Its just perfect having Christmas every other day because if it was everyday then it wouldnt be christmas as it would just be any ordinary day because it is everyday… hahahha im saying too much already! Haha!
Wow thats some great work there!!! I have an excel too that does the same thing and distinguishes monday from the rest of the week but i must say yours is better!
Aud/usd just got triggered at 1.0424 hmmm…
Rpotor, Love the EA. Thanks again! Quick Question, I understand that I should set the EA on a daily chart to set the correct pending orders but does it move the “quarter” and “half” positions to the right stop loss levels each time the market moves in the right direction? That wasn’t too clear and wanted to ask before I make any assumptions.
thanks again,
-Armstrong
GY got stopped
Okay, got it, new version of the order setting EA is up. This version will put expiration time on all the orders placed, so the orders which are not triggered will automagically be deleted at the open of the next daily candle.
http://www.rpotor.com/forex/TTE/Daybreak-TT-OrderEntry-v2.0.mq4
Thanks, glad you found it useful. 
Unfortunately the EA is not smart enough to handle the SL movements, you still need to manually manage your trades and set SL for Air and Retrace positions when needed. So the EA in its current version just sets the orders and then just sits there and smiles dumbly like an idiot. I absolutely don’t have the experience yet to build the EA to manage the SL jumps too. But I hope someone more knowledgeable might pick up the torch from here.
i may be guilty of assuming that those following the thread had a good idea about how i approach fridays. if so, i apologize and will explain. we are going into friday with six open positions across four pairs. that’s enough to think about. with only half a day of even possibly good trading, we don’t need the additional exposure of more positions. we are also on the finish side of a strong run and are seeing consolidation. no bueno.
as of this morning:
g/j from 121.69, tp hit +30, air and retrace stops at 122.50 hit, +80, +80.
g/j flat.
a/u from 1.0336, tp hit at 1.0375 +35, presently holding just above 1.0400. we are going to want to close these sometime today anyway, so i don’t have a good reason to not go ahead and move stops on two positions still open to 1.0400 locks +60 and +60.
e/u from 1.2170, tp hit +30, reversed to take air stop out at 1.2275 +105. retrace stop hit at 1.2250, +80.
e/u flat.
g/u from 1.5551, tp +25, has reversed to take out air stop at 1.5675 +125. currently just above 1.5675 and that is where i would move the stop locks in +125.
summary:
g/j, flat, +30, +80, +80
a/u, 2 positions still open, closed +35, locks +60, +60
e/u, flat, +30, +105, +80
g/u, 1 position still open, closed +25, +125, locks +125
total closed: +590
total locks: +245
these would be my discretionary calls and how i will report results. i might even start looking for more favorable exits to remaining opens as the day progresses. you are free to pursue what you think is best. by tightening the stops, of course, we always run the risk that someone bored in dubai will decide to buy dallas this morning and need to run a few billion through the exchange. maybe he’ll wait 'til monday.
edit at 640 am: okay, i thought we might be looking at a little more upward move and i may miss one later in the morning, but i’ve now decided i want
a/u sl at 1.0425 locks +85, +85
g/u at 1.5700 locks +150
these are very tight stops and we just have to be willing to call it a day if they are hit
total locks now: +320
edit at 710 am: a/u trades below 1.0425, both opens now closed +85, +85
a/u flat
Read more: 301 Moved Permanently
g/u stopped out.
total closed trades: +910
great day yesterday for any triple threat traders!!
So, Pipwoof, what’s your take on a currency pair that signals entry, then drops to SL only to return to entry? Do you take the second entry as per entry level rules? Or is it a once-per-day thing?
Today, I had an entry at 1.23304 on eurusd(I didn’t use the 11 pip friday rule, but it did hit 1.2404 to signal entry according to rules). Then, it stopped out and rallied to TP @ 1.2375.
Also, what about days where your trade doesn’t hit SL or TP and the next day signals an opposite entry? Being in the US, how do we hold both positions or how do we decide between which position to keep? (Thank you Uncle Sam for taking my hedging abilities …)
Just some situations I wanted your(or anyone else’s) take on
Thanks in advance.
Ps: thanks rpotor for the spreadsheet. I adapted your formulas into my own sheet that I had set up already. It definitely helps double check the math.
i have updated post # 66, a summary for july, through this week’s trades. with two trading days to go, we are up +2,025 for the month and i hope you got every pip!
i suppose what i want to say now is preaching to the choir if you’ve already been around the block a time or two on the trading street. so, if this is not your first rodeo, just skip this post and move on to something productive. if you are a newbie, please indulge me and give this some thought.
we call it a market because it is a competitive environment with opinions and methods, players on both sides of the buy/sell. some of those players are willing losers because they are actually in the market to hedge, expatriate funds, or other reasons. but, for those of us trying to extract money from this exchange, each of us will start by thinking we are right about our position. as your competitor, i will try to find the lowest number you will sell at and you are trying to determine the most i am willing to pay. in the end, one of us will be right and the other wrong. one will win and one will lose.
around these buy/sell dynamics, markets change and one of the reasons is that players change their strategies, trying to get on the right side of the trade. losers are trying to figure out what they’re doing wrong and trying new things, winners are cautiously trying to keep the momentum going. for retail traders (us), it is a negative-sum game, for every buyer there must be a seller and that means for every winner there must be a loser. at the end of the day, it has to add up to zero less transaction costs. if the market even hints at becoming predictable from one point of view, it has to change. it must maintain the balance of winners and losers. it has to be sobering to know that some of our competition operates from plush apartment-style suites in towering office complexes utilizing nanosecond computers housed in refrigerated compartments to enhance processing speed.
the operative word in the paragraph above for winners trying to sustain winning is “cautiously.” the point has been repeated in many posts on this site and others. as we go into august and more of us go live, let us commit to keep our emotions in check and practice stringent money management. my job here is to offer something i honestly believe will help us be profitable. i just don’t want to hear that someone has blown an account by getting too excited, too invested, too overtraded. if you trust this method, trust it only as far as you can throw it and be ready to (throw it) if it fails you.
we have really enjoyed july, especially yesterday. whether you are on demo or live, if you walked away with even part of that swag, you have reason to celebrate. have a great weekend. at least for the moment, you are part of that small percentage of profitable traders and you can imagine yourself in that company who decides they want lobster tonight, so they fly up to maine. when we come back on monday, however, we will come to our charts with the certain knowledge that there is nothing on earth which can humble us more quickly and more thoroughly than what we are so anxiously about to do.
pipwright, thanks for your post. i haven’t collected any hard data on re-entry, either in a situation where we are closed out one direction and get that direction again or where we reverse. from cursory observation, it looks like it would be beneficial, especially on those days when the run is such that it creates enough reward to pay for several unsuccessful attempts. i can only suggest that you look back at some of the stop-outs and see if re-entries would have been triggered and what the outcome would have been.
i have been watching the continued upward progress of several of our pairs after i placed tight stops and got closed out of all positions by the precedent short move, costing several hundred additional pips. there were probably traders using this method who chose looser stops and gained more than us conservative souls. there may even be those who still have positions open and are planning to carry over the weekend. i have said before that judgment calls are probably as often wrong as they are right. we make them because we’re human. i am sorry you got caught in that V pattern. if it’s any consolation, that pattern does not occur with statistical significance enough to profit from, so, in the long run you can expect to come out with an alternative.
the +/- 11 pips is only for mondays because of the limited sunday data set we have to base entries on. does not apply to friday. however, i have some definite attitude about trading friday. see my post #108 about this friday in particular. generally speaking, we have only half a day of possibly good trading. if we don’t already have open positions, friday does offer some good opportunities and i will initiate, even close to mid-day. but, with open positions, i prefer to just monitor those, not add anything new friday morning, and get flat before the weekend. i can tell people what i would do and why, but it is a judgment call after all.
no, we can’t hedge. at least not on a single account. if you were wanting to hold opposite positions, you would need a second account. some brokers also offer sub-accounts and my understanding is that you can be hedged between a main and a sub or two subs. this situation should not occur very often with triple threat because we are only 50 pips away from one direction being stopped and the previous day’s range is usually more than that. it can happen and i suppose i would stay with the existing trade until it played itself out.
i always hope that we get multiple opinions on questions like these and that, just maybe, someone will have some actual facts to help us out. it helps us all to determine how we want to handle things. thanks again.
For starters well done pipwoof on your strategy and being able to execute it consistently to deliver a stellar week. I definitely picked the right week to give it a shot.
You have greed well under control which comes from experience clearly displayed in your ability to tighten up stops when the word Christmas starts getting mentioned. More importantly your strategy focuses on EXITS and not the worlds most perfect entry. When you get out determines if you make money not when you get in. Triple threat is a clever way of combining 3 strategies into a single entry yet keeping is simple enough to comprehend on the run. Just gold (a phrase used in Australia when something is perfect)
I had a few simple questions which I’ve made assumptions on but as a check;
- Is your position sizing equal for all 3 positions in a single market?
- Across different pairs with varying currency do you try and balance your risk or just take the same # of contracts?
Two things I would like to add to the testing of this strategy is;
- The results of e/j
- And although a bit more complicated looking at the results of tightening the Chandler exit stop on the retracement position when its well in the money. Basically what you have been referring to as judgement calls after a few halves have been reached.
For now we celebrate and eat lobsters or prawns and crays here in Oz. Cheers
bear, thanks so much for the positive comments. it is clear that you overestimate me, but i’m not proud, i’ll take the strokes!
i may not be sophisticated enough to balance the risk unless we can keep the math at about a third grade level, so have been taking 1 position in each pair for this building/testing period. i have not put this one live yet and since losing a pip in gbp/jpy is not the same as in eur/usd, this is something i would like to consider. thank you for the suggestion.
it sounds like your question on the stops could end up with a quantification of what, for lack of a better explanation, i call judgment. that would be a good thing, especially for those trying to write an ea for this. i’m not always sure i make the same judgment calls in similiar situations, but i probably should. many traders refer to the subjective side of their decisions and conclude that they get a “feel” for price movement after so many years of experience. i confess to that also, but am honest enough to say it may be no better than a coin toss. i am certainly above alluding to any mystical powers or secret insight. i support quantifying those calls and as soon as i have time to look up “chandler exit stop” i will talk more intelligently on the matter.
e/j… for real? are you kidding me? what made you think of that? and why that particular pair? you know, i haven’t had time to look at all the pairs and e/j was one i passed up. however, i have just this afternoon completed a very tiring three-day look at eighteen months by hand, eyeball, and f12 of the e/j, the results of which i hoped to get on the thread sometime this weekend. i think i would have considered introducing that with some kind of dramatic delivery, but you have tipped my hand.
holy mother of pearl, are you going to be pleasantly surprised! i am always asking for others to verify my work. if you have a little time, just look at october 2011, where i found only -30 losses and +2,360 in wins for the whole month! did i get that right? i almost think i should spend another three days going through this again, just to be sure. of course, that was the best month. worst month, february 2011, netted only +35. we might have asked the mortgage company for a loan extension that month. but, here’s the clincher: more than +15,000 pips net, more than any other pair! well, here it is and, please oh please, check it for yourself:
In my opinion, to begin determining the best position sizing model, we need to know first the max correlated drawdown for all pairs. Let’s say, from testing we found that the worst we had were 3 consecutive days, when all 4 pairs lost (all 3 orders/pair). Of course, the longer the testing period, the better. So if we would have traded for example 1% risk /pair, for fixed fractional, we would have had about 11.5% hole in the account (compounded). Starting from this max total drawdown we can then adjust the risk to match with our tolerance.
Very nice! Ill have to eye e/j!
As a note: e/d took the first loss @30 pips x3 to total -90. The second run caught +133.8 for a net of +43.8 pips. Not bad for starting with an early loss.
pip, allow me to use your trade for a little instruction. sorry, can’t resist. had someone followed strict method, but decided to take a second shot, they would have entered e/u long at 1.2329 on the 12 gmt bar (looking at 15" bars here). stopped out pretty quick a half hour later (doesn’t that just drive you crazy?) -30, -30, -30. then, re-entry at 1.2329 on the 1315 bar and goes to tp at 1.2375 on the 1415 bar +45. then, falls back to 1.2350 where we would surely have had stops on the other two positions +20, +20. so, strict method leaves us slightly in the hole at -5. but, before it went back to method stop at 1745, there were intervening bars to a high of 1.2389. meaning, a judicious call could have caught a maximum profit up to +60, +60. best case, the day could have been -90, +165 = +75.
we can’t pick the tops, but, obviously, pip did a good job of getting a big chunk of that and coming out with +44 of it. the only way he could have done that was by departing from the strict method at a certain point and making a discretionary call to exit BEFORE THE SYSTEM CALLED FOR IT. several of us have emphasized the judgment calls that can and should be used. not a license to drop the method and wing it, just an urging to keep your head about you.
you know those instructions on the visor of your car? mine say things like, “avoid abrupt maneuvers and excessive speed,” and, “always buckle up.” i’ll swear some people have different stuff than mine. i just know that some drivers’ instructions say, “remove brain,” “place brain on seat beside you,” “drive.” you know what i mean.
when trading, keep your brain. look at the situation. we decide to trade friday. we get a good runup on, of all things, a second swing. we reach a point where we are profitable enough to cover our earlier losses and even bank some pips. do we really want to let that get away from us? then, we see the upward move start to fade on the wrong color bar. as richard pryor used to say, “RUN!” don’t hold your breath hoping it will stop that nasty downward business. pick a spot and get out.
i don’t mean to insult your intelligence with all this guidance and most traders looking at a method like this probably don’t need a lot of advice anyway. but, the forum is here and the site is, presumably, for many traders new to forex. i am only thinking about the newbies and the things i wish someone had got into my head a little earlier. maybe about $$$$$$ earlier. hope no one is offended.
@Pipwoof: I concur.
I also had a questionable stop on the a/u before a nice climb. I wasn’t watching when it happened. So, I am not totally sure but I may have been stopped out early… maybe the bid was @ the level I was stopped @. My stop was placed @ 1.0425, a few pips above my entry @ 1.0423. Then, it was closed @ 1.04256. As you can see in the pic the low for the candles near its close was 1.04264… it is a demo acct. and its a close call but it’s odd considering the price action following the stop.
I guess you win some and lose some.
Perhaps…but consider this. Feb '12 for a/u and Dec '11 for g/b both had 5 or more losses in a row and a/u at one point had 9 out of 11 wrong. I am using 0.7% risk / pair with a maximum of 3 pairs open (9 positions). Out of the 5 pairs i just pick the ones that first signal an entry. This puts my worse case scenario of drawdown to 14.7% assuming all the other pairs performed just as poorly as the a/u during the same time interval. I never want to exceed 15% drawdown and if I did I would abandon the strategy.
It comes down to your risk profile and expected returns for the year. I target 35% for the year at this level of risk. If say you wanted to earn 100% return you may need to risk 3% per trade but your risk of ruin increases considerably and perhaps have a 40% chance of blowing up your account. I’ve learned one thing for sure the longer you can stay in the game the greater your chances of being profitable become.