Hey knotthead! Do you use a vps?
Hey Froggy! Thanks for the post.
I like the sound of your system! 4H charts and you are still getting 26 trades a week. Love it! If you keep the lot sizes the same but make your TP smallerā¦do you think you would get more trades that way (i.e. more trades at a lower risk and quicker TP vs. fewer trades - not that 26 per week is bad - with a larger TP)? Then again, a 4H timeframe should definitely see 20-50 pip movement. I used to trade stocks using the dual Bollinger Bands (20-1, and 20-2). Itās a good system. Demo is a bit different than live. In my findings with the current system, live did better than demo.
The big thing with these sorts of system is the draw downā¦and many people canāt get passed that. I think of draw down as inventory. Sure, that position is pulling my equity down at the momentā¦but so would inventory in a store. Just like shoes on the shelf, the money to put those shoes on the shelf will eventually work for you. Same goes for open positions. and, on occasion, just like shoes, you have to let them go and take a small hit in order to free up room on the shelf. $10k in draw down would be a bit hard for me to manage at this pointā¦but as long as you have margin to cover then youāre rockin and rollin! 
So, with your system, do you base lot sizes off of you account total? How do you ensure risk is the same as the account grows? How does the draw down amount compare to your profit? For me, I see black when I get to the next level for me to raise lots again. Soon enoughā¦ Iāll stop raising lots and let the profit continue to roll while the open position draw down levels off.
Thanks for sharing the EA info! Iāll definitely download it and play with it on a shorter time frame.
Good luck and keep me/us posted on how it goes!
~knotthead
Hey Chineseguy!
I used to run a virtual box through Amazon Web Services. The cost wasnāt bad and it was pretty reliable. I moved all of my stuff to a local machine though. There were a couple of instances where I couldnāt get in and/or the VPS rebootedā¦so my EAs werenāt taking profit. So I moved everything to a local box. I have three MT4 instances running;ā¦So far so good!
~knotthead
Iām not sure if you have used Blessing EA from your comments, but it has an automatic Money Management feature(LAF) that increased the starting lot size according to account size. I have LAF set @1 which even with a pair apportioned $25000 it still starts with .01. If the LAF were say 5 the starting lot would be .03 or so. I reasoned by keeping the LAF low I can run more pairs. The pairs that have produced the best are- Gbp/Aud, Eur/Aud, Eur/Nzd, Eur/Cad, Gbp/Chf, Gbp/Jpy for me anyway. I used only 16 pairs for 80% of the time, with each currency involved in 4 pairings only. I figured that spread the risk because usually only 1 or maybe 2 will produce a big run because of a major decision or event. Brexit was a good test for my set files. I only had Gbp/Usd and Gbp/Aud running at the time. Gbp/Usd had 2 700 pip drawdowns that day with 23 trades resulting in $850 profit. The 1000 pip drawdown I had was Eur/Cad about a month ago. To hit my TP (which was 20pip) it had to retrace 150 pips and has since dropped another 400, so if your account and or system can stand the drawdown the profit will come your way, in this case $690 for 4 weeks wait. If you want more detail on my settings let me know. Cheers
Froggy60
Thanks Whack Attack!
What I am doing (or trying to do) may not be for everyone. Iām just trying to be upfront and transparent in what I am doing. If something is working (or at least has the potential to) then Iām all for sharing experiences. If a system or a refocus on lot sizes based on account size works and I make money, then why wouldnāt I share that? If you look back at one of my original posts, I think I said something along the lines of āWhy do people feel the need to charge for system info if their system works? Wouldnāt they make enough money with the system? Why would they need to charge traders for that info if their system is working so well?ā Iām not saying my trading process is worthy of that status but I do think that sharing your experiences can help othersā¦whether they are good or bad.
Good luck out there!
~knotthead
Hey Froggy!
I havenāt played with the Blessing EA yetā¦but I will find it this weekend and set it up on a demo account / check out the settings. Iāll definitely load up those pairs and see what happens! Thanks so much for sharing this! If I can get this to work then it will just be another small account churning away!
~knotthead
Good morning Knothead:
Wow, thanks much for this intriguing info! A few questions, as follows, if you remain tolerant:
1: What proportion of your trades are eventual losers that you will clean house and exit and realize the loss?
2: Since you do not trade losers, what EA trigger is used to execute the Martingale trade? In one point it in the thread it seemed that if a .01 trade was open at the time the RSI found another trade meeting the RSI conditions, it would automatically take a .03 position (vs .01).
3: Forgive my newb status, but what specifically causes a ālock up.ā
4: What are the exact conditions that the EA trades the Martingale? You mention after some set number of candles a position has not closed at the TP, or is it simply when the system finds another RSI trigger while a new position remains open?
Thanks
RCloud
Hey rcloud! Thanks for your post.
1: What proportion of your trades are eventual losers that you will clean house and exit and realize the loss?
I only took two loses (manually) which were in May. That was to free up two pairs for trading and to minimize draw down. I did this because my margin was really getting chewed up and my lot sizes vs. account size was a bit ambitious at the time. I have since scaled way back to allow for market fluctuation. - always learning.
2: Since you do not trade losers, what EA trigger is used to execute the Martingale trade? In one point it in the thread it seemed that if a .01 trade was open at the time the RSI found another trade meeting the RSI conditions, it would automatically take a .03 position (vs .01).
Correct, the EA will fire off a trade when the conditions are right (in this case the condition is that the RSI has either hit 70 or 30). If that condition hits again and a position has already been opened by the EA, it then opens a triple-sized position to average up or down - requiring less pips to break even. This is coded into the EA.
3: Forgive my newb status, but what specifically causes a ālock up.ā
Locked up refers to the fact that a double position (a .01 and a .03 lot) has opened on a particular pair. This means no new positions will open on that pair until the current open positions close. Locked up means they are not generating moneyā¦i.e. they are not tradingā¦just eating up valuable margin
4: What are the exact conditions that the EA trades the Martingale? You mention after some set number of candles a position has not closed at the TP, or is it simply when the system finds another RSI trigger while a new position remains open?
When the system sees another buy pattern. In the case of the EA I use that would be another RSI trigger. It is the same trigger that fired off the original smaller lot. For instance, GBP/USD goes down to 29 on the RSIā¦it is way over sold. The EA opens a small long position. The pair goes sideways for a few candles, goes up some but not enough to trigger a TP, goes back down and hits that RSI at 29 again. The EA sees that, sees that there is already a smaller position open at .01 lot size and then fires off the triple position. Now I have two trades open on GBP/USD. No new GBP/USD trades will fire off even if the conditions say it should. Nor will it fire off a counter trade in the opposite direction. After two trades, the pair is locked up until A) the EA closes it for profit or B) I manually close it. There is no stop loss. If the RSI goes down again for a third time, the EA does nothing. There is a two trade limit for the pairā¦a small lot size and a triple.
I hope these answers help. If you need more clarification let me know. Good luck out there in Forex world!
~knotthead
1 Like
Hi knotthead? How many Ea are you using?
Hey Chineseguy!
I am currently running two EAs (one based on RSI and one based on divergence) but I may pick up a third if the one Froggy mentioned works out
~knotthead
Does that mean you have 24 pairs running? Eg 2k account using 12 pairs.but with 2 eas that will be 24 pairs?
Hello again Knotthead:
Do you run the EAs from your own desktop, or does it require a separate offsite type of server?
Thanks
RCloud
Hey Chineseguy.
I have 2 accounts that I am running. The links to each account on Myfxbook are listed in the thread. One account I am running 16 pairs - 4 are running the divergence-based EA and 12 are running the RSI-based one. The other account I am running 12 pairs - 9 are RSI-based EA and 3 are divergence-based EA. So all together I am running 28 pairs, though most of the ones in my small account are the same ones in my large account. So many times when a trade fires off in one account, it also fires off in the second.
Hey rcloud.
You can do either. I was running all of my stuff on AWS but have since changed it over to a home-based set up. Either way works fine.
~knotthead
You are doing great Knotthead, we all are here to gain and share our knowledge and experiences in order to gain from each other intellectual skills and develop the same in ours and later enhance it. You are doing your part very much efficiently.
[quote=āknotthead, post:113, topic:82405ā]
Myfxbook
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Good morning Knotthead
I have obtained and setup a similar EA based upon divergence that does the same Martingale routine with a .01 initial position and .03 on losers and takes profits at $1.30. Iām curious if you have previously tested or backtested the divergence based EA against the RSI based EA and which one was better when using the same settings on both?
I setup and backtested the divergence EA for a 1 yr period on the EURUSD on 5 min charts, but it reported an overall loss because the backtester closed out two trades at a loss of $181 with profitable trades at $46 at the end of the period. If there were truly no stop losses there would be no gross losses unless I closed them out manually, however, I do wonder if these few ādogsā would ever turn around (one for loss of $130 and one for $51).
One further note, the model had a 24.87% modeling quality and I donāt know how to improve that.
Thanks again for your effort to respond to all of these questions.
RCloud
Oops, I must correct my prior post. The period tested was only 3 mos. Even though my date range was set to one year, MT only downloaded an initial period of 3 mos that I set up. Sorry, Rick
Sorry everyone, I am learning the intricacies of MT backtesting and the EA (and messed up), and must revise what I reported in the prior posts.
Test #1: I ran a different backtest on a year of EURUSD data using a divergence based EA, this time with backtest model quality of 90%, and default settings of initial buy position = .01, buy on loss = .03 (Martingale), TP at $1.30 with no stop loss. This I ran from 6/30/16 thru 6/30/17. The results are not impressive with a loss of $89 (which includes closing out approx $180 on two orders that went southāremember no stop loss). So if you carried the losers you would have made approx $90, but I would think at some point large losses must be closed.
Test #2: Just for kicks I doubled settings: .02 buy position, .04 Martingale with TP set to 2.60. Results were not good, loosing $231 in total that included two bad trades that the backtest closes out at the end of the period totally $275. Still, even without these taken into account results are not impressive.
Test #3: Just for kicks, I likewise ran a backtest with settings from last paragraph and set a stop loss at $50 that made things worse.
Keep in mind these were all done with the EURUSD, for the period 6/30/16 to 6/30/17 and perhaps this was a really bad period for this pair that contributed to disappointing results.
I would like to try the EA based on the RSI that Knotthead reports above.
RCloud
Hey rcloud!
I havenāt tested the two against one another. I was running them in parallel at one point in both accounts and, at least at that particular time, the RSI-based one was firing off more than the divergence one. The thing is, with the RSI one, in a sideways market it works great. When a major market move happens though, especially since I run it on a 1M and 5M chart, can open two positions rather quickly and then the pairs get locked up. One thought would be to add another indicator to the EA that measures the strength of a move or the strength of momentumā¦and if that strength is above a certain level it doesnāt fire off the trade. That way, the major moves would be avoided and pairs would lock up less. That would be my only suggested update.
As for the EA taking lossesā¦that is strange as the only way the system CAN take a loss on a single position is if there is a triple position that trumps it for a profit. So Iām not sure what happened with those ālossesā. It doesnāt make much sense unless the EA you tested isnāt set up to close the triple unless it is your original TP above the loss of the first position. Example: Position one opens a long at .01 lot size at say 100.25 (weāll use this as an example - sort of a USDJPY number). The TP on that position is 100.30 for $1.30. The pair wavers and then continues to fall and gets down to 100.05. A second position opens at the .03 lot size. Now, combined, the average price is 100.10 for both positions. The TP now becomes 100.13 or so as the triple position will be able to close both positions for your original $1.30 profit (The triple position .03 will make $3.90 while the first position .01 will lose $2.60. The EA I use is coded so that the triple position will only close both positions if the profit of that triple exceeds the loss of the first position by my TP target. Both positions close when the net profit hits the original TP targetā¦in this case $1.30. So, my first position lost, but the triple made up for it. My guess is that maybe the EA you backtested didnāt have that feature and it only took the profit of the triple but didnāt take the first position into consideration when closing both?
Let me know if this does or doesnāt makes sense. Itās confusing, I know. Basically when a position closes in my account, there is always a net profit of my TP target. If that net target isnāt met, the position stays open until it does. It never ālosesā. The only loss I see on a daily basis is the loss of equity due to open positions and draw down. But that will get back to black once I stop moving lots and TP targets.
Questions? Bring 'em!
~knotthead
Hey knotthead,
Your thread is a good read. Can I ask how is your collegue doing? Is he still making over 7k a month? Did he blow his account?