Is This My Holy Grail EA :D

Quoting jnevins

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....Just looked at the bot and saw everything has reset on its own... the net balance is now around 41K starting with a 100k account... it had run up to 129k then reset with a -87k bombshell.... This is why Martingales are so roundly avoided... the only way to succeed at this then does seem to cut off the death trades at the pass... but when does one intervene? What standard sign is there that it is time to pull the plug?

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Quoting steveshutts

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Bob,

You are completely write here, which is why i am closing my EAs as soon as i see a reasonable profit. When i got up yesterday just before London open i realised that my EAs had been trading on the wrong side of these strong trends and i didn't like it. I saw $30 profit and took it. As i mentioned, the other 40/100 was experimental, to leave going to see how bad things could get. It was nice to see, but the other worrying thing was that it happened whilst i was at work and could do nothing about it. It was an exceptional move in one day and in this scenario you did not get the couple of days that you would normally get to see a death trade build.
I really think this strat works but i feel that you need to keep an eye on things, checking every hour or so would be nice. I currently go to work around 15:00 GMT and get back around 00:00 GMT so i can check the EAs any other time.
This can be the only downside i think, the fact that some of us have to be away at some time where we cannot access the computer and finding a suitable way round this. I have usually stopped the EAs by the time i have gone to work, and these have been in profit every single day since i have started, unbelievable actually, so i am thinking, maybe i should have a rule where i shut them down if not in profit by the time i got to work. This way, you will have some losing days, although few and far between, but the winners should far outweigh the losers.
Just to let you know, my 2 main accounts, have done well during the Asian session. I came to work at 08:00 GMT this morning and closed my 40/50 with $205 and the 40/100 with $275 profit, amazing. I am now $845 in profit on my 40/100 for 9 days trading, so i think i can afford to take some losing days. Obviously, we are seeing some pretty large moves at the moment and i would not expect to see profits like these too often but they are nice to bank.
I know by switching off the EAs before i go to work may stop bad trades recovering but it will also stop this sort of disaster i think.

Bob, when you say you stop and then restart the EAs, will you restart them straight away, it sounds like you do? Say i stop mine during the early London session, i then do no restart until the start of the next Asian session. Are you just restarting them again immediately? If so, have you always done this in your testing?

If anyone has any comments, i would love to hear them.

Steve

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Quoting jnevins

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Dave,

That would seem to be a good thing to work on now... Is there a predetermined amount of pain to take before the bot could intervene on our behalf? Could that parameter be set in the EA? Does it need some further programming? How do we finesse this one?

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Quoting PistolDave

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Ok, I am sorry about writing so many long posts on this, but I don't have any way to explain it without going into some detail. Please bear with me. I hope I am helping us all out some.

I would like to get Bob's opinion and anyone else's suggestions too that would help us be as profitable as possible.

I have put my comments under the settings here, the way I understand it, and I hope someone could explain more of this to me, and let me know if I'm not seeing it right.

Go to the properties for the EA and you will see where to change the settings.

Here are the settings that can be used in the EA to set a TP and SL.
There are lots of things that can be set in this EA, but what I am concerned with are the TP & SL.

I am showing everything below as it is in the properties window on my EA right now. The regular type is what is in the window, the bold and colored text is what I have added to make it clear what the section is, and my comments follow the "......."
Hope that makes sense.

CUTLOSS SETTING

_______ This section allows you to set a Take Profit amount (TP) ______

SecureProfitProtection ___ false

SP If profit made is bigger than SecureProfit we close the orders

SecureProfit ___ 20

........ set to "true" should enable SecureProfitProtection. "SecureProfit" is the profit amount where you want the EA to close the orders, I assume this value is stated as "deposit currency" not in "pips" but I don't know.
_____________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________

___ This section refers to settings to enable the account protection (SL)___

OTP Number of orders to enable the account protection
........ I don't have any idea what this means

OrderstoProtect ___ 3
........ Don't know what this should be

ASP if one will check profit from all symbols, if cero only this symbol
........ I don't think this applies, since there is no place to put a value

AllSymbolsProtect ___ false
........ Don't know what this should be either, but I think it should be set to "true"
___________________________________________________________

_____ Account equity protection by percentage remaining ______

EP if true, then the expert will protect the account equity to the percent specified

EquityProtection ___ false

AEP percent of the account to protect on a set of trades

AccountEquityPercentProtection 90

........ When you set this to "true" the EA should monitor the equity of the account and close the positions when the drawdown is the difference between the number you enter in "AccountEquityPercentProtection" and 100. In this case, you would only allow a 10% drawdown in floating equity.
___________________________________________________________

______ Account equity protection by USD amount _______

AMP if true, then the expert will use money protection to the USD specified

AccountMoneyProtection ___ false

AccountMoneyProtectionValue 3000

........ When set to "true" in this case the EA should close positions when balance reaches this number to limit drawdown
________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________
The testing:

I am going to test with different settings on three different platforms and see what kind of results I get. Obviously, my goal is to get the largest profit with the smallest drawdown so I will have to test. It's tricky because to get the most profit with this system you have to allow some drawdown and get a retracement to get the big bucks. Allow too small a drawdown and you get out too early with a loss -- too big and you lose even more. There is an optimum "zone" there somewhere where you will catch the profits. But you have to draw the line on losses somewhere. That's the variable I will test.

Another very interesting prospect is the ability to take profits at a certain amount. This needs to be tested too, because if you set it too low you will always be leaving money on the table. And you need a certain amount to balance out the losses plus some extra to have a net gain. So what's the best amount that makes the most profit? Who knows. I will test.

Since you can only test one variable at a time or you won't know which is creating the best results I will start by setting the TP (SecureProfit) at $100 and the drawdown (AccountEquityPercentProtection) protection at 75. This will give me a maximum drawdown of 25% which should give it some room to move, but definite protection against blowing out the account. With those settings, if you don't get more than one drawdown that shuts you down every 10 trading days you should be OK.

If that works and I don't see it hitting the drawdown any more often than that then I will start increasing the TP setting.

The settings I will try first:
SecureProfitProtection ___ true
SecureProfit ___ 100
OrderstoProtect ___ 3
AllSymbolsProtect ___ true
EquityProtection ___ true
AccountEquityPercentProtection 75
AccountMoneyProtection ___ false
AccountMoneyProtectionValue 3000

I think these settings will have to be changed at times depending on the volatility of the markets too. But thats something to consider later. Maybe we can develop some kind of index or indicator that is related to the ATR that will tell us something about how much room we have to allow it to move.

I hope this helps us keep moving toward success,
PD

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Quoting nanningbob

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The account protection I like the best is the amount protection. I know exactly when it will stop and at what figure. So if I have 4300 in the account and I set it at 3800 that is when all trading will stop. The other account protections when activated will reenter trades after activation.

AccountMoneyProtection ___ false
AccountMoneyProtectionValue 3000
Set this one to true and the amount to whatever you fell comfortable with.

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Quoting PistolDave

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Thanks for the advice on that, Bob. I did not know how that worked. It makes more sense to do it that way.

I am setting up two demo accounts for testing beginning on Monday.

BTW, did you notice that IBFX has added some new pairs? Check out that GBPNZD. Daily range for yesterday was 798 pips!

We can make some money on that baby!

Just kidding. This one makes the GBPJPY look sluggish in comparison.

Glad to have you back again,
PD

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Quoting nanningbob

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I had read that they added new pairs but have not looked at them yet. I am still playing with the numbers for GBP/JPY. Maybe I will use a 100/100 and see how that works. LOL Whats the spread on that one 20 pips??

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Quoting nanningbob

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For the guy who can only do .10 trades. I have made two modifications and would like you to try them. Instead of just following the 1D trend, I have two more to test and find results on.

1. One only trades if it follows the 1W, 1D, and 1H trend. The 1H trend being a 7MA, shift 0, Close, LWMA. This is like following the trend and then entering on a trend break. I feel the 7MA, close is the best MA for trendline breaks. It is designed to enter only the safest of trades.

2. Same as above but only follows the 1D and 1H trend. We eliminate following the 1W trend. These are both 100/40

I also would like guys to try opening them at different session times and report. For instance turn on the EA at JPY session, EURO session, USA session and we can compare how it does.

Since we are trading dimes and can hit bigger numbers faster, this is a definitely close all trades after you see a nice profit. Good luck and let me know how it goes.

I traded these today and one hit 54 dollars by the end of the Euro session and the other hit 75 dollars. I closed all trades and will wait for tomorrow. I opened them at the beginning of the JPY session.

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Quoting masa

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.................................................................................................
Hi Bob and members,
I’m newbie, much appreciating your instructions and sharing EAs.
I began 0.01 lot demos with 3K at FXDD, using three EAs, 1D1H 1W, 1D1H and 1D from Sept. 1st.
I started EAs at 23GMT and closed all currencies at 22 every day
Pictures show profit of 1D and 1D1H1W from 1st to 5th .The large drawdown of $1800 on Thursday is sum of $1400 aud/jpy ,$250 eur/usd and others.
As to 1D1H1W, orders of aud/jpy were all sells last week, and got $200.
This suggests 1D1H1W is useful to avoid death trades.
Do you think 1D1H1W to reduce death trades in general?

Good trade winds,
Masa

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Quoting steveshutts

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Bob,

Have you been using different settings for different currencies all through your testing or is this just a new part of your testing to see if different variables work better? I am simply running the same 40/100 EA on all currencies.

Steve

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Quoting nanningbob

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You start looking at pulling the plug between 250-350 pips deep. I almost never let it get to 400 unless I am seeing it bounce off of a resistance or support line. When it breaks those lines I get out. If it bounces, I play the retracement.

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Quoting jnevins

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Thanks Bob... I will definitely intervene in the future at that point... I'm wondering if there could be some kind of circuit breaker built into the EA that could close a potential death trade automatically for you? Off to secure my sailboat 2 hrs away for the approach of tropical storm Hanna!

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Quoting nanningbob

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This EA has 3 ways to control trades, to set limits on losses.

1. It does have a stop loss. You can set the stop loss at 400 and when the first entrance goes 400 pips in the whole it will close all of the trades of that currency pair. The EA will then begin reentering on that pair. All other currency trades are not affected.

2. Percentage of account. You can set your loss at a percentage of the account and when it hits it will close all the trades of all currency pairs. It will then begin reentering trades again.

3. Specific protection of entire account:
The account protection I like the best is the amount protection. I know exactly when it will stop and at what figure. So if I have 4300 in the account and I set it at 3800 that is when all trading will stop. The other account protections when activated will reenter trades after activation.

AccountMoneyProtection ___ false
AccountMoneyProtectionValue 3000
Set this one to true and the amount to whatever you feel comfortable with.

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Quoting PistolDave

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Great explanation. Thanks.

I am going to test this, using #3 above, starting on Monday. My original plan was to run the 100x40 on three different MT4 platforms with the drawdown set at 25% on all and to set the "SecureProfit" at 100, 150, and 200.

The idea was to see if I could reach a predetermined daily profit objective while using the 25% drawdown as a way to eliminate the death trade in my absence, like Thursday.

In the settings under "SecureProfitProtection" it says "SP If profit made is bigger than SecureProfit we close the orders" so I was hoping that meant that once the account balance (after starting the EA) has increased by $100 it will close all positions and stop. But after thinking about it I don't believe it will work that way. Probably only acts like a TP on the one pair that reachs $100 profit and then it starts again on that pair, and keeps running normally on all the others. So that won't help any since we already have the TP's set by the EA at 100 anyway.

What do you think about that line of reasoning?

This may not be the best way to approach the problem anyway. Maybe you could clear that up for me, Bob.

Also, using option #3, does the EA close all open trades, or does it simply quit opening new ones? If all the trades are not closed at that point then I don't see how it could actually limit the drawdown to any specific $ amount.

You have a lot more experience with these EAs than I do. I need whatever info you have to point me in the right direction here.

Thanks,
PD

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