Recently I found a free scalper EA on a code developer website. I tested it out because it had good results, but of course I was skeptical. I ran it 2 nights consecutively on a demo, starting with 10k. I left the settings on default as an initial test. I made 5k each night, so the morning 2 days later I had 20k. When I woke back up a little later, I had dropped from 20k to 7k! I had 8 consecutive losses, 4 of which is very significant.
Since then, I’ve been toying with the “initial stop loss” function, testing it with different values. So far, even with a pretty substantial stop loss (40pips, 75 pips, 150 pips, 300pips), it’s been unsuccessful. The stop losses all are now making me break even +/- overnight, because they are almsot all being stopped out (approx 50% to 75%). Attached is a copy of the EA and my 2 days of history. You can ignore the last several entries as those were pre-EA testing. They’re attached in a zip (couldn’t attached mq4 or htm files?)
So, I’ve determined that this EA definitely makes money and definitely works. The problem is that I am having trouble successfully limiting the losses. The EA does run with a trailing stop, but it seems that it’s the initial stop that is the problem.
Is there anything else anyone can recommend to limit these losses? I am looking for as many ideas as possible. I can’t seem to figure it out, even though I don’t think it should be so difficult to minimize these losses, even a the cost of less profits.
Note: The system is based, from what I can tell, purely on MACD. It it set to use MT4’s MACD, which isn’t the standard MACD, so I replaced it with the real MACD in my uses.