Slingshot system

Trading Systems Free Forex Trading Systems
63

Hallo friends,
Brian (bkr): I have checked the timing issue. You’re right. Wherever they are located, IBFX people offer graphs synchronized with GMT. FXDD, for instance, is GMT+3 (it was supposed to be +2, but maybe in Bulgaria, they have some other DST schedule…). So three hours of difference. It could be nice knowing the timing of Oanda, as it looks even more profitable than IBFX.

The question of “candles changing shape” that I expressed quite cryptically in my previous is that, if candles start at another timepoint during the 24 hours, of course also the levels of open/close/high/low are different, and therefore the “slingshot” points (where/when to enter, where to place SL, and so on) are different. This causes, on the “same” day one setup being profitable, and, on another time zone, being a loser. I saw this thing many times in my testing on different platforms (IBFX and FXDD, 3 hrs of difference, now it’s clear).

With such time zone/broker sensitivity I’m now starting to believe that even the 30 minutes TF suggested by the original author of the system [I][B]could work[/B][/I] somewhere and sometimes… but who knows where/when?

Still looking for good proposals for an explanation, if anybody has one! Is it “European traders” being more emotional than American or Asiatic, and make candles reverse? :smiley: Just kidding!!!

Regarding becoming a millionaire… Well: good luck and [B]all[/B] my support and congs. But, as soon as I have a bit more time, I will show some long term backtesting… I think some more tweaks are needed!

Bye

Fabio

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As I understand this the whole concept is based around the psychology that happens when certain price movements take place Therefore it would make sense for the system to based around the same price charts and candle patterns that were being used by the most people. London is the primary trading centre so it follows that the GMT charts are the ones to follow at 7.00 AM GMT Maybe we should check out other brokers that offer GMT charts to validate this

Maybe also the system could be adapted to work as well using EST a when Wall St opens

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I’m glad that you’re putting so much time into this, fsprea. I’d be happy to modify the EA in whatever way ini order to make it profitable with different brokers. It has performed wonderfully for me so far (another +77 pips on long EUR/CHF last night) but if it can be tweaked to do even better, that would be great! I hope you’ve also found a way to start using it even a little to make some money while you’re testing. My account remains small for now (waiting to close on a house) so I’m only trading .05 mini lots. My +1031 pips have only earned just over $50, but it still feels great. I know that the same pips on a $1000 account would be over $1500 in profit. :slight_smile:

66

Hello everyone,

This EA seems to hold great potential for profit. Imagine: Making endless amounts of money could be as easy as flipping a switch! :smiley:

I would be very interested to know all the different brokers and their time related to GMT, especially Oanda and Alpari US.

I have a very basic question about EA’s.

I can open many different charts for different currency pairs and load the EA onto all of them. Now, even if I minimize them all, the EA should still be working for all of them, right? And it will place trades automatically on all the different pairs?

Just curious.

Thanks for everything so far,

-ForexPhantom-

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Yes, unless, in the MQL “language” “trade contest is busy”, meaning that more than one EA’s (one for every chart) is trying to send to the broker’s server an order at the same time. In this case one of them will be “stopped” producing such kind of error (“trade contest busy”). This is why in every well programmed EA there should be a section controlling for “freedom to operate” so to say, and adopt some mechanism (e.g. waiting a little bit) for placing orders (or modifying them) while it is possible to do it.

A note of warning, though! Dear Phantom, don’t rush too much in “finding the dollar machine”! Normally with such an attitude, you end up finding the “ruin machine”, eating out your account while you’re sleeping in the night (and very likely after it produced you so much, that you were also sleeping quietly, fully trusting in it!). Machines are good helpers, when you know what they’re doing, and youre 1000% sure they’re doing what you want. If you’re NOT “THE” trader, but rely on another one (machine, or who programmed it) you’re really playing with the fire. Take care! Just my suggestion. If I looked not too superficially around, you’re proposing some trading system somewhere else, here. Again my suggestion: keep on with that, it’s a good and important job, principally for yourself. For me this SS system is a sort of “nice toy” that, if works, can be a nice complement to my “real” trade activity (with options), not the reverse!

Maybe after dinner I have some time for the promised backtesting. Not sure yet (let’s see what kids think about! LOL). And perhaps it will be a bit disappointing concerning the “million machine”. But truth is always the best thing to follow!

Bye

Fabio

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One EA will place trades on every chart you place it on. It is deinitialized if you switch accounts or close MT4. This means that the SL will not be updated and the trade won’t close automatically on trades thatt have been placed, and new trades may not be placed. In order for the SL to be modified on every chart you run the EA on, you need to change the variable “ticket” to something different for every chart. Otherwise, only the last chart you place it on will update stop losses.

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So people, here we are. Kids are sleeping and I had time to prepare for you a pdf-converted ppt with the data I promised.

I think the document should be quite self-explanatory, except the fact that the “long term” data are calculated from 01.01.2006 to date.

If something is unclear I’m here to answer your questions.

Just a comment: I have modified Brian’s script just for the FXDD platform. Given the 3 hrs difference we discussed before I forced the script trading only between 10:00 and 23:00 GMT+3, which correspond to 07:00-20:00 GMT. In spite of that, (now the two EA’s on both platforms are trading with the same timing) note the difference in performance between the two platforms, as explained in the pdf. FXDD, in comparison to IBFX has also some bar missing in the weekend.

So, people, I’m very sorry if I cool down some enthusiasm here. But: take care!
Notice that the x-axis of the MT4 backtester is not chronological, but simply reports the number of the trade. This means that, if for instance trade 4 can follow trade 3 just the day after, trade 6 might come 3 months after trade 5, but you’ll not see it on the chart with the appropriate scale. Nevertheless, it is very clear that the system, on the IBFX platform, was working very well probably in the last year (if your liver is able to sustain quite hard drawdowns, but not dramatic). Sometimes in the past, and probably for periods as long as months or years, you should have been really a “strong believer” to hold on.
All this analysis must be performed on charts transformed in order to put data in a consistent and progressive and proportional time scale. Brian, (or anybody else): do you know how to stream backtesting results in a convenient cvs so to import them into excel and make such graphs and calculation? It is always possible making it “by hand”, but it’s quite tedious!

As the system is working quite good in the present and in the recent past, I think there are some chances to fix it. These are the possibilities that I can imagine:
[ul]
[li] first: looking whether trading it on multiple pairs creates a sort of hedge mechanism. This is not easily feasible with MT4 tester, because the tool is able to manage just a pair at a time (a limitation of the program). The (quite hard) work to do is backtesting several pairs, convert them into the appropriate time scale (as above) and then superimpose them (adding the P/L together) into excel.
[/li][li] second: apply a money management scheme that helps improving profits when times are nice, and reducing losses when they’re dismal. A fix lot kind of MM does not help in this case. My initial idea is to apply a proportional, with a strong correction for the downturns, or still better a ratio/proportional scheme, where, as a threshold is hit, you suddenly increase/decreas lot size or percentage of capital invested. With the pure proportional, if anybody wants to apply it, I would strongly suggest that you keep your capital low: as soon as the balance reaches a certain level ($2000, $5000, $10000, it depends on personal feelings) you have to withdraw your money from the trading account and invest them in something that has not the features of this SS. Of course the way to the million becomes longer, but also that to the death (of your account, of course … LOL).
[/li][li] Third: find one nice indicator (gosh: you’ll hate me for that! Indicators here around are seen as the devil!!! :p) which can act as a filter for saying when it is time to use the SS and when it is time to keep fingers away.
[/li][/ul]
This is basically how I see, now (sometimes good ideas comes into mind when I’m sleeping, so don’t worry if I put something else forward) the way for improving the system. Please, please: everybody is strongly encouraged to propose others. Or just to blame me for having said a lot of stupid things.

I will be glad that somebody convinces me that I’m wrong. I pefectly know that MT4 backtesting is far from being perfect, and it makes mistakes. But very usually these mistakes are smaller than the ones that we, human beings, make in backtesting systems, because we look at quite limited cases (unless, really, you put yourself in front of the screen for some months and look at every single minute bar scrolling them one by one from the right side of the screen… :D), and with quite a lot of enthusiasm for our good nice new system…

Over for now. Hope I was a bit helpful, tried to be less “serious” than normal not to bother you all too much!

Bye

Fabio

Testing_the_Slingshot.pdf (357 KB)

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Thanks again for all yor work, fsprea. I agree with a lot of what you’ve said. Most import is this: I do think that running on several pairs (I still maintain sticking to the 4 originals I listed) does somewhat “hedge” things. If you think about it, these four pairs are pretty independent (though every currency is somewhat closely tied to another). So if the EUR is having a better night than the GBP or is gaining higher against the CHF compared to the USD, there are more/better options for trades. There will still be losses, but if a loss on one pair comes the same night as a gain on another, so much the better. It is unfortunate that it’s not easier to back test this.

I also like the idea of more trades being placed when using 4 pairs. I still like the fact that it’s next to impossible to over trade with this system, but if you have to wait 2 weeks sometimes for a set up on a certain pair, there are (as recent results show) other pairs that will have valid set ups during that time.

The last thing in regards to maintaining profits is the manual close. I have lost out on a few pips closing in the morning (for me…actually around 1100 GMT) but yesterday is a great example. I closed the EUR/USD early for 55 pips and GBP/USD for 207. The GBP continued to fall, as did the EUR, at one point gaining about 150 more pips combined. However, this was while I was at work, so my only option was closing when I did or letting it run until candle close. At close, the EUR had com back up and erased much of that extra profit. The GBP came back up a little, but it would’ve still been a good day. The bottom line was that, by the end of the day, I only missed out on 60 pips instead of 150. Still nice to gain more, but there are going to be days (as the backtesting shows) where waiting until candle close can turn into a loss. (Showed nicely in your pdf on page 5…“BAD little SS” would have been good if closed near top of wick). I stick with my credo: “Don’t be greedy.” A day earning 262 pips is a great day and the extra 60 I could’ve had are nothing to fret over. Slow and steady wins the race.

The backtesting shows better result for 2008-2009 than 2007-2007 and 2007-2008. The current results are good. I think the market “turmoil” currently going on is driving this system. It may even out eventually, but I think that if you keep an eye on things and use some good judgement (even better than a single indicator in my opinion) you can maintain profits consistently for many years.

71

So…from what I’m seeing, everyone should be using this system with ODL. There is no “Big Sea of Death” (very funny…made me laugh) and a 9x return over 3 years. I had to run 1.5 standard lots on a $10000 account due to lot size restrictions, but the ratio is the same as the other brokers tested:
GBP/USD results

And check out the EUR/USD results:
EUR/USD results

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Brian,
wonderful results with Oanda! Thanks a lot. Just a little thing: take care when the tester says there are so many “errors on graphs”. It means that there are quite a lot of mistakes in the historical series reconstruction. You’d better going to the “history center” and reload the data for the particular currency.

Nevertheless it’s really nice. I don’t have time to investigate now, and I don’t have a demo with them. Can you eventually tell us which is their “Forex time zone” (when do they close/open candles?).

Bye

Fabio

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Fabio, Just one clarification. Brian’s results are with ODL Markets and not Oanda. Oanda does not offer MT4 platform. I wish they did because I have an account with them and like them very much. On the other hand, from what I have read about ODL Markets I will not open an account with them.

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Just curious what you’ve heard about ODL. I know nothing of them, just that I ended up there the first time I wanted to download MT4. I can’t open an account with them anyway since I’m in US, but others might find the information useful.

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Hallo people,

PipPocketer, thank you very much for your note, and sorry for my superficial reading.

About ODL, at least in some italian forum, there are rumors about requoting and orders not filled. Actually I think these are very important issues for scalpers, mostly. Anyway I know nothing about them.

But again, please: this is now a “technical” important question. Do anybody knows the TIMING of these people? The only thing I got in the few seconds I had available till now for looking at it, is that they have offices in London, so they also should trade synchronized with GMT.

If this is the case (hopefully not), this would be OVERLY strange. Because the differences in performance of the SS between IBFX and FXDD can be easily explained by the time zone difference (different candles “shape”, as pointed out). If by chance it comes out that IBFX and ODL trade the same time zone (=candles SHOULD be identical, also in the very unregulated forex world), then … WHY the hell should the system perform differently???

And if they trade with another close/open schedule, it could be interesting making some hypothesis on why the SS works better with a certain timing than others…

So, please, if anybody has ODL MT4 up and running, can he/she please open any chart with M1 and tell us “what time is it”? LOL :smiley:

Thanks in advance

Fabio

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Not necessarily Alpari UK have offices in London and they are CET (GMT+1) I have discovered that the reason they are not GMT is because this means they can avoid the Sunday candle. Sundays are not trading days for the large Forex players and so many brokers do not produce candles then for this reason.

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I have been demoing this for a few days now. Not had a great deal of succes yet but I think that is down to the broker I am using. I have a couple points to make which may make this system better What do you all think

This system was originally designed for a much smaller timeframe so these points are designed to address that

  1. If the wick of the previous days candle is very small then the slingshot effect is almost none existent This is made worse on the Daily chart I suggest a minimum no of pips must exist before taking a trade between the high/low and close prices

  2. When price crosses the close price of the previous days candle then this needs to consolidate first before the trade is triggered. I suggest we wait for a 1 min candle to be completely clear of the price before taking the trade.

Both of these measures would have prevented losing trades on my account

I would like to learn to write EA’s and try this for myself Where can I learn

Thanks

78

Quite right, the fact that IBFX do produce a sunday candle was annoying enough for me to scrap them as a choice.

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The Sunday candles make a difference with this system. If you don’t have them, I’m not sure you should trade on Mondays. It’s probably 50/50, but if Friday’s candle is bearish and Sunday’s bullish, then Monday would be a sell day (this is what happened this weekend with GBP/USD). If you don’t have the bullish Sunday candle, you’d be buying. Maybe it makes a difference, maybe it doesn’t, I’m not sure. It would be easy enough to code out Sunday’s candle and re-test the results.

Python, I’m not sure what you meant in your first point. Do you mean no range as opposed to a minimum range of 20 pips? Please clarify.

Your second point makes a lot of sense, however is moot much of the time. If the price is already well past the entry point by 0700, there should be no need to wait. Perhaps if it’s not there by 0700 we could wait for a 1M candle to be completely past. Again, I’m not sure how much difference this would make. Can you provide an example?

I’m more than happy to make adjustments to the EA to try different ideas. That’s what this forum is for and that’s why I’ve been encouraging testing and posting. Just let me know your ideas.

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I have a really good training manual on MQL4 on my site. http://www.brianredmond.net/forex/mql4/mql4book.chm

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I think that would be useful as many brokers do not have Sunday candles and it is not a proper trading day

The slingshot effect that the price first moves in the direction of the previous candle and then quickly reverses The size of reversal is the difference between to wick price and the close price of the previois candle So it follows that if there is a very small wick then there is no slingshot effect. I suggest we only trigger when there is a reasonable price difference Not sure what this would be however its open to experiment Remember we are not trading 30 min bars here

Attached is my failed trade from monday The trade triggered when price was only 0.6 pips past the previous days close and it price never made it higher apart from 1.5 pips a few bars later (close price was 1.40920 and you need to add the spread to determine buy price) I think that ideally a complete candle should be above the buy price before the trade is triggered.

Maybe the above could be user set values with defaults set as at present Then people could test the options Yoiu also need the following

5 dec places prices
Omit Monday trading

Thanks for your help

GBP-USD-9-3-09.jpg700×464 72.6 KB

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OK…I see what you mean about the size of the slingshot. I think you’d miss out on some trades, but you may be right that it will save more losses than the trades it misses. I will play around with it this weekend.

Omitting Monday trading is very simple as would be the option of 5 decimal places (I would add both as external variables so you could choose whether you want them or not). The five decimal places will require some testing as I’m not familiar enough with using them. I will modify the EA to what I think should work if you don’t mind testing it.

I can look into something along the lines of waiting until a 1M candles closes beyond the neccessary point. That will be the most code intensive part, and I think will be the part that changes results the least, but I’ll look into it. FYI, I’ve already built the spread into the EA so it shouldn’t be a factor.