Help Needed to Debug Existing EA with proven strategy

Hi Billv,

First off, sorry for having spelt your username wrongly - ought to be Billv and not Billy.

Quote Billv - "What does the EA do next, when the SL of the 1st order gets hit and the 1st suborder is already triggered?"

With due respect to you Billv, the mere fact that you had asked that question shows that you have not grasped the strategy employed by the EA - what you have asked above is precisely where the bug is - in that scenario, the EA must immediately (1) delete both the pending orders, (2) immediately re-issue a fresh First Order at the then market price and finally, (3) must immediately re-issue two fresh stops pending orders. This is where I need help to iron out that bug and to make sure that the EA does all the 3 things above in the scenario as described by yourself.

With regard to the first part of your post 19, I fully understand what you are saying and I am not saying that it will not happen. What I am saying is even if it happens, it would not be a disaster - lets assume the scenario you described in post 16 truly happened and we took a hit of -$4,500.00. So, what??? Its only 4.5% of our account - we would have made lots of profits before that and we could well afford to take such a hit and such a hit could never blow our account. Billv, just look at the demo account I posted here, I had ALREADY REMOVED -$4,183.59 of toxic trades caused by the bug yet we are still $12,469.00 in profit - so, in reality in a tame market such as last week, would the scenario you described had happened last week?? Highly unlikely and if the EA had functioned properly in those 44 hours of trading, we ought to be $16,652.59 in profit with only -$126.08 drawdown now from the active opened trades.

Billv, if you can show me how to upload the whole of the Account History here, I can do it and point it out to you all the -$4,183.59 toxic trades that I had manually removed.

To sum up Billv, yes, what you had described could happen but very rarely and in the mean-time, the EA would have made lots of profits that it is not a real concern at all. Just avoid trading on red events day and the scenario you described would very rarely happen.

Hi Hanover,

Yes, I understand. Hope there are takers out there.

Thanks for replying anyway.

Hi Phillip

I have read the manual.

You are describing what will happen when only the SL of the 1st trade is triggered
but with the 15pip SL of the first trade and 10 pip spacing between the 1st trade and the 2nd trade,
the 2nd trade will trigger before the SL of the 1st trade is hit.

Therefore the 2nd trade will be open when the 1st trade will close.
What do you want the EA to do after that?
Does the EA place an new 0.01 trade plus 2x 1 lot pending orders?

OR only 2x 1 lot pending orders?

This scenario is not explained in the manual.

Hi Billv,

Quote Billv - "but with the 15pip SL of the first trade and 10 pip spacing between the 1st trade and the 2nd trade,
the 2nd trade will trigger before the SL of the 1st trade is hit."

Yes Billv, the above scenario can happen but not as you had apparently understood it (correct me if I got you wrong). Allow me - assuming we had employed the Buyer EA with the settings as I had posted earlier and (ignoring spread) the First Order (buy) was opened at 100.00 - so SL would have been set at 99.85 and the two Buy Stops pending order set at 100.15 and 100.30. In a scenario as you had described, the price moved up to 100.30 and triggered both the pending order (the EA would have issued two more fresh buy stops pending orders at 100.45 and 100.60 by now) but before the TP of $300 is hit, the price reversed and kept continuing downwards until it hit the SL of the First Order at 99.85 - in this scenario, the EA must do the following (this is where the bug is, the EA is NOT doing the following):

1. Immediately close up the two buy stop pending orders at 100.45 and 100.60
2. Immediately reissue a fresh First Order at 99.85
3. Immediately issue the fresh buy stop pending orders at 100.00 and 100.15
4. Continue to monitor the Universal TP

And so on and on and on. So, in the scenario above if the direction reversed and go up again and both the fresh pending order of 100.00 and 100.15 are triggered, we would have the following orders triggered (1 lot each) 100.00, 100.15, 100.15 and 100.30.

Billv, I hope you grasp it this time.

In the scenario above and if we had done our filtering process properly in having employed the Buyer EA, the $300 TP would have been hit in a pretty speedy manner.

The fresh reissued First Order at 99.85 would have a SL at 99.70.

Let me continue with the above scenario.

Lets say the price kept moving downwards (instead of upwards) and hit the SL at 99.70, the the EA must do the following:

1. Delete both the buy stop pending orders at 100.00 and 100.15
2. Issue a fresh First Order at 99.70 with SL set at 99.55
3. Issue two fresh buy stops pending orders at 99.85 and 100.00

If the price keeps moving downwards, it will eventually reached the bottom and when the price starts top move upwards again, the freshly issued stop pending orders will start getting triggered (all triggered pending orders must be immediately replaced with fresh ones) and the whole cycle ought to be closed in quite a speedy manner.

Lets continue with the above scenario, lets say the price went down to 99.60 and no further (hence, SL at 99.55 was not hit) and the price started to move up again and triggered both the two pending orders at 99.85 and 100.00 (EA would have immediately issued fresh buy stop pending orders at 100.15 and 100.30) - by then we would have the following opened/triggered orders (1 lot each) - 99.85, 100.00, 100.15 and 100.30.

I hope I have made it clear enough.

Hi Phillip

I can see what you've done, you've changed your EA settings (they are not as they are shown in the manual).
Ok, No problem, however you may still run into the situation I described earlier
because your SL is now15 pips and the distance between trades is also 15 pips.

I think this will cause you problems in a live account.
Anyway, good luck with the strategy.

Hi Philip Lee

Very interesting strategy. I am trying to grasp the details and wondered about certain aspects of the strategy. Would you mind to clarify the following few things:

1) You seem to want 2 separate EAs, a Buyer EA and a Seller EA. The Buyer EA will take only Buy trades and Seller EA will take only Sell trades. Do they need to interact with each other at all? Are they totally independent of each other.

2) You mentioned it can be traded on 23 pairs at the same time. Will all 23 pairs use the same settings or TP/SL and distance between the Pending Orders and the First Order?

Hi Billv,

The settings as per my post 4 above. The demo account was traded at that settings.

Yes Billv, the scenario you had described will definitely happened but I am not too concerned about it as it will happen very rarely. I have extensively demo tested it and had traded it live for a few weeks (all in 2011) - the only problem I encountered trading live was the bug as described at post 9 and nothing else. So, if the bug can be ironed out, I will definitely trade it live again after confirmation that it is working as I intended it.

Thanks for the interest anyway Billv.

Opened Positions as at close on Friday 30-03-2018

Please note that out of the -$8,537.24 drawdown, a total of -$6,708.00 was caused by the bug.

All the following 14 pairs are 'orphaned' trades caused by the bug (from top to bottom)-

cadjpy, usdjpy, cadchf, audjpy, usdchf, nzdjpy, eurnzd, gbpusd, chfjpy, audnzd, gbpjpy, eurjpy, euraud and gbpjpy

Leaving only 9 pairs still trading properly unaffected by the bug.

As can be seen, even if I removed all these opened trades, we have still made $7,342.93 profit in less than 3 days of trading - with a very quiet trading day yesterday due to Good Friday.

I intend to start afresh on Monday by closing all the opened trades as soon as possible.

I mean I will close up all the toxic trades only, not the ones still trading properly.

Its easy to prevent a messy situation, ask your programmer to add a bit of code
so before the EA places new trades it checks to see if any of the suborders have been triggered
and if that is the case, it then waits for the open trades to close before placing new trades.

Also, I would combine the 2 EA's and also add 3 trading buttons, BUY, SELL and CLOSE ALL
Anyway, there are many things you can add to an EA, I wish you all the best with it.

Yes Billv, I am open to any suggestions AFTER the bug is ironed out.

Common guys, any takers???

Did I get the following right for the Buyer EA?

1) You first buy Oder of 0.01 lot is entered at the Market price 100.00. No TP set. SL is set for 15 pips.
2) At the same time, 2 Pending Buy Orders of 1.00 Lotsize are created at 100.15 and 100.30. SL for both of them is set to 200 pips.
3) If SL for the first Buy Oder is hit...then delete the 2 Pending Orders and do step 1 and step 2 again at that Market time.
4) Everything closes if $ amount of profit is reached.

Assuming I am getting the above steps correct...what happens in the following case?

The price goes up by 60 pips and so it triggers both your Pending Orders. You now have 3 Orders open of total lotsize 2.01. and now price starts to go down. Your SL for these trades is set to 200 pips. Do you wait to lose 200 pips on these 3 Orders?

I read about the bug you are mentioning....but don't quite well understanding what you want the EA to do once the price reverses?

I try to program it using my own code .. its working so far..
Sorry i did not use your previous programmer source code.

Do you want this to be post publicly in the forum?

The only drawdown about this system is when the Sub-Order hit the SL level.. its quite big compare to the universal TP ..



This happen when the sub-order hitted the SL multiple of times..


EUR USD BUY strategy only 2017


EURUSD SELL only 2017


Setting

This is exactly what I had visualized! Thanks for the graphics.
I am thinking there might be something more to this which we have not understood.

I will wait for Philip Lee to clarify what is missing.

Sorry Yalgaar,

I miss your first post. Yal, the two EAs are totally independent from each other - it would be idiotic (forgive me for the harsh word) to turn both on at the same time.

Your other question had already been answered if you reread my posts 24 & 26 - please try to digest and grasp what I tried to say there, it should be plain to see with the examples given.

At this stage, please stay focus on ironing out the bug first, after that is done, we can move forward to combined them and incorporate a trend filter.

The current idea (how I trade it) is to roughly guess the direction of the price movement in the next 24 hours and employ the appropriate EA. It is NOT an automated system - I don't want it to be fully automated at this stage.

Yal, please read my post at 24 & 26 and you will understand what I want from the EA.

Hi tictac-nur,

First off, really appreciate your effort to code it from scratch.

But please please please Tictac, you CANNOT backtest it like that by applying the Buyer and or the Seller BLINDLY - it goes against all the logic behind this idea. Some days you will need to apply the Buyer and some days you will need to apply the Seller - there must be a 'trend filter' to decide whether to employ the Buyer or the Seller before a trade is executed. At the moment, I am doing the 'trend filter' manually and at least for now, I want to stay focus on ironing out the bug first before we talk about combining the two into one and incorporate a trend filter.

Please please please Tictac, help me iron out the bug first - please don't do any backtest at this stage as the idea has not reached a 'backtestable stage yet'. Please grasp the basic strategy first, please please please.

Yal & Tictac, if you both had grasp the basic strategy behind this EA, please could you tell me in your own words what the EA suppose to do - in that way, I can explain further to you as I have already tried to explain it with detailed examples at post 24 & 26.

I hope you two can grasp it already.

Thanks very much for the interest anyway.

Ok here is it in my own words of what I understand about the EA. Let me know what I am missing:

1) You do your analysis of the market and start the Buy EA or Sell EA (never both EAs at the same time)
2) Assuming you take Buy EA.....it takes 1 Buy trade of 0.1 with SL of 15 pips...no TP set. It also enters 2 Pending Buy stop orders of 1.00 Lotsize each at the distance of 15 pips and 30 pips from the current market price. These will have 200pips SL and no TP set.
3) From this point...there are 2 possibilities. a) Your Buy order hits the 15 pip SL. In this case you want the EA to close existing But order and delete all existing Pending Orders. You then also want the original 3 orders to be created based on the new market current price. b) Your 1 or both Pending Orders get triggered.

The bug you are talking about is that your current EA is not taking the new 3 orders when the 15pip SL is hit.

Did I get it right so far?

I just now read the Post 24 and 26 again and I understood this much better than what I thought I had understood. :-)

I am sorry I still do not see the edge here. I doubt I am missing something. Following is the case which I don't think is a rare condition and it will incur big losses.

You enter a buy trade....the price moves up by 30 pips and triggers both your Pending Orders....now the price goes down 45 pips. This will close your first order and create new first order (as per your requirement) and also create 2 more Pending Orders. Now the price gores back up 30 pips and triggers both the new Pending Orders...and now the price falls down 200 pips!!!

At this point you will have total of 4 Lots of Buy Orders...each losing 200 pips, 185 pips, 170 pips and 155 pips respectively!

Let me know if I got anything wrong here?