So I probably should start with: I’m not the brightest soul on earth. I’ve been plugging away at trading for almost ten years and have basically broken even until this year which has been slightly profitable.
This year I’ve been using a modified “3 ducks” system where instead of 4hr/1hr/5min I make sure daily/8hr/4hr/3hr/1hr match. I use Oanda’s software and have the trade defaults setup as: Size = 15% Lev NAV, TP = 0.60% Price, SL = 0.50% Price. It’s not perfect but it’s a starting point.
The thing I want to do, but have no idea how to make it happen, is backtest basically every TP and SL combination to find the most profitable setting where I don’t get stopped out too early or take my profits to late. There has to be some sort of optimal percentage to use.
Why do I use the settings? Well, you see, like I said… not that bright of a dude sometimes, so I have a habit of (for lack of a better term) dicking around with my trades. Until I set the software to basically just let me click buy or sell, I’d change too many things like “oh, this one’s a winner, let me trade a bigger lot” which resulted in nothing working because inevitably the losses always outweighed the winners.
So I’m pretty sure I need to have these settings in place to keep me from doing stupid stuff, might not make the most profit but hey my living expenses are low. I live in a tiny mountain cabin so if I can make $50 a day I’m happy, I’m going for consistency over trying to become rich.
I know MT4 can do backtests and there’s Forex Trader 3 which basically looks like a modified MT4 install, but how in the world do I get MT4 to test what I want? It seems like I have to code a program but damn, I don’t think I could code that sort of thing to save my life.