The inside bar EA

Hi guys!

First of all I would like to thank james for all his work. His systems are truly great.

I took the liberty of creating an EA that uses the inside bar system. I have seen another one, created by someone on this forum. I think DazeGhost is his nickname. However, as I recall, that script did not produce profit. My apologies if I am wrong and please tell me what settings I must use to make it work if it does on the long run.

The code is kinda raw, so you cannot modify the Stochastics settings (they are 8,3,3) unless you do that by editing the code itself (i know i’m lazy).

It works best on 15M, as james said.

There is something changed. The stop loss is 2 pips below IB but the TP is a fixed 2xSL (actually is (Price - Low or High of previous bar)*2). So generaly if your SL is about 25 pips, the TP is somewhere between 46-50. Why? simply because is you waited for Stochastics to cross again it would not be profitable. So there you go. (The system wins on autotrade about 36% of the trades, that with a 1.95 win / loss ratio gets you a profit factor somewhere in the neighbourhood of 1.15 - 1.22). So if you use it only as an alert (again, you have to write your alert by yourself, i’m lazy :D) it should provide more because you ignore news, big Sup/Res and so on.

In the future I will work on a general function to implement in several auto-systems that calculates optimal SL & TP and if it is necessary does stop trailing… But I have to work on that, as it is not that simple (takes in account things like overall market volatility, fibonacci S/R, daily range-pullback etc.).

This system does not come with stop trailing. For the time I tested, it did not seem profitable.

Please test the EA yourselves, beacause my MT4 is installed since June and the older data taken from history is not that reliable. We all know how much a 1% increase in overall win ratio influences things.

Ok I bored you guys enough. Have fun;)

InsideBar.zip (982 Bytes)

Interesting. However I still beleive in being there while trading. I trad einside bars as well but I trade on the 5min tf. I will be starting a thread soon so others can follow my trading and so that the people who have been at this longer than I can give me some feedback.

This is a good stepping stone though. Just remember its very hard to program something to the human discretion of momentum in a market.

There’s definatly something too inside bars. Looking forward to seeing how this develops.

I’m no coder but have been playing with some ideas that i was going to try and get coded. You beat me to the IB one… thanks.

Peace
Stuart

Inside bars signal a slight change in momentum. They are intra-trend moves or start trending moves.

There is more to them than just an inside bar forming though… it is placement, momentum, price action… I am going to start a journal/thread here soon with what I’ve come up with. It is thanks to jame’s thread and another thread on another forum that I have made into my own methodology.

Yes balto, you are right.

Is is very hard to make a steady profit autotrading this kind of strategy. I know that and that’s why I posted this EA, in order for you guys to see it and test it out. I doubt anyone will use it with real money. But I hope in the future I can delevope it further, add calculation on price action, S/R, etc. and improve it.

DarezGhost is the author of that other EA. You are correct that it was not profitable in backtesting, however it did make some good entries if you were at the computer to control the exit. I took that code and modified it to use it as an IB alert for myself, and added some external inputs for people who wanted to try and trade it. I can attach my modified code if anybody wants it. I would never let it trade my account, but if you’re looking for some code examples it might be worth taking a look at.

Balto: I saw your other thread on scalping short term charts using IBs, and felt like somebody snuck in to my office and stole half my trading journal:p. Nice to know I’m not the only one…keep up the good work.

ffaspector,

I would like to see your modified code for the IB alerts if you don’t mind posting it.

Thanks,
Skates

I put it in its original thread so as not to clutter GigiDolar’s new thread:
http://forums.babypips.com/…40-100-pips-day-mt4-ea-14.html#post79347

Thanks!

No problem about posting it here also, i really don’t mind.

I’ve tested the EA, it has the same problem as mine: it is profitable from june 2008 until now. Before that, it’s not. The thing is, the EA is not to blame here. it’s just how this system works. I’m not saying it wasn’t profitable before, just that autotrading it wasn’t. IBs work. But autotrading IBs is more complicated then i’ve thought. As i see it, the TP and SL MUST be in correlation with market volatility (hourly, daily, even weekly) and fibonacci. The exact relations are still foggy to me, I’m currently studying that.

Keep up the good work!!