witsnpips just so you know I believe martingales can and do work. It is greed that kills that system and undercapitalisation. I personally don’t care for it but I know several people who are very successful with it. People say this or that about martingales but they don’t reealize that with a large enough account and a small enough starting point they simply can’t lose period.
If you choose to flame me so be it I don’t care because I know reality. Even if you only had a 1% chance of winning eventually you would recover your losses. it is a matter of probabilty fact!
Nevertheless I would say Photon is far better, does not in any way shape or form use a martingale and has proven itself that after a long period of time when a loss finally occurs it is so minimal that who really cares.
The best part of it all is in a year when I tell you I told you so, not just to you but to all the naysayers that believe a robot cannot succeed. I am seriously going to provbe you wrong and when I do I don’t want to hear you got lucky or it never happens. Alot of people on this forum, whom I have great respect for, feel that ea trading is a waste of time and cannot succeed. I started this thread to publically test an ea so that the world will see you can have reasonable expectancy from using a good ea.
Does automated trading beat discretionary trading? No not if you are a good trader but a decent robot will beat a bad trader any day off the week.
erikskenne Im glad to hear you find success with b3. Honestly I cannot use it on a real account. the dd is just to much if I want meaningful gain. Having said that I tested it privatley for months and months and it produced on average over 20% and never blew my account. I had a 50% equity stop in place and it got hit once, had I not had that the trade would have worked out.
Bottom line if you are profiting and are comfortable than great for you.
Watch Photon with us the links on the first page are real links and real forward testing. The first one is on a live money account the others are on demo. You can see how she’s doing anytime you want before you commit any real money if you ever feel so inclined to do so.
btw witsnpips after just shy of 2 months live forward testing and after the worst losing streak ever she is still up almost 20% monthly so you tell me.
I think the issue here is entirely down to mathematical expectancy. If you have a negative or zero expectancy system, you are mathematically guarenteed to lose with martingale. Its not a matter of if, its a matter of when.
There’s no arguments at all about that, its reality. A large account and small risk will delay the inevitable failure, but unless theres an edge, you’ll fail eventually.
So what you are saying is that no matter what unless you have a greater than 50% chance of winning eventually you will lose.
I’m saying that the system would in fact be a useless waste of time but you are assured to break even at some point.
Lets say your lot size is .01 and you were Bill Gates with unlimited amounts of money.
Even if you lost 100 times in a row that 101 time you would make all your money back + .01
Am I wrong? I could be and I feel martingale is very dangerous with improper money management. Also forget risking 2% its way to high with that type system.
Anyway maybe you are right. I personally don’t like risking so much to earn so little, thats why I’m glad Photon doesn’t use any martingale.
It’s not about the “chance of winning,” in the sense of how many trades are profitable; it’s about the expectancy, which is how much you will win or lose per trade over the long run.
For example, if your system loses 10 pips 90% of the time, but wins 150 pips on average the other 10% of the time, this is how you calculate expectancy:
(90 * -10 + 10 * 150) / 100 = +6 pips per trade
[Note: for simplicity, I am assuming constant-sized investments, which means no compounding, but the underlying principle doesn’t change if you calculate your expectancy in dollars, euros, etc.]
On the other hand, lots of systems win most of the time, but lose badly when they lose. For example, if you win 10 pips per winning trade and win 95% of your trades, but lose 300 pips per losing trade (the other 5%), then your expectancy looks like this:
(95 * 10 + 5 * -300) / 100 = -5.5 pips per trade
In the second example, you might have very long stretches of great profitability, which would be wiped out once per month on average by a huge loss.
If your expectancy is positive, it doesn’t matter how often you lose; you will make money in the long run. If your expectancy is negative, it doesn’t matter how often you win; you will lose money in the long run.
I think that your description is basically right, but that’s the problem with martingale-type systems. Google “martingale system” and you will see what I mean.
Martingale systems are based on the statistical certainty that a fair coin will eventually come up the way you bet on it. It is just as certain, however, that an arbitrarily long losing streak will occur at some point. That is, if you play long enough, you can be sure you will lose 10 times in a row, or 20, or 100, or whatever number you pick. Thus, no matter how small your initial bet or how deep your pockets, without a significant edge, you will eventually run out of money.
Even until then, you will face enormous swings, because your risk/reward ratio gets to be outrageous. In the second half of the example you gave, the risk/reward ratio got as high as 16. Half the time, it would have gone up to at least 32, a quarter of the time it would go to 64, and so on. Eventually, that will wipe you out, even though everything might seem great for a while.
Anyway, if Photon isn’t using a Martingale system for its money management, this is neither here nor there for purposes of your thread. It sounds like your trading with Photon so far has had a positive expectancy, so maybe none of this discussion about expectancy is a problem. I would love to know what happens during a really bad stretch for Photon, though.
I belive we should keep this thread to Photon, It seemed to be a intresting EA.
However I have burnd my self with scam too many time, but I shall follow this thread closely maybe it can be something useful for the future,
As of now I use B3.7 conservative setting and still it works fine. I disconnect MM and run fixed small lot and linear lot setting.
I start with 10000Usd I will let it run to the end and keep you updated as times goes.
I agree. I think it would be great if you started a thread on blessing 3. You could talk a little about her strategy and trade philosophy and keep it updated with your results. I would definatly come check it out
the problem is both of these eas will hurt u long term
What makes you say that? I understand that about b3 because of the martingale thingy, but photon?
First off it has the best money management I have seen in a commercial ea, second it has proven forward test results which continue to impress
third it has a developer who, is very present, and involved, and constantly working to “optimize” settings so that she will remain profitable in the long run.
So I would like to hear what you [B]believe[/B]. Because belief is a huge part of trading and it will shape our decisions. I hope I can change your beliefs about expert advisors.
i have seen few remarks on the performance of photon specially with go markets like server busy not closing trades etc… any1 could verify as i am not with go markets anymo.also losses it made today. i should thank my lucky stars as i did not allow photon to trade today:D
well i have not seen any problems with go markets. there spread is the best I have ever experienced so I think between that and virtually no slippage that they are a good choice.
Photon did lousy last night I had been messing with settings and had set aggressive to true and honestly I don’t like it. Ive been saying that photon manages risk very well and that is one of its great attributes but in agressive it basically opens double the amount of orders and hence doubles the risk so I am not a big fan of aggressive mode.
I will continue to give photon her fair shake. The way I see it is I have 60 days to see profit or I will ask for a refund and at that point I will humbly admit I was wrong, but until then I am still holding hope that she will start killing it again.
You know honestly the yen pairs went nuts through asia last night and into london and basically all day. gy has been a tough beast to ride and so I can see in times of volatility where there is very strong trending maybe photon won’t do well.
I observe her trading and sometimes I see support and resistance being directly in the way?? I can set long or short to false if I see her about to do something stupid but I am resisting that for now because I don’t want to mess with the test results. Maybe I will have to set up another demo?? We’ll see what happens, its early in the week so …
Photon did well last night. earning aprox 1% she lost one trade and won two.
I like conservative settings. It is similar to trader psychology. Don’t be greedy. If its one thing I have learned it is [B]Protect your capital!!![/B]
well to be honest I am not sure. I can tell you what I am sure of…
Worst trading day was -2.2%
Worst week -2.3%
Average trade length 84.6 minutes
Average trades per day 3.5
average expectancy thus far 5.44 pips
I think these are reasonable numbers. I did try aggressive and I hated it. Way to much risk for me. I am really focused on preserving capital. I have blown up accounts and had major risk issues in the past and at this point as a trader preserving capital is thee most important thing to me. If I had to guess I would say the max drawdown is low, I haven’t even bothered with backtesting, but the max stoploss hit so far has been like 26 pips and on a $500 account my lot size is .04 so we are talking about $6.50ish which is a tiny bit more than 1% so even if that happened on three trades it would still be under 4%
