Mister ED's 4 hour Heikin Ashi system

I had 5 trades going on the USD when the dollar crashed and they all stopped out. What happened to the Dollar today? I guess in hindsight I shouldn't have entered all those trades against one currency. I great lesson but what went wrong?

Hi Longbar,

I've been testing the M30 and M15 tf's. I noticed that it traded almost every bar for awhile, and then stopped trading, displaying "INFO: CheckTrigger - this bar not marked for trading".
I had originally entered all 24 hours of bars to the EA and it saved them, but when I looked at the TradeTime field I saw that the entry had been truncated.

Here is a copy of the TradeTime M15 values still in the EA:
00:00 00:15 00:30 00:45 01:00 01:15 01:30 01:45 02:00 02:15 02:30 02:45 03:00 03:15 03:30 03:45 04:00 04:15 04:30 04:45 05:00 05:15 05:30 05:45 06:00 06:15 06:30 06:45 07:00 07:15 07:30 07:45 08:00 08:15 08:30 08:45 09:00 09:15 09:30 09:45 10
The rest, up to 23:45, were truncated. The field allows entry, appears to save them in the .set file, but when you exit the EA screen, then open it again, over half the entries are missing.

The field apparently has a smallish character limit.
If the field size can't be adjusted programmatically, could you work around by creating a "switch" that interprets a completely blank field as allowing all candles to be traded?

I already tried emptying the field but I still get the
"INFO: CheckTrigger - this bar not marked for trading" message.

Cheers,

JR

Yeah, I installed an FXCM demo account to play with this. Manual pending order submit takes the provided expiration date into consideration - however the same ignored when provided from an MQ4 scripts, ie EA. Similarly to SL/TP the expiration date must be set in a follow up order, so we fall back to the existing TwoStepOrderSubmit feature and its scope had to be expanded with the expiration date as well...

The attached EA v0.15.2 has to fixes:

 

1. Expiration date now allocated in the second step for ECN type brokers like FXCM (set TwoStepOrderSubmit to true to enable this mode)
2. A recovery process fix I ran into when the second pending order submit fails after a retracement trigger

JR: you should see now the expiration date for all the pending orders and those should be cancelled by the broker at the end of the bar should they not get triggered earlier. Well at least that's the hope

Longbar

Hi JR,

That's right, a string input to the EA will be truncated to max 255 characters. This way the list can cater for all the schedule up to 30M granularity/chart. For the 15M or less TF charts the full list would be longer than the 255 chars so some bars will have to be left out.

I like the idea of the empty list which means all possible bars. This is the way already implemented for backtest runs, if the day is listed at TradeDay and the corresponding TradeTimeXXX is left empty then the EA would consider all possible bars. I will make this feature available to "normal" (ie non backtest) mode as well.

Cheers
Longbar

Hi,

In order of importance, I'd like to see the following:

 

1. Proper order handling during counter trigger. I assume the close & reverse that's currently implemented is the choice, but Mr Ed might have other best results to consider.
2. Option to "Trade opposite to signal." I've made several days tests on the M15 (3% & exit2, $25k account) and each one has had a losing trades rate between 80-92 %. This happened while the M30, with otherwise identical settings, was profitable during the exact same trade times. I've so far tested only during the Asian and very early London session. Last night the M30 was +$1,250 for the period, while trading the opposite of the M15 signals would have netted +$9,350 (3% & exit0). It's worth exploring, especially on shorter tf's in ranging market conditions where the HAS is consistently behind and a great counter trade indicator.
3. Option to set a minimum SL for exit1 entry. Occasionally a trade is triggered where the ATR is very low (2-9 pips)but the 50-200 % requirement is met. It leads to a trade where the SL is just a few pips away and is quickly triggered in the noise. Setting a minimum # of pips SL could provide a wider SL if you want to take the trade. The low momentum in these instances would make me personally pass on the trade so I'd prefer setting a "minimum ATR pips required to trade" value. EURGBP is good example of pair that sometimes stagnates but still triggers a trade and then gets stopped out quickly.
4. Option to limit combined risk. Something simple like "Max # of open trades" or "Minimum % Margin Required to Trade"
5. Option to use the wick or body of the HAS indicator for TSL. I've used both the original and the v2 and they give identical results in exit 1&2, but I assume that's because it's using the body, not the wick. Wicks are more pronounced in v2 and I'd like to test to see which is more profitable in use.
6. Tracking maximum retracement since order open

The T3 is not of interest. Additional indicators, however well intentioned and logical appearing, usually just muddy the method and results and invite discretionary trades. KISS.

I check the news frequently during the day and consider it essential, but I don't want it included in the EA. Too complex an addition. Most traders will trade some, but not all, red/ orange events, so a simple flag won't work and you're back to assessing each event and deciding trade/ no trade. There are several free news indicators that will post recent/ upcomming events and you can filter for red, orange, yellow flags per FF calendar. Keep it separate and choose the one you like best, or just check the news calendars. Again, KISS.

Being able to Enable/disable retracement trigger entry wouldn't hurt, but I don't believe it offers much potential for improving results, so it would be a low priority.

JR

I submitted a post yesterday about some trades I made against the USD which all failed. Did anybody else place these trades? On looking back at them they were all against the daily trend. Mr Ed is this something you take into consideration before making the trade?

I'm using the mister ED strategy about two days, but i can understand this points:

1- How i can used the stop loss?
2- when i konw the signal to close the trade?

Hi Mister Ed and everyone

Do you still find the optimization settings set out below and in your system document profitable or has yours changed?

GBPJPY-trade every day
GBPUSD-trade only Monday, Tuesday
EURJPY-trade Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday
EURUSD-trade Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday
USDCAD-trade Monday, Friday
EURGBP-trade every day
AUDUSD-trade just Monday
AUDJPY-trade every day
NZDUSD-trade Monday, Friday
USDJPY-trade every day
Gold-trade Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday

How much do you emphasize the importance of this factor to the success of the system.

Would be great if Mister Ed or anyone with some experience of using this system to answer my question.

Hi Bar, Ianforex and everyone

The optimization is there to improve the performance of the system. Without it the system works but not as well. I am still fiddling around with these settings and may have more information in the next few weeks.
Last month was the worst on record, on the regular trades I lost 104 pips and the optimised settings lost 336 pips. Most of that difference came about on the last day so it gives a wierd reversal of the optimisation.

August was a strange month and so I am not too disheartened for the longer term performance. This was just the first loss in 20 months. Now that the summer is over I feel that things will trend a bit more, especially after Fridays NFP results.

Ian as for your question about taking trades against the trend I agree that this may help, but it is then becoming a subjective trade which I have tried to avoid with this system. Because it is as close to automatic as I can get you will have losing trades. I also wouldn't probably have traded these signals live because it was the last day of August combined with being a Monday. This could be a tricky combination and so probably should be avoided. However as I am logging all possible trades I have included all of them in my statistics.

I will try to keep adding my input but the next few weeks are likely to be busy with the start of school and work etc.

Stick with the system as I feel that things are likely to improve this month.

All the best,

Mister ED

Mr Ed,

Thanks for the reply, I agree with you about trading on a Monday and at the end of the month, I'll learn a good lesson from this.

Cheers,

Ian

Mr Ed and others,

I was referred to this thread a few days ago and with much interest have been following along. I've read through the first 23 pages of this thread in detail and then skipped to p.48 where I got the v0.15 of the EA. I've been 'playing' with it in a demo account and think that I have everything pretty well understood.

I've even been playing with it dynamically in the M15 chart of EURUSD and made two very nice trades today.

I set up about 6 pairs using the H4 charts and just noticed 2 trades triggered at the 00:00 time mark.

USDCHF triggered a short on the H4 chart.

GBPUSD triggered long on the H4 chart.

Just to check my setup, do you agree these are valid signals?

Thanks!

I made a few small changes to the EA.

 

1. TradeDay and TradeTimeXXX parameters can be set to "All" to do trade for all day/bar opportunities
2. Time frame of the chart is used for trading when EAPeriod is set to 0
3. New parameter MaxOpenPriceDiff in pips allows/limits 2nd order recovery within X pips of the first order's open price

The new value 'All' can substitude the full list of either name of all days (TradeDay parameter) or time of all bars (TradeTimeXXX param). This will simplify setting up the EA when all opportunities should be traded. The All word is case sensitive, no spaces before after the word please...

The MaxOpenPriceDiff parameter provides a bit of +/- pips flexibility for the second order entry around the open price of the first order. If you want that the second order should not be submitted should the price since the first order moved away more than 10 pips then set the MaxOpenPriceDiff to 10. Note that this parameter value will be adjusted to 3 or 5 digit feed, ie multiplied by 10 in that case to deal with platforms using fraction pips.

Longbar

LB,

Nice additions to v16!!

Alsea

I figured out that the reason I was getting the Debug messages was due to the fact that I forgot to set "Allow Live Trading" in the params. I'd still like a reference to the usage of the StatMethod parameter.

There is one new feature to (back)test the performance of the standard and retracement entries independently as well as combined.

New feature:

 

1. EntryMethod parameter to trade only standard or retracement triggers, or both of them
   1. Value 0: Standard entry only
   2. 1: Retracement entry only
   3. 2: Both of them

Fixed:

 

1. Entry price for pending order was set incorrectly during recovery (introduced by addition of MaxOpenPriceDiff parameter yesterday )

Have a good trading!

Longbar

Hi BeerTrader,

The EA generates a statistical file upon detach/MT exit/EA parameter changes in the dialog window. The generation of this file is controlled by the StatMethod parameter value:

 

1. 0: stat file will never get generated
2. 1: stat file will be generated at the end of a backtest run (see Strategy Tester feature of MT terminal)
3. 2: stat file will be generated for live and demo accounts as well as backtest runs

For the last one ensure that you enabled "All History" in the Account History tab to list all the tickets from the past for the purpose of stat file generation.

Longbar

Hi, I finally got thru all this thread. Had too many distractions to do it all in 1 go.
A very very big thankyou to Mister ED for sharing his system and to LongBar for all his ea work.
Its very impressive seeing how LB has developed the ea piece by piece, adding functions on the way.
I play on a FXDD demo that was meant to be mini, but appears standard as 0.1 pip is $1 profit/loss on a USD pair. Time to load some charts.

Had a dig around for an old ea tutorial I read, along the lines of "Hello World", but it would look better with "Hello Mister ED".

If you check my posts under my name, I put a thankyou post on an ea Tutorial thread back in Jul09 that was a bit more advanced.

Beware of the programming bug, it will cost you more sleep than trading already does.

cheers scalpz

Hey,

Been catching up on this thread for a week or so and so excited about it. Manually entered 5 trades last week, all profitable. Set up the EA tonight and ran into some issues. I had two questions regarding the EA:

1) Is it possible to run the EA just as an indicator with trigger alerts, and not have it execute for you - so you have to manually enter the trade. I love the clarity of Mr. Ed's system, but have my hesitations about EA's (I'm green to forex so not comfortable handing over the reigns).

2) This may be beyond the scope of this thread, but wanted to report back. I set up a profile running the EA on a group of currency pairs on 4hr and 15min TF's. Several 15 min trades where triggered, but when it entered the initial orders, it used ATR from the 4hr charts instead of the 15 min charts - very bad. Any idea why this would happen? I'm attaching screen shot of chart that has some error messages. I know this thread is dedicated to Mr. Ed's criteria - 4hr, but I've had manual success with other time frames so would like to get EA working properly running multiple TF's in same profile, if its of use to others.

(having problems attaching screenshot, will add when I get it figured out)

Thanks to Mr. Ed, Longbar and everyone else for your contributions.

Best,

FF

So stepped back and just trying to run EA on 4hr charts, it opened AUD/JPY trade an hour after candle opened and it wasn't even a trigger candle - help?

Hi ForeverForex,

Please double check your EAPeriod parameter setting.

If you want the EA to trade the 15M timeframe, regardless what period the char is on, then set the EAPeriod to 3. This is different than the default of 6, which is for the 4H TF.

If you want the EA to trade the same TF of the chart then you set the EAPeriod to 0. In this case ensure that the chart is a 15M one.

Hope this would get it rolling,
Longbar