Frosty's '$2,000 to $60,000 in 12 Months' Challenge. Care to follow along?

"The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry"

This entire thing is a best case scenario, intended for fun. DO NOT use real money unless you can afford to LOSE IT. No really, I'm serious. This is NOT a 'get rich quick' thing. This is a fun challenge that will probably NOT go as planned. Do NOT use my thoughts and comments as advice. THIS IS FOR FUN. YOU WILL PROBABLY LOSE ALL OF YOUR MONEY.

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We start October 27th with a $2,000 micro account. You can start with whatever you have, even if it's a demo account. Our goal is to earn 30 times our initial investment in 12 months. Here is how we will do it. I estimate that this EA can make about $50 a day on a $2,000 micro account, trading pennies (0.01 lot sizes) on 18 pairs (9 currencies, running twice with 2 versions of the EA). This is a bit lower than the average I have been making over the past 5 weeks, even in this market.



PHASE I
Start with the 2k mini account. Run on 9 currency pairs, twice. Once with the standard EA, once reversed or AWE.
Bank half of your profits every 2 weeks during Phase 1.
Split your account once you have $2,000 in system profits (ie, you will have made $4,000 but you have banked 2k, so the other 2k goes back into the system)

At $50 a day, it will take ~80 trading days to get the $4,000 needed to split the account (after taking out $2,000 in profits). This should land us on a split by February 13th, 2009. Now, with 2 accounts, we are making $100 a day. We can add another account once another $4,000 is made, in about 40 trading days, or on about April 10th, 2009. Now with 3 accounts, at $150 a day, another account will be added on about May 19th, then as follows:

Account 4 May 19th
Account 5 June 16th
Account 6 July 8th
Account 7 July 28th
Account 8 Aug 13th
Account 9 Aug 27th
Account 10 Sept 9th

At this point, we have already banked $18,000 in profits and we have reinvested another $18,000 for a total of $36,000. We are now in Phase II.

PHASE II
At this point, we will build the micro accounts until they are $5,000 in size. We will increase the lot size by 0.01 each time our account increases $1,000. So, at $3,000, we are trading 0.02 (and hoping to average $75 a day), $4,000 we are trading 0.03 (also at $75), and at $5,000, we are trading 0.04 sized lots. Once we hit $5,000 in the account, we will expect to make $100 a day per account.

By Oct 14th, we should have the 3k accounts setup with a total profit of $56,000. With 5 more days to end the year, we should have made around $59,750.


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The EA used is the 100/40 by Nanningbob and it's variants, the 100/125, 60/40, and Bastard.
I will be using bastard since it has a few extra options built in that let me easily switch signals, and between 'standard' and 'funky' (or backwards) trading. Below are the 100/40 and bastardv03.

Information about the 100/40 can be found in this post. It starts around page 40 or so, look for Nanningbob's posts.

You can see the results we all have with it both in that thread and in this thread (Frosty's daily trades).


If you are not willing to take the time to read the threads (yes, I know they are very long) then you should NOT join this challenge. For those of us who have read them and understand the systems, lets have some fun!


I will be trading the following pairs to start with:
CHFJPY EURCHF EURJPY EURUSD GBPJPY GBPUSD USDCHF USDJPY
CHFJPY EURCHF EURJPY EURUSD GBPJPY GBPUSD USDCHF USDJPY

I will be running 100/40 on one set of them and Bastard with AWE on another set. Once I start my next account, it will be running with bastard in AWE standard and funky on two sets. After that, I will start mixing things up a bit with the 100/125, 60/40, etc..

Don't get greedy. $50 a day is doable. -$500 is also a reality if you get greedy. Take your profits and walk away. Some days, you will make more, some less. If you have made what you need, feel free to turn things off. DONT GET GREEDY.

Each week, we will track our progress here and see how things go, if we hit our dates and if we hit our profits. See you at the starting line!

Count me in Frostcall. I was actually just about to start trading this EA live, good timing, on my 1900$ mini account. Maybe I can manage to get it up to 2k by next week. If so I'll stop there and wait up.

Look forward to cataloging our success and failures. I wish I could say just success, but we all know that nothing is perfect. Hopefully our success will far outperform our failure.

Good luck to all!

Hi Frost,

The idea is fun, quite similar as my first journal.

But I stop my journal due to I found that I can know the results( for fun) by trying at the past data.

Use the same idea, try it on back test start from Jan08.
And u may not need to wait till 12 months to know the results.

As for mine, the accounts all hit MC within a month.

Anyway, good luck and no worry as it is in demo

p/s: I will continue with the idea after I can get EA with back test that continue profits without MC.

Not to sound mean or bust your bubble or anything, but this system/ea is really one of the ones that backtest results can REALLY differ from live results because it really isn't totally automated and takes some trader discretion. Like... for example closing traders on friday, trying to close out a death trade, etc. all these examples can't be tested 100% on a backtest, at least, that I know of.

Agreed. Backtesting on this EA is only the half of it. Also, making real money is way more fun than back testing

like hell yea!

Frosty,

I am in, but I'm starting with 1k on a micro and not quite as many pairs...But I'll be rooting you all on!!!

(I May start late a guy is wiring me cash and I haven't seen it yet UUUGGHHH)

Good Luck!


Jim

I have a question... so for your first account Frost you are running just normal AWE and 100+40 with not setting set to reverse/funky? For some reason 100+40 reversed doesn't always reverse the calls... that is why I ask. I have had times where it during a trade that is 4-5 trades deep it suddenly started adding to that position so suddenly instead of having a death trade with 8 trades I have one with 8+... Does the 'bastard' ea set to funky actually reverse the postion of the standard setting?

It should only do that if you are changing settings (properties) after the EA is running. Be sure to make your changes before starting the EAs. The 'funky' or reverse setting simply tells the EA to buy when it would normally sell, and sell when it would normally buy. It works on the normal or non-AWE setting as well, basically making it easier to do more with 1 EA. Let me know if you still have anymore problems. I'm currently running the pairs once with AWE and once with the normal, non-AWE. However, the GBPJPY is ranging so much right now that I may move it's settings to 100/125.

Odd. Nope... they were changed in the middle of the night after the EAs were running fine for a while. Like a death trade isn't bad enough

Yep! just saw it happen myself. I'll work on it tonight and tomorrow. I'm sure I just put something wrong in the code. Thanks for the heads up.

looks like it's not fixed. I'll work on it tonight.

Yeah, it doesn't even have to do with just your version of the EA either the 'bastard' one its the same with the 100+40 and Reverse enabled.

preliminary tests show that the current solution works in this version. Looks like I had to REALLY simplify things in the EA. give it a shot (demo) to see if it did the trick. So far, it's actually doing what it's supposed to do for me.

the next full version (bastardv05) will have an automatic MagicNumber to make it easier to use on multiple currency pairs. Also, I hope to add in support for nanningbob's new indicator.

Are we still going to try and do this Frost? I know you account took a beating, as did most peoples, with the recent major moves so you might not be starting with 2k.

All the same I was just wondering if you were still planing on doing this?

Yes! Sorry for the late reply, life has been rather crazy lately. I'm currently running 7 pairs and going for a daily goal of $25 instead of $50. Once I get the account back up to arround 2k, I will open up a few more pairs and shoot for $50 a day or more again. As you can see, I'm still updating my live status at: www.frostcall.com/mt4

I'm slooowly creeping back up but I'm still in it!

I'm actually using just AUD/NZD 50/20 range for my part of the 'challenge.' So far I like it... averaging about 45$ish for the past two weeks so it is fairly competitive and I rather like the fact that I'm only trading one pair. I plan to treat the account the same as a 100+40D one like in the challenge, ie. spliting them and such.

Let's see how it works out.

frosty
are you using the 1hr modified 100/40 EA or the old version?

I'm currently using Bastardv04 with AWE set to TRUE and FUNKY set to TRUE. Basically, it's designed to follow the trend using AWE on a 4 hour time scale. Still using:

Multiplier: 1.5
TakeProfit: 100
Pip spread: 40
MaxTrades: 8

Or, the '100x40'. I'm currently working on Bastardv05 which will have an automated magic number (hoorah!) and will automatically set the above numbers based on NanningBob's historical currency pair data that he posted a few days ago in his 100x80 thread. I plan on having 5 settings in order to cover all daily pip spreads 80% of the time. I'm using this little spreadsheet that I made to figure out the best settings.

'Coverage' shows you what the settings will handle, for example in the picture below, it will handle a 320 pip spread with no problems (this is the old standard 100x40 settings). The 'Total' is the gross 'profit', the sum of each lot. This is not necessarily in USD, it all depends on the currency. Regardless, I think that it's good to keep it around 25-30.

EDIT- 25-30 is good for a $1,000 account in order to keep your risk below 4-5% for each pair on a 'normal' basis. I highly recommend not going over 50 if you are trading several pairs. If you want to increase risk, adjust the lot size, since it allows a much slower incline to increased risk.

EDIT- OK, updated with Max Draw Down, showing what it would look like if the EA was maxed out and you were at the point where the EA would enter a new trade, only it's already past your Max Trades.

What are the settings you are using? ie, what's the multiplier set to and whats the max trades set to?