Good question. X marks the (50 pip) spot.
No, I made a typo 
Thanks for the heads up.
Well, not to say always simple concepts are good and comlex concepts are rubbish, but e=mc² is simple AND brilliant. I coded some EAs lately to check my chances out at Forex. I just use it for hedging right now until the EAs will prove stability. The best one is the simpler one in the long run. The more complex makes a lot more money, but more dependent on market conditions. Not to say, they are overshooting complex. I know what they are doing. So, they are all specific tools for the specific use. I wouldn’t take my bike to ride over the ocean and I wouldn’t take an aircraft to fly from dining room to living room, or would I?
We will see …
Thanks for that!
And for that too, sir!
Okay, I have changed the EA back now, but it is late here in Europe and I don’t know if it will run without errors today. I have also to improve this older EA, as I have 2 other EAs running in demo and I want to be sure that it will not interfere. Nothing fancy, but it takes some minutes to code.
Sorry, sir. Please standby. I can code whatever I like. I just want to check the purest signal first to see if that makes a difference with other signals. To change S/L and T/P needs just a smile on my face. Just variables to change. Even the whole EA is only a few lines of code. Nothing fancy. It took 1 hour or so to code.
Phew.
That was just too much for my head what you wrote there.
I prefer to keep simple things simple.
You might like to read my answer to your first post again. 
We will see …
…I dont think so. [B][U]You will see[/U][/B] when you look at your charts. Filling your charts with all kinds of clutter prevents you from seeing.
Wasn’t he saying to use the right tool for the job?
I red the whole thread over and over and I understood what you mean weeks ago. I just wanted to be clear, that I do not believe in a holy smoke, eh grail or anything at all. I trust in knowledge and I do not trust a promise. And it is not always that simple in life. I am new to Forex trading but not to life or investments. Before I lose 1 cent I will have an idea if this simple strategy will work or not, trust me. I do not doubt generally, I just want to know if it can work. That’s it. And if it works, my backtesting and demo trading will show me that before I will lose my first cent.
Oh, I have a lot of “clutter” at my charts, but that has nothing to say. My EAs are running precisely like bees and collecting the honey for me without my interference. I even do not have to sit in front of a boring computer screen and hit a key. Maybe I would catch a heart attack and then all that money wouldn’t help.
I use charts just as a helping hand and to see things clear and construct a strategy and not to complicate things. I use Forex for hedging right now and beside of hedging I will make a backtest for all of my strategies, before I will join the 95% club. If that backtesting and thereafter demo trading will not work, I will stick to my rules of fundamental trading and that’s it. That works. Easy, ha? Nevertheless, I enjoy your replies. Thanks a lot!
My EAs are running precisely like bees and [B]collecting the honey[/B] for me without my interference.
That is a matter of your personal opinion.
Let’s look at EURJPY behaviour this week as an example.
Depending on your trade execution parameters and trade management you could have collected +500 pips this week in three trades by [U]trading from the short side, [B]only[/B].[/U]
That’s a lot of honey for trading only short and executing three trades.
How is an EA going to deal with a price drop of 35 pips in 1.5 minutes, a retrace of almost double and the following drop of a couple of hundred pips later because of increased order flow on the short side?
Because that what happend last Tuesday and in a similar way with EURJPY, yesterday.
Some traders picked up 10 pips, other traders picked up 50 pips and let’s say your EA would have picked up 110 pips.
A few traders out there picked up +500 pips. Even less traders picked up even more.
A lot of gamblers and knuckle heads with loose plans standing on the other side and were left with the tab.
Remember, that’s trading the pair from the short side [B]only[/B] this week.
Where do you think those differences in profit/loss result from?
The reason is individual trader skill.
And that individual trader skill manifests itself in his/her trade management model & risk management structure and is executed with discipline.
I use charts just as a helping hand and to see things clear and construct a strategy and not to complicate things.
Your focus is distorted.
Minimize loss and maximize profits with a bare minimum of exposure is asked for in trading.
Well, that’s always possible honey. How do you know yours is not?
An EA is just as good as the rules. Your words not mine: “The rules are simple.” No problem for an EA. An EA and particularly a backtest shows if your strategy is stress proof or not. But if you start with exceptions from the rules (only some currencies, only short here and long there, …), then this is not a simple strategy. It becomes very complex. Full stop.
My EA with your simple strategy is ready now. Backtested on EURUSD 20 pip sl, 50 pip tp 1 year shows this:
—snip—
Initial deposit 1000.00
Total net profit 100.96
Gross profit 700.60
Gross loss -599.64
Profit factor 1.17
Expected payoff 2.29
Absolute drawdown 146.30
Maximal drawdown 176.20 (17.11%)
Relative drawdown 17.11% (176.20)
Total trades 44
Short positions (won %) 0 (0.00%)
Long positions (won %) 44 (31.82%)
Profit trades (% of total) 14 (31.82%)
Loss trades (% of total) 30 (68.18%)
Largest
profit trade 50.36
loss trade -20.00
Average
profit trade 50.04
loss trade -19.99
Maximum
consecutive wins (profit in money) 3 (150.12)
consecutive losses (loss in money) 7 (-140.00)
Maximal
consecutive profit (count of wins) 150.12 (3)
consecutive loss (count of losses) -140.00 (7)
Average
consecutive wins 1
consecutive losses 3
—snap—
Huh, I hear you say: “See?” Wait! Here is a backtest with 2 years:
—snip—
Initial deposit 1000.00
Total net profit -319.04
Gross profit 1000.60
Gross loss -1319.64
Profit factor 0.76
Expected payoff -3.71
Absolute drawdown 566.30
Maximal drawdown 696.30 (61.62%)
Relative drawdown 61.62% (696.30)
Total trades 86
Short positions (won %) 0 (0.00%)
Long positions (won %) 86 (23.26%)
Profit trades (% of total) 20 (23.26%)
Loss trades (% of total) 66 (76.74%)
Largest
profit trade 50.36
loss trade -20.00
Average
profit trade 50.03
loss trade -19.99
Maximum
consecutive wins (profit in money) 3 (150.12)
consecutive losses (loss in money) 27 (-540.00)
Maximal
consecutive profit (count of wins) 150.12 (3)
consecutive loss (count of losses) -540.00 (27)
Average
consecutive wins 1
consecutive losses 4
—snap—
And here I show you what my very simple trend related EA with an RSI filter is doing with a couple of bucks in the same two years with the same currency:
—snip—
Initial deposit 1500.00
Total net profit 248.60
Gross profit 315.10
Gross loss -66.50
Profit factor 4.74
Expected payoff 10.81
Absolute drawdown 66.00
Maximal drawdown 114.64 (6.52%)
Relative drawdown 7.36% (113.90)
Total trades 23
Short positions (won %) 0 (0.00%)
Long positions (won %) 23 (95.65%)
Profit trades (% of total) 22 (95.65%)
Loss trades (% of total) 1 (4.35%)
Largest
profit trade 33.90
loss trade -66.50
Average
profit trade 14.32
loss trade -66.50
Maximum
consecutive wins (profit in money) 19 (241.62)
consecutive losses (loss in money) 1 (-66.50)
Maximal
consecutive profit (count of wins) 241.62 (19)
consecutive loss (count of losses) -66.50 (1)
Average
consecutive wins 11
consecutive losses 1
—snap—
See the difference? I won’t bore you with the graph, but it shows that your strategy as it is in its simplest form is weak. My EA has a straight line from bottom left to upper right in opposition.
There is from posting one in this and other threads one question laying around in my simple distorted mind. No, two:
1.) If it would be that simple, why are not all people billionaires?
2.) If you can make money with it long term, why would you share your strategy for free?
Well, three questions, sorry: Why are you filling up those threads here trying to convince people that technical indicators are useless? I am not a technical indicator guy, but it is obvious for me until you prove with your own trade log or backtest of an EA, that your strategy is not fail proof in the long term. You might get some gains here and there, but at least this strategy will burn money over time. Maybe you have some special experience, but then this is not a simple strategy. And at least I wrote here already that the signal of the weekly open is weak. At least for the EURUSD pair.
If you want to prove me wrong, then please come up with something stress proof and not some gains here and there and “if you haven’t made it, it is always your mistake.” and it is simple and some exceptions here and there. Before I invest 1 cent of my money, I need facts, not illusions or promises. Thank you.
This will be good
Meh, I didn’t know my name was Mr. xtraction. I just trade his ideas in an even simpler form as he has put across here in this thread. No reason to get hyped up about it. You are talking swahili and I am talking suhali. That’s the way it is. I don’t share the same approach to trading as you do as the last remaining member of the lost tribes in lost lands because all the other fellas have left here.
Okay, I am just honest and straight to the point (half Eropean, half Texan). Please don’t take it personally, but if you want to proof me wrong, then please come up with something useful. I am curious to learn, but I need facts and one fact until now is, that the weekly open signal is just as good as other signals. So, it lies in other techniques. But if you have only a good mm then you could also good play at the casino, right? Names doesn’t matter to me.
Anyways: Have a good one!
Buckscoder:
How many times per day does your EA trade the weekly open?
It’s great to finally see some solid statistics going on - you’re a rare guy to have around Buckscoder (from my experience on the forums anyway)
I’d like to (re-)second that opinion as I was trying to stress similar points earlier in the thread but never really put it as concisely as that way you put it - must be an edge from programming logic lol (on presenting something as simple when it really isn’t is a little deceptive and that the whole ‘on sale’ factor is arbitrary as hell, you’d be waiting years before some pairs appeared to go that way). Not to mention a bit of irony given the obvious rejection of indicators but slow embrace of them anyway in a fashion similar to how they came about in the first place. Bit like going atheist because religion is cramping your style before developing your own spiritual & moral principles that end up being much like a religion in the first place. Helps make a history & name for yourself I guess.
Because they’ve found them to be useless (but still use a few anyway), good to see that I’m not alone in thinking that there’s an incredibly unreasonable bias against technical indicators going on. A minimalistic approach that is supposedly well-defined but is open to variation and exception can be as misleading as them. If a tool is misused there’s going to be a bunch of users blaming the tool but people are going to find in their experience whether it’s the tool or the users at fault - imo applies to both fundamental & technical systems.
However from what I understand of xtractions posts the rules of the system were never meant to be followed to the pip the same time every time, so unless your EA factors takes additional filters into account it doesn’t fully represent what he was trying to get at (putting aside the constant “it’s simple don’t complicate it what more is there to explain I’ve already said that there’s nothing more to explain go read the rules again” sort of attitude). After all he did have two sort of games going on (one was the weekly -> daily cross, the other being only buying). While the rules themselves are simple and the strategy had a focus on simplicity, trader discretion was never alienated. As used mentioned
If the system was presented to be followed strictly by crosses in the direction of ‘dominant flow’ (here defined as lines marking weekly open and daily open traded with weekly to daily or daily to weekly flow, sometimes as strictly weekly to daily) and there were absolutely 0 exceptions to the rule even if crossed by a pip, skill would never be a variable - only luck in whether one was at the screen at the time of crosses.
Put another way there’s a whole lot more to trading the system that comes into it or you wouldn’t have an incremental experience factor.
From my point of view the system in terms of profitability is unfortunately more or less ‘unfalsifiable’ - by an EA anyway (unless you were to incorporate every avenue of additional filter/signal that experience would offer, e.g. avoid trading during certain hours, avoid trading during NFPs etc). This is because its been presented in a minimalistic fashion that while defined as simple allows for a huge margin of variability in application with exceptions and what not. For example whether to check the box ‘on sale’? -> a pair may ‘simply’ be on sale and I can think of plenty of people who would love to just point that out followed by a rhetorical question but what’s defining it as onsale is going to vary from person to person based on differing perspectives on TFs etc. Such degree of variation allows for the attitude that you’ve illustrated:
So if in fact the system does only work on the drawing board in theory but has little practical application we’re never going to know for sure since it’s in essence it’s so loosely defined as a result of exceptions - as above it’ll always be your fault not the systems fault, you just haven’t been following it. Personally I still favour the emphasis on opens highs and lows though.
In my eyes it’s more of a skeleton or template than an actual system that works well as a starting ground for completely fresh beginners. After all the aspects the system focuses on (daily weekly opens closes highs lows) have been part of many discretionary sort of systems I can think of (eg. Tech Templates); on a tangent xtraction has simply drawn a greater weight to these levels and never claimed to invent anything.
Although he stated clearly it was intended as an exact how-to-do method it doesn’t exclude the fact that there is plenty of room for variation and exception to the said ‘rules’
I mean no offence but having come to terms with that you shouldn’t be slagging off other people & their interpretations of his method as having a poor understanding of it or at worst being blind/unable to read. To be fair you’ve been doing more than just trading it - the fact that you’ve been advocating your interpretation of it means you ought to be taking responsibility for your opinion rather than delegating it to xtraction after these backtest results.
Buckscoder if you’ve got the time it’d be interesting to see EA results that involve additional criteria such as avoiding mondays, avoiding certain hours of asian session etc.
As many times as it closes one trade the day and there is time left that specific day and the price crosses the weekly open from below again. Rarely seen in the backtest.
Time is my most precious asset.
Mondays are already avoided. Just trades Tue to Friday.
This is the code snippet:
—snip—
//±-----------------------------------------------------------------+
//| day Tue to Fri? |
//±-----------------------------------------------------------------+
bool dayok() {
return(Daynow>1 && Daynow<6);
}
—snap—
I can’t see any bugs around in that simple snippet. If you find one, please report. Didn’t check every trade on the chart thereafter, but two or three I checked used the right signal (Monday open is the weekly open on Alpari, right?)
The point is: I am seeking for a reliable entry signal in my strategies. If I am checked in with the ride, I have lost most of my control. I can just close it. That’s what I got left. Well, I can change tp and sl values, open a hedge trade and whatever, but that is just for comfort and easier to code than more complex rules.
I am seeking for a signal, which is better than just randomly let a monkey do the stuff. The monkey would hit a profitable trade 50% or so over time, subtracted by the broker spread. So, what is a signal worth if it doesn’t beat that monkey? However, if anybody can give me precise rules and a backtest shows that those rules lead to a better entry signal than that of just random entry, I would spend some time.
I don’t say the system herein doesn’t work. But if it works, it is exactly NOT because of the signal, if I take the backtest. And it is NOT, because it is simple. Most successful manual traders seem not aware of their own complexity. If you say something like “if the price is cheap”, that contains a lot of complexity. “Cheap” related to what, when, where, how, … ?
If it’s simple, it is simple to code. If it’s not, then it is not simple. Easy rule. Plus with an EA I have an emotionless precise slave who works for me based on precise rules. Just right for the Forex trading.
I’ve enclosed now the backtest graphs of my own EA with RSI filter and trend recognition (straigt line with one loss) and the forexstore graph. Thought, they can’t be directly compared, because my EA is a bit more complex, it shows why I wouldn’t use a simple strategy of just using a weekly (Monday) open and then daily open on a day below that and crossing from beneath to above the weakly open.
You fellas aren’t getting it.
Below is a screen shot of a proplatform for “[B]Iceberg Orders[/B]” excecution in FOREX.
[B]Iceberg functionality allows traders to place orders without alerting the marketplace. An iceberg order allows traders to specify exactly how much of it is visible whereas with a hidden order, whilst the order is still in the market, no part of it will be displayed to any other market participant.[/B]
Your EA does not stand a chance against this piece of software regardless of how many hours of backtesting you have performed.
Keep on living in cuckoo land.
Did your bank account get emptied recently only kidding wouldn’t want to take away from it trying to tweak this strategy. Didn’t realise you’d already excluded mon
Gotta love the beauty of a discretionary system; no one can really say it doesn’t work since there’s so many arbitrary factors on top of the said signal. It’s a little wanky for me to gloat that there’s finally some stats to prove what I was getting at earlier in the thread mostly at how simple this thing isn’t under all the almost excessive keep-it-simple attitude (/ego) but at any rate it’s going to be interesting to follow your back-test findings around this forum
Was that a joke, I really don’t get it. Gotta ask why an EA is competing with iceberg orders and furthermore why would it lose. Guessing they only work with visible market orders or something. And why anyone is living in cuckoo land in the first place, unless that was just another one of those harmless I gotta reassert my ego to clearly demonstrate I know something you deluded people don’t me being elitist and all. Nice spreads though, 1.3 pips on cable :eek:.
/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2)
you forgot to take into account relativistic velocity via the Lorentz transform…
I love statistics 
Don’t have to get, what I got already, right? Well, just kidding. You seem to believe, you got it all, right? You are so wise. Most people who believed to be wise are not, but you may prove them wrong. In one direction or the other.
Below is a screen shot of a proplatform for “[B]Iceberg Orders[/B]” excecution in FOREX.
[B]Iceberg functionality allows traders to place orders without alerting the marketplace. An iceberg order allows traders to specify exactly how much of it is visible whereas with a hidden order, whilst the order is still in the market, no part of it will be displayed to any other market participant.[/B]
Your EA does not stand a chance against this piece of software regardless of how many hours of backtesting you have performed.
Keep on living in cuckoo land.
Thanks for that. But. Currently I don’t see a relation to the dispute of simplicity. Plus: Backtesting makes NO EA better or worse. It is just a stress test if theory is backed up by reality. By the way, I never thought or said that my EA is something special. I just use it to compare it with other strategies and to have it run in my demo acc. to prove if it will collect money over time without risking too much. Until now it performs better than your simple strategy in its simplest form. See above. Plus you can’t win a cent with me comparing apples with appletrees, as I am a reliable coder since decades and know the difference between an institutional trading platform and an EA in MT, where you have no information about market deep and other things to consider.
I could even code an EA which would post from time to time some phrases like “You hit the nail on its head”, “You are living in cuckoo land”, … here in. So, you would have more time to stick at facts and straight to the point instead of bore people. I take 100 bucks an hour for that. But if you are sooooo wise and making [B]constant[/B] profits, you should spend that easily and with a smile on your face. 
I just wanted to participate here and to ask some fundamental questions and return my backtesting results, which came out of an emotionless computer. But there is one guy now taking it personal, so letz see how that develops: A human guy taking it personal against an emotionless computer with a master of almost no emotion.
I don’t love statistics but girls and that above is too complex for me! I replicate used: Take it simple!
So, my final question is: Is there any non fundamental signal in a simple form which could lead to an EA which would make profit over statistics without risking the whole account like martingale or something like that (which is not a signal, but mm strategy)? Because if there is this signal, I can code it (and some other, too).
Please stop eating or you risk to become fat and to spend all your money for food instead of feeding the sharks (brokers) with yourself.
Meh, and round & round & round & round it goes.
Your P/L is truth.
Your Trade Management & Risk Management Structure decides about your truth.
- you control your risk
- you control your position size
- you control your entry point
- you control your exit points
And if you’re fortunate enough to get on the correct side of the move, the market takes off with your money onboard and
- you then controlling your partial or full exit according to your applied Trade Management Structure.
Everything else is up to the markets and you have no contol over it.
I bugger out of this thread. Let the hot shots in here carry on.