The journey to full time trading!

I have been involved with FX for 3 years. What a crazy journey it has been! Like many of the people that have been at this for a while i have tried most systems and aproaches out there. I lost money and made money but consistency has been somewhat out of my reach. Since i have a full time job (bills need to be paid) it has been difficult for me to come up with a way to profit from this market while keeping my job. So i started working towards creating an EA to do the trading for me. After working on a variety of concepts and approaches i have finally cooked up an EA that is showing a lot of promise. The EA has been profitable in backtest and live forward test. So i decided to put some more money behind it and see what happens. I will start trading on 01/11/09. This thread will be a place where i will keep track of my progress and record some of my ideas along the way.
I do not have any specific goals/targets, at least not short term. My aim is to see if this thing can be consistently profitable. The trading will be live at IBFX and the account will have $5000 in it. It should be an interesting experiment since the only trading i've done before was manual. It will take some getting used to the idea of having a robot doing the work.

PS I am not willing to share or sell this EA (for a lot of different reasons) so please no requests of any kind!!!

Went live last night. Did not have any time the past week to write more details about the strategy. Here is a screenshot with the account balance:

Good luck!. May your ea adjustments be fruitful!.

I've been working on a system for a while ... and havent been succesful with my EA yet. So I keep falling back on manual trading. Have you demo'd your ea during live trading? for a while?

Thank you and we'll see!

I have demo traded the system for about a month just to try and spot any potential bugs. I also live traded the system with real money for about a month as well with a smaler account. Since the system has shown a profit across all different kinds of tests i decided to bump the account up some and take the plunge.

The firsrt week is over and the results are pretty good. I'll post the results later on today but before i do that i would like to write a little about the EA.
Currently the EA is traded on 5 pairs:

EUR/CHF
USD/JPY
NZD/USD
AUD/CAD
AUD/NZD

I have tested and optimized the EA on 10-12 pairs. I chose to trade only those pairs that had shown a profit on more than 90% of the passes done during optimization. The settings chosen were those that had the best profit to drawdown ratio. The position sizing used in tests showed a max. dd of 10%. This is how i came up with the above 5 pairs.

In the future i may add more pairs, but it seems that in order to do that i would need to look for additional filters for the EA, and at the moment my time is very limited so will see.

The EA is very sensitive to volatility. Too much volatility (relative to the volatility during the testing period) and the EA could run into problems DD wise. Too little and the profits will be dramaticaly reduced. I may need to reoptimise every few months or so if sharp changes in volatility will present themselves.

I may withdraw half of the profit on weekly basis for a few weeks. Will post the results of the last week as soon as i get home to my desktop.

Ok so here is a screenshot from the daily confirmation sent out by my broker. This is the last one i got last week:

This one is from the trading terminal:

The results for individual pairs:

And the equity curve:

Hey mate, what program are you using to produce these graphs?

Thanks, and good luck.

MM

Hi Sergiu,

Pls attached the trade statement.
From the equity curve, seems you play with some martingale EA.
Is it correct?

For the graphs i use excel. I am downloading all of my transactins from the broker's web site in csv format then import that into excel. I wrote some vba code that alows me to quickly process that data and format it in the way i want then generate the graphs.

Yes it is corect. The strategy adds to loosers in a martingale like fashion, however the strategy is a far cry from the classic martingale or the variations seen on this and other forums. Every martingale flavor out there that i have played with was unable to survive in backtests for more than 6 months. They may work with some heavy manual intervention but i wanted a completely automated strategy. HTH

Took out $78 last week. Here is this weeks summary:

Totals from the terminal:

Results per pair for last week:

The 2 weeks side by side:

And the equity curve: