Kefx, There has been very little in the way of trends over the last month, but it is looking like some are starting to gain some traction.
Having read Curtis Faith’s ‘Way of the Turtle’ I am in the process of adding the Turtle’s 20 day breakout strategy, and I’m planning on changing my 2x ATR re-entry method to Faith’s 1/2x ATR (4 times) on each of the 55 and 20 day channel breakouts. Doing this I will not be re-entering on Conqueror, or Trend Analysis, as I’ll have plenty of trades open as is!
You definitely have good diversification using so many different strategies. Will be interesting to see how the 20/10 strategy goes - I wonder if it will create many more false entries; I recall that they used an entry filter based on previous winning/losing trade. I had been contemplating whether a MA crossover entry filter could be beneficial for these breakout strategies, but in the end I decided to just stick with Smiths 55/20, rather than play around with it. Although I had heard that more recently, Smith has possibly stopped using the rejection rule and last bar - have read this from people who attended his recent trading seminars… not sure if just for stocks, or for forex too.
I have setup my charts in a way that finding the entry signals is easy and doesn’t take more than 10-15 minutes. Like you I have a busy day job - I find time at the end of the day (Australian time as well). Hardest thing for me right now is keeping track of everything, all the stop orders, and open trades. Working on setting up a trading journal spreadsheet in excel to help with this. and limiting my self to 8 currency pairs + gold/silver.
Just wondering do you have any limit on total open positions - portfolio heat? I’m thinking about putting a cap. At the moment I have 10 open positions (I also use 1%). But with my 3 strategies and 10 possible trading currencies, I could potentially have 30 open positions = 30% portfolio heat.
I imagine with your trading of many more currencies and multiple strategies (plus re-entries), you could potentially rack a whole stack of open positions and large portfolio heat.
BabyPips getting taken over by an Australian contingent - just as it should be…
I do have a large stack or entries, and re-entries forming at the moment, even though I am yet to start doing the Turtle style quad entries on each trade. I currently have 22 open, but though each is at 1% account risk (pretty much) I have less than 10% risk at the moment because many of the stops have come past the entry price.
Yeah, Aussies everywhere!! Good thing for the forum, lol.
Have some decent floating profits from some recent trades, long EURUSD, GBPUSD, EURJPY, GBYJPY, gold and silver. Entries coming from all 3 different systems I’m using. Will see where these go over the next week or two.
One thing that I have noticed since switching to longer term trading is the effect of rollover rates. Mostly it is negligible and does not matter, but for certain crosses (eg. short AUD or NZD) it actually seems to be a fairly significant amount. For instance, currently short AUDJPY, this will cost 1.3 pips per day. Let’s say I held that for a 6 week period, it would be about 55 pips worth of interest payments. My stoploss for this trade was around 140 pips. Seems a bit unattractive.
I am considering not entering short trades for these two currencies. Bit of a shame really, since it would seem the upside is fairly limited for our Aussie dollar in the longer term
Kefx you can trade CFDs with the currencies and avoid the rollover rates, with GFT a CFD contract/lot = 10k lot. They have 24/7 text chat available from the website.
Kefx; The rollover is definitely one thing you have to watch out for, but so long as your trading is profitable I wouldn’t worry about it too much. My current average trade length is 12.8 days and my average profit is 51.8 pips, so I’d only be worried if my average trade got a lot longer, or my average pip gain shrank drastically.
I just view it as a cost of doing business (and my accountant agrees when doing my tax return) and have it as an entry into my profit and loss column in my spreadsheet.
After last night you, like I, would have to be pretty happy with your Gold and Silver long positions.
Hi Cmac132, I had a look at GFT. Do you trade live with them? It seems that even their CFD will attract a daily financing charge.
www(dot)gft(dot)com.au/Range-of-Markets/Market-Information-Sheets/CFD/Forex.aspx
Probably the only way you could avoid them would be to open an Islamic account - but there is no way I would put my money with these type of brokers.
Good point Cyco. If you are making good profits, then it wouldn’t be as much an issue, and you could claim these as a tax deduction. Shame the spread can’t be claimed… although if a broker existed that charged lower spread and small commission per trade, this may actually work out better for the profitable trader, from an after-tax point of view.
Yep, very happy with open trades at the moment, gold silver eur and gbp. Guess Draghi’s words helped somewhat…
I am finding some CFDs have a financing charge (Gold and Silver long) and some do not (WTI long).
An interview done with Courtney Smith done by Michael Covel of turtletrader.com:
Another month (I started trading Smith’s System 23rd Nov) has ended, and a very profitable one at that - my account balance is up over 100%. It did get higher, with a peak of 150% for the month last week, but it has contracted somewhat.
Number of trades _ Average pips/trade _ % winners _ Total pips
Conqueror __________ 113 ____________ 33.57 43.36 ____ 3,793.6
Channel (55 day)___ 96 ___________ 90.02 ___________36.46 ____ 8,642.1
Trend Analysis ________ 28 ___________ 146.77 __________ 64.29 ____ 4,109.6
Inside Days ____________ 8 ____________ -1.23 __________ 50 _________ -9.8
ATR Re-entries ________ 24 ____________ 30.7 ___________ 37.5 ______ 736.9
Trend Reversal _________ 9 ____________ 88.07 __________ 33.33 _____ 792.6
Channel (20 day) ______ 14 ____________ 16.6 ___________ 57.14 ______ 232.4
Totals:
Smith System ________ 245 ____________ 67.49 _________ 43.27 ____ 16,535.5
Current systems ______ 292 ____________ 62.66 _________ 43.15 ____ 18,297.4
I have 2044.4 pips in open positions, more than half of which in on a long Gold position, and I expect to typically bank about half the open pips.
I have a 0.76% daily gain, and 29.32% monthly gain since I started Smith’s systems.
I have a histogram of the daily gains, but for some reason it doesn’t want to attach - so I’ll have to try it later
Great results Cyco. Are you still using Ichimoku?
Kefx, I havn’t been using Ichimoku for some time to cut down the number of screen hours per day
What a great testimony, amazing work Cyco, and very very well done on sticking with it in the difficult months!
Excellent job reflecting discipline. Thanks for updates and your insights.
Your thread and your discipline have really inspired me about position trading Cyco. I’ve been reading up Smith’s book on these trend following strategies. With such a diverse amount of strategies though, it’s hard to believe you’ve shrunk down screen time to 40 minutes in the morning! I’ll be setting up trades in the morning too before work.
I’ve got a few questions about the charts and candles though - are your candles set at NY close or GMT? In the gft platform they seem to be set as GMT close by default. But in relation to the morning time in Perth I think GMT candles close at around 8am and NY candles close at around 12pm? (sorry, still very new to forex).
Also do your charts include the Sunday candle?
I’ve set up a couple 55/20 channel and 3 conquerors this morning. I found it much easier for the conquerors instead of having a line at the 10 and 40 day mark to plot them both as SMA’s and look at their relative position. See attached picture
The picture quality got downgraded hmm… anyway:
The brown line is 10sma. (the darker line closer to price)
The orange line is the 10sma with a displacement value of 10.00 (which moves it forward 10 periods/days) (same as the darker line but moved forward)
The dotted blue line is the 1sma with a displacement of 40.00 (which moves it forward 40 periods/days)
Let me know if I’ve set this up correctly. I think it all depends on the time and whether the Sunday candle is there or not though.
Thanks and good trading.
Thanks for this thread Cyco. I have been following your thread for a few months now, and I have enjoyed reading about your success. Perhaps it was mentioned, but I missed it…I wanted to ask something about inside days:
I see you only have an n of 8 for inside days. Surely there have been more than that? Did you stop trading them? Not profitable for you? What strategy did you use? Smith highlights a few variants in his book with the whole lemonade thing, etc.
Thanks for the info in advance!
Cyco,
Are u using default platform values for GFT or have changed it for their ADX indicator? Have you seen any difference between those and MT4 platform ADX values? Do let me know.
Thanks,
AKS
souljie; I like the offset SMAs - a very simple system, and won’t need the daily updating that the vertical lines do. I use the GFT default of midnight GMT for the close - so to try and get a bit more sleep in the morning I’m only trading Conqueror in the morning (at NY close) and doing all my other channel and trend trading in the afternoon, after work. Tends to be during the Euro/London session, but as the channels don’t move too fast it is generally not a problem.
Bavarious; I still trade inside days - but I have several issues with them: I’m poor at spotting them unless I am specifically looking for them, so I often see on the weekend how many I have missed in the last week! Also if I have an open trade in that pair already, or I have other stops in the vicinity I don’t take them, it just gets too confusing trying to keep track of all the lines.
AKS; I have ADX set to 14, but other than that I have not touched it. I have never compared it to a MT4 ADX indicator.
Here is another go at attaching the daily percentage change histogram.
I have removed the ‘0’ count as at 157 it totally dominates the chart and makes the rest very hard to see
AKS,
The standard ADX indicator with MT4 is NOT accurate…the best thing about MT4 however is the number of custom indicators available. What you need is an indicator called Wilders DMI Book…this indy is coded to use the parameters set out by Wilder, Google is your friend.
Cyco, great to see you still getting consistent results with your trading, its what its all about, well done!
Thanks for the reply Cyco.
I’ve got a couple other queries with the Conqueror stop loss maintenance as to how you interpret them.
Are you adjusting the stop every day with respect to the current ATR? Smith says not to ignore subsequent changes in ATR under adjusting the stop. That means if ATR increases we are widening the stop?
Also, say you adjust the stop loss down by 1/3 because one of the rules turned against you, if that rule goes back in your favour do you increase it to the full 2xATR stop loss again or just leave it as 2/3?
Cheers
