Good job Jack, but try to get out as close to the planned takeprofit amount as you can. This system only has a 25-30% win rate, so we need all the pips we can get on the wins in order for it to be profitable. Just remember it sometimes takes a 2 or 3 week losing streak before a big win comes, so the wins have to cover the losses and make some profit on top of it.
You did great though!!
I haven’t had a chance to do the detailed backtest of the Thursday set up yet. I’ll have it in the next 48 hours though.
And sometimes newbies come up with the best ideas simply because they are newbies and are thinking outside the box! The problem is they don’t have the experience to tell the great ideas from lousy ones. That’s why new traders like you, and experienced trades like me working together is such a great thing!
I want to post this so much thank you phil for your great strategy…
you’ll notice something different with this one i tried to tweak something
and at the same time i try to forward test other pairs.
afterall it was good day to start hehe, got profited at first attempt.
You’re welcome FurTrader, and congratulations on your wins!
Keep us up to date with your testing on other pairs.
I backtested other pairs but never demo/live tested them. From my experience the winners and losers seem to correlate too well, meaning they either all won or all lost. That sort of defeated the purpose of multiple pairs… You might as well just up your risk on the one pair.
But like I said, I never forward tested it, so I may be wrong.
I actually started backtesting this as a Daily Breakout system, but after checking the numbers it turned out that trading a weekly breakout was more profitable, and less work, in the long run because of the huge risk:reward ratios on the winners.
No reason you couldn’t trade both though. If you’re looking for a daily breakout system I suggest Furious Angel’s Daily Breakout on GBP/JPY. You can find it on the Forex4Noobs website.
I think we talked about daily breakouts before. I can never keep up with what I’ve said and who I said it to on these forums. If I’m repeating myself just ignore me…
Just beware of overtrading. More trades doesn’t necessarily equal more money. I was constantly looking for trades when I was new and probably took 25 or more per week. Now I take around 5 and make a lot more money.
I was putting $500 in my account, and I had grew it to $650 within a day; following Furious Angel’s daily breakout + bubble break; I wanted to use your Sunday Breakout too, but my account wasn’t working on Monday - please believe me, I am a huge fan of yours!
And the next day, I was eager to use bubble break out and I kept trading, even though bubble breakout said not to; trend in 1 hour, 15 mins, and 1 mins need to be matching. But I didn’t care, I want to trade to make money and I was so wrong!!
So, I started to trade on 1 min chart, and ignore the trends on other time lines, and this morning my account it left with $350…
I also thank god, related to what you’re writing on?, for letting me learn this lesson at such a discounted price! haha!
Yeah, you don’t need lots of trades. If you started this Sunday Breakout system in 2005 with $1000 and risked 2% of your balance per trade you would have over $20000 as of today, and that’s with only 1 or 2 trades per week!
Of course those numbers are from backtesting results and represent all perfect trades with no human error. In reality it would probably be less than that but you still get my point…
Sounds like you might be risking too much per trade. Do you mind if I ask what your money management plan is?
I never risk more than 2% per trade. At that risk I’d need 31 losing trades in a row to go from $650 to $350. And I’d never get 21 bad trades in a row cause I’d stop trading after around 8 to review my strategy.
That’s correct. And I recalculate this before each trade so I’m compounding my earnings in immediately. Some people only do it at the beginning of the week or even month, but I like every trade.
Also, most people just assume $1 per pip for a mini account no matter which pair you’re trading. It’s close enough and makes doing the math in your head easier. But if you’re a math whiz then go for accuracy!
I stop once I get the dollar per pip value, since Oanda displays it on the screen I can enter my trade amount that way. It’s another reason I like them.
Ok guys. I’ve spent many, many, MANY hours backtesting Jack’s idea about entering a trade on Thursday to take advantage of the fact that highs/lows statistically happen more often on Fridays.
Even though it looked promising, I can’t come up with a repeatable pattern that would be profitable.
It was a good idea though!! Keep 'em coming!
Trading forex is my full-time job, so I have the time to backtest ideas that you guys might not. If you have an idea, and I think it’s sound, let me know and I’ll test it.
Just don’t get offended if I don’t think it’s viable. It takes me a long time to backtest these things manually so I have to have a hunch it’s gonna work before I try.
Phil, Thanks for taking the time to test out the idea. Looking at the graph you had it looked like there might be something there. Also, It’s great that there is a place where advanced traders are willing to work with beginners. It makes the learning curve go much quicker. The Sunday breakout works great for me since I can not trade full time or have a lot of time for a lot of research. For anyone else that likes this strategy read Tymen’s candlestick trading, I like that one also. I’ll also read though NickB’s strategy.
thank you phil for your great strategy…
