Hi Mike,
I am posting a link to a guy who does stuff in an Excel spreadsheet. This is unrelated to your thread, but you came into my mind many times whilst I was watching this 1 hr 15 minute video.
I have just read your latest post to your journal. I care about you and I care about your tenacity to get to the truth. So if this is of no use to you please just let me know and I will not comment any further.
I feel in some respects we are very similar, but maybe from different starting points. I also want to be able to tell myself that I can master trading, and like you I don’t really care what anyone thinks of me (except my wife and family who sometimes say I work far too hard for my own good).
Anyway, the Excel stuff is something I am very passionate about but have not used much in the past with respect to Forex. I intend to do a lot more of that shortly. Meantime it was great to see the author casually explain how he took .csv data feeds into his spreadsheet, made some simple formulas expressing averages (six period averages on 15 minute data for all 8 currencies in scope of majors and crosses), and then went on to explain how he wrote formulas to represent a simple oscillator (short average period of 6 and long average period of 20 - I think).
Please browse through to see if any of these ideas give you any light bulbs in your quest.
I am concerned about your most recent concentration on one pair, one trade at a time, and most particularly no stop loss. There are a couple of reasons.
The first and main reason is that although it is unlikely that a currency pair can ever go to zero, it could happen that a currency becomes worth a tenth or a hundredth of its value. In that case, if your trade is leveraged, you could end up with a margin call (or your demo account reducing to zero in a black swan event).
The second reason, and this relates to a piece of work I am doing at this link where I have agreed to test a backtesting software, is that of the rollover or swap cost. In real trading, this is a daily cost that is added or subtracted from the trader account depending on the differential interest rates of both currencies in the pair. These days, those interest rates are very small compared with in the past ,but they do count, and if the demo account does not allow for putting in a swap cost element, your results over a large number of trading days may be very far out of line with reality.
I hope you accept these comments as constructive. And you may wish to read the thread I have created about testing the backtesting package. Swap cost is covered in lesson L21 (which I have yet to add, but intend to do so within the next hour).
Keep at it my friend. I do believe you will find the right path having committed so much time, effort and tenacity to this task. The right path may end up being something else than Forex trading, but the skills you have collected in this endeavour are priceless.
Till next time… be good, and be careful out there.