Many people have posted their trade systems on this forum, but most systems are missing something essential: they have not been backtested. So there's no way to know if the system is profitable or not. A "manual backtest" by eyeballing some charts or trying some demo trades can not give any useful info. Consequently, you can see in five minutes with a simple 4-year backtest that most of the systems posted here will lose money. On the other hand, a few of them can generate remarkable profit. But how do you know which?
I think no one can develop a successful system as long as he has no method for testing it. That however requires to program the system as an EA, script, strategy, whatever it is called. Here's the problem: most traders think programming is too difficult for them. But it's not. Anyone can learn EA or strategy programming in a few days, and can then easily backtest his systems or even trade them automatically. I'm in the process of writing a course for this. I hope from posting the course here that I get some feedback about what is easy to understand and what not, so that I can improve the material.
I'll post the first part here over the next days. The first part is just about learning programming in C, and covers variables, functions, branches, and loops. The second part will be about programming trade systems, and will cover trend trading, counter trend trading, optimizing, walk forward analysis, portfolio strategies, and money management. It uses some new trading algorithms such as frequency filters.
The C language has the advantage that you can use C knowledge for writing EAs or strategies on many platforms such as Ninja Trader, MT4, even Tradestation etc. because all those languages are rather similar.
The course will go over about 2 weeks. The goal is to develop a portfolio strategy with a solid annual return on capital. There might be a third part about using artificial intelligence, such a perceptrons and decision trees, but it's not finished yet and comes at a later time.
For the course you'll need some program for running the script examples and testing the strategies. It's called "Zorro" and you can download it for free from zorro-trader.com. We won't use MT4 for this course, although MT4 also uses C for its EAs. There are several reasons: MT4 requires some extra code stuff that is unnecessarily hard to learn for a beginner. MT4 lacks also essential features for properly testing a strategy. The third reason is that MT4 has a hidden feature called "Virtual Dealer Plugin", which can be used by your broker to remove a part of your profits. Therefore I tend to avoid MT4. However when you're through this course you'll also have the basic knowledge to write an EA for MT4 if you want.
I think no one can develop a successful system as long as he has no method for testing it. That however requires to program the system as an EA, script, strategy, whatever it is called. Here's the problem: most traders think programming is too difficult for them. But it's not. Anyone can learn EA or strategy programming in a few days, and can then easily backtest his systems or even trade them automatically. I'm in the process of writing a course for this. I hope from posting the course here that I get some feedback about what is easy to understand and what not, so that I can improve the material.
I'll post the first part here over the next days. The first part is just about learning programming in C, and covers variables, functions, branches, and loops. The second part will be about programming trade systems, and will cover trend trading, counter trend trading, optimizing, walk forward analysis, portfolio strategies, and money management. It uses some new trading algorithms such as frequency filters.
The C language has the advantage that you can use C knowledge for writing EAs or strategies on many platforms such as Ninja Trader, MT4, even Tradestation etc. because all those languages are rather similar.
The course will go over about 2 weeks. The goal is to develop a portfolio strategy with a solid annual return on capital. There might be a third part about using artificial intelligence, such a perceptrons and decision trees, but it's not finished yet and comes at a later time.
For the course you'll need some program for running the script examples and testing the strategies. It's called "Zorro" and you can download it for free from zorro-trader.com. We won't use MT4 for this course, although MT4 also uses C for its EAs. There are several reasons: MT4 requires some extra code stuff that is unnecessarily hard to learn for a beginner. MT4 lacks also essential features for properly testing a strategy. The third reason is that MT4 has a hidden feature called "Virtual Dealer Plugin", which can be used by your broker to remove a part of your profits. Therefore I tend to avoid MT4. However when you're through this course you'll also have the basic knowledge to write an EA for MT4 if you want.