts very seriously. He was right, though: there was the underlying basis of a solidly-based breakout method in this system, but quite a bit more work needed to be done.

My instincts about this system are that it could become genuinely profitable by incorporating an element of letting profits run: the [B]point[/B] with systems of this kind, and the reason for their use, is that [I]they can occasionally catch the start of a real trend and hit a runner[/I].

Messing about with this, with either a 10-pip SL and a 5-pip TP or with 7-pip SL’s and TP’s isn’t the way forward.

I’d be looking at much wider stops, much smaller position-sizes, and using either an ATR-multiple or a Donchian parameter to let the trades close, and I’d be expecting to find a way to make it both profitable and practicably tradable with one of those parameters or a combination of them. (I’d also be looking at improving the win-rate by using a “barrier” between the previous day’s high/low and the entry order, to avoid some of the many “fake-outs”.)

There’s a good underlying idea, here, based in reality. But a tradable system [I]as it’s presented here[/I] … not so much.

Edited to add: in my opinion, this is a promising [U]entry[/U] concept for a little system, not a little system in itself, which was doubtless why the thread died out after its initial flurry of enthusiasm (but that’s quite common, in trading forums: there’s often a little confusion between “potentially good systems” and “potentially good trade entry parameters”). :wink: