With manual trading, we would have 20+ pips in the bag, but with the EA, my BE was hit barely before price went to 20 pip TP. News has just now come out which is moving the Euro higher again, so we’ll see what happens this time, looks like the market was waiting on Spain.
I did some backtesting last night and decided it’s hard to trust the backtester for a period more than a month because of modeling quality. It did seem like having the BE SL setting too small caused there to be almost no profit. In fact, the most profit came when I moved the BE SL setting greater than the Trailing stop, which I use 20 pips. I will do some thinking and testing to see if I come up with more ideas. BTW, removing the entry buffers caused the system to be a loser.
Benks1, thanks for your contribution…could you provide us with results of your idea?
Killerno, what was your setting that allowed your profit on the ECN? I use Finfx, which is an ECN and have no problems with order executions today, but still had the BE, which was set at 10 pips, hit before any TP could be reached.
I’m just posting this to give you guys an idea…this is a sidebar from my thread…
I’m going to back test this EA with very small TP setting, sortof scalping, to see how well that works. I’ll try the smallest allowable trailin stop, 1.5 pips, and I’ll try various small TP, under 10 pips. I’ll report on this tomorrow.
I think best to test the system in forward test as you said backtest quality is poor.
I am using Fxopen broker and my BE set to 4pip and to open trades is set to 1pip from the ref candle both side. +28pips
I had no more errors after BE hits however I still dont now tralilng stop is working or not, could not test yet:)
I think it would be nice option to set where to put the SL after BE is hit and also option to set after how many positive pips to close all open trades.
I agree, this would be useful…we need the BE SL to be somewhat negative compared to entry. Another idea, and I don’t know if this is codeable, but if there was someway to have it where if the price is not in the reference candle zone, then the orders are trading, and if it is in the reference zone, no orders should be actively open, sortof like rules…this may not be realistic.
Here is something to think about in theory…if we had the BE SL very close to the entry, not actually BE but had a 4th trade with TP just big enough to cover the loss if the other 3 trades hit SL, we may avoid the cost of unnecessary stop outs…just to give you something to think about.
Wow, things have been active here. I’ve been doing some backtesting with Excel and VBA rather than using MT4 EAs and I’ve been getting some pretty good results, though I think these should be taken with a big pinch of salt because the data that I’ve been using is H1 from FXHistoricalData.com and its all GMT+2. The data isn’t from a MT4 platform so it isn’t “like-for-like” if you traded through MT4. But all other assumptions are reasonable.
The model I built basically puts the usual 8AM High and Low buy and a sell pending orders in at 09:00 London time every day and closes it at 20:00 London time, before the spreads balloon out. I assumed all of the data was Bid and simply added a notional spread to any buy operations.
I did a bit of sensitivity testing with different SL and TP lines, and concluded that 50 and 150 was best, respectively. I never bother with trailing stops, they don’t add to backtest profits IMHO.
The best thing about this FXHistoricalData is that it goes back to 2001, so have some amazing results to look at:
I’m very skeptical about these results, and would love for an intense debate to ensure. I think forward testing is the only way, I’ll be starting mine tomorrow.
And some combined results summary stats… Yikes on the drawdown!
This shouldn’t be construed as advice. Forex is risky, past performance not a guide to the future. Usual caveats, bla bla bla.
those results probably wouldn’t be indicative of this system, since it relies on an opposite order triggering, should the initial SL be hit, and when that happens, historically, the price has high momentum which carries it to the higher TP levels, netting a profit, despite the loss. I don’t know that backtesting with EA or automated method will have any value or not for this system, because backtesting like that just isn’t reliable…I just look to see if the bottom line was profit or loss. Visually backtesting is only good for simple systems, but when a trailing stop, BE, etc…get involved, it’s about impossible.
Its fine to do your modelling in Excel instead of MT4 (or whatever trading platform), but you need to use more granular data. As Banker928 intimated, 1H simply isn’t accurate enough. In the majority of strategies you will need at least 1M data, however it does depend on the strategy and it is possible that 5M or 15M data might suffice.
In this case, for this strategy, stops and entries are too close together, so 1M data will be required to get any kind of accurate results.
Depending on your account size you might want to look at ECN broker. Non ecn brokers typically will take opposite side of your trade, so if you lose they win, hence low spreads. You might want to look at paperstone comes highly recommended by a friend of mine., though i dont have an account with them so can’t vouch for them either.
Well, the spread increase at 8:30 EST knocked the EA out of what was otherwise a good position.
I suppose this is where an instant replacement of orders after BE would’ve been helpful. Didn’t have time to do it manually before I realized what had happened.
Or another solution would be if the spread increases by x, move the stop loss away by x? Would that happen fast enough to prevent something like today from happening?
the most impotant thing is to find out where to place the pending orders from the reference candle and after how many pips profit move the SL to the BE or to ±pips from the BE.
I think if we place the buy pending orders +3.5-4pips from the high of the ref candle and -2 pips the sell orders from the low of the ref candle would be optimal set up.
For the BE I think best to set 6-7pips then price could move a bit more. Also I am considering to place TP10 TP20 and TP40 orders and TP40 with 20pip trailing stop.
I think the EA should check thereafter the extended ref candle and if price goes back to it place pending orders again.
what do you think about the optimal settings?
EDIT:
An another idea, what about if we place buy orders e.g. +4pips from ref candle high, sell orders -2-3pips from ref candle low and the initial stoploss is to the candle high and candle low. And BE is after +7-8pips.
TPs could be the same TP20,40,60 or TP10,20,40.
We would have few looses but once price is move away from these points and it is going fast with max 2-3 pips back.
i had two losses, like others, before the third trade hit 20 pip TP, and didn’t quite make it to 40 TP, so other trades closed at 20 pips each.
my brokers spreads stay between 2.5 and 2.7, ECN…news is what moves price, so you guys might search for another broker that doesn’t widen spreads around the news.
my backtesting on the short TP idea showed it wouldn’t work, it looked like a mountain, up, then down…BE at end
Yap i got wiped out too. I placed +3 buy orders with 3 pips spread from ref candle high and 3 sell orders with-1 pip spread from ref candle low.
I had the ea running todays as well and that ended in a lose as well. On thing i noticed it placed orders initially 3 sell 3 buy when buy orders got stopped out Pprice went above the ref candle stopping out the sell orders as well, EA then placed sell orders again at candle high (should have been low) I don’t understand why that happened. So that too was a loss price stopped that out as well. :60:
just modify this line:
if( (TimeHour(TimeCurrent()) > London_Open_Time_hour) ) //Time to keep checking for new Orders until midnight.
like that:
if ((TimeHour(TimeCurrent()) > 9) && (TimeHour(TimeCurrent()) < 20 ))
it means new pending order gonna place between 9 and 21 in broker time.
I think it should work.
regards
today i didn’t trade i was waiting to trade the nfp at 8:30 but the market reacted in the 9 hr candle but couldn’t wait had to leave home on business shame not to trade would have made at least 20 pips too.
yesturday i traded with the fundamentals made 50pips on the 8hr candle using the 20-40-60 rule
my point is yes EA and london open range and so fort but isn’t know that the market movers wait for fundamentals too then move so why not trade until the announcement minimize lost the way the market moved yesterday and today we would have lost alot of money lets not forget our 3 legged stool in babypips school
