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Snowballs and the anti-grid

  • #101
  • Jun 30, 2010 3:37pm Jun 30, 2010 3:37pm
Quoting censura
If we put a line to trigger trades each time it hits line will it open a new trade ie let say it bounces up and down around the same point for 10min will it trigger 10 orders?
the lines will only trigger once, then they change color and the description will contain the word "triggered".

You should test all this on a demo account. You can also use the backtester in visual mode: pause the backtest, place or move the lines or move the buttons and then resume it and see how it behaves.
  • #102
  • Jun 30, 2010 11:33pm Jun 30, 2010 11:33pm
Hi everyone

Well I have one technical problem. When I start running this program it is getting to load date from last
60 days. I can use all 3 modes while loading this date but when system
is done I can not perform any action ad it is automatically disable!
Why does it not working in real time?
  • #103
  • Jul 1, 2010 1:56am Jul 1, 2010 1:56am
This robot creates a unique magic number for each currency pair. This means if there are 3 open EURUSD trades at the same time they will all have the same unique magic number from snowball.

I need snowball to increase the magic number by one digit so each new trade has a different magic number and multiple trades from the same currency pair can be managed separately:

EURUSD trade 1, snowball assigns magic number 28206787
EURUSD trade 2, snowball assigns magic number 28206788
EURUSD trade 3, snowball assigns magic number 28206789

etc.
  • #104
  • Jul 1, 2010 7:47am Jul 1, 2010 7:47am
i tried this on mt4 demo...may i ask will the default setting for the ea closed trade for us?

i saw a few profitable trades exited in account history with no take profit level setted...is this normal?
  • #105
  • Jul 2, 2010 4:04pm Jul 2, 2010 4:04pm
Quoting wheelbarrow
I need snowball to increase the magic number by one digit so each new trade has a different magic number
Are you kidding me?

This is not the way magic numbers were ever supposed to be used. Magic numbers are ID numbers that are used to group trades together. All trades belonging together have the same magic number. And all trades of one instance of snowball belong together!

Snowball will manage all its own trades with only one unique magic number per instance because it needs only one group. You don't need to care about this mechanism at all or mess around with it in any way, its all working automatically and flawlessly!

There are a lot of functions that operate on a group of trades. common_functions.mqh is full of such functions and the way this grouping is done is following the official recommendations and is a paradigm that is fundamental to all of my MT4 code.

What would be your suggestion how I should group my trades if I cannot use the MN grouping anymore because you need the MN to hold some sort of stupid counter? What would be your suggestion?

It is neither possible nor ever needed in any way to abuse the MN for things it was never meant for.

Your request does not make any sense. You will have to write your own EA pretty much from scratch if you don't want to use this system and the EA as it is.
  • #106
  • Jul 2, 2010 4:10pm Jul 2, 2010 4:10pm
Quoting hewtwok
i tried this on mt4 demo...may i ask will the default setting for the ea closed trade for us?

i saw a few profitable trades exited in account history with no take profit level setted...is this normal?
By default the auto_tp is set to 2 which means it will close all trades (and end the current cycle and go back to stopped mode) as soon as price is a distance of 2 levels (the value for auto_tp) above break even. ("above" profit wise)

You can deactivate auto_tp by setting it to 0. You can draw stop lines instead or close manually. Stop lines are explained somewhere in this thread.
  • #107
  • Jul 4, 2010 2:36pm Jul 4, 2010 2:36pm
7bit,
I discovered your Snowball-EA today and backtested it for about 5 hours while reading all postings and other things connected to this all.

I traded with Grid-EAs a few years ago and made up to 2500 Pips daily with them.
Other traders showed daily profits of 50 - 100 % with their Grid-EAs ......
and all of them - including myself -
ended in margin calls.
No exceptions.

No wonder that traders are trapped using Grid-EAs and abandon them forever after losing 2 or more live-accounts ( the less greedy destroy about 10 - 20 Demo-accounts only and then move the EAs into the recycle bin ).

About your Snowball-EA:
Wowwww !!!

I am more than glad that you have shared this EA and I am happy that I found your thread.

Thanks a hundred thousands times.

The EA is perfect as it is.

Only thing which remains is:

a) finding the best distance

b) finding the best entries

Thatīs all - and of course proper MM.

I donīt know if you are the first one who turned grid-trading around , but since I know of nobody else ......
I am calling you a Genius.

Thanks again.
It is the tool I was looking for in my manual trading.

Who has the perfect trend-detection system ?
There are so many and almost all of them
are able to pick big moves.
With your tool, the profits will roll in like a river.
  • #108
  • Jul 6, 2010 2:35am Jul 6, 2010 2:35am
After another day trading live with the Snowball,
some ideas came up.

1. Would be fine to have an option to chose
a) pending orders .... as it is
b) instant market order either buy or sell according to what direction I chose plus the pending-order into the direction of the market-order.

2. I was long in GBPUSD and 2 levels in profit.
I drew a trendline with "stop" in the description which the Snowball immediately accepted.
I placed it below the price in an angle to let it stop
the Snowball still in profit on both levels,
but price penetrated down through the line and nothing happened.

The stop-line is working above the price on Longs
and below price on Shorts.

Is that intended ?

Regards
  • #109
  • Jul 6, 2010 6:05am Jul 6, 2010 6:05am
Quoting fxtr51
Who has the perfect trend-detection system ?
There are so many and almost all of them
are able to pick big moves.
There are of course many ways to do this; I personally prefer hand-drawn trendlines, including horizontal support/resistance. These old-school methods will always work. You just have to always be on the lookout for trending pairs.

Volatility expansion setups should work well for this, though I haven't tried it myself. Wait for a period of low volatility in a range and trade the breakout. You could set your anti-grid spacing according to some multiple of the range width or volatility (maybe ATR). Volatility expansion setups work on the theory that periods of low volatility are followed by high volatility.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
  • #110
  • Jul 6, 2010 8:57am Jul 6, 2010 8:57am
Quoting fxtr51
7bit,

I donīt know if you are the first one who turned grid-trading around , but since I know of nobody else ......
I am calling you a Genius.
Pyramiding is probably as old as the markets are.
Even Jesse did it.
  • #111
  • Jul 7, 2010 5:02am Jul 7, 2010 5:02am
Quoting fxtr51
After another day trading live with the Snowball,
some ideas came up.

1. Would be fine to have an option to chose
a) pending orders .... as it is
b) instant market order either buy or sell according to what direction I chose plus the pending-order into the direction of the market-order.
this would require some non trivial amount of rewrite in the code and I don't see any benefit for doing it. Until proven otherwise I continue considering "stop hunting" a myth.

Quote

The stop-line is working above the price on Longs
and below price on Shorts.

The stop line should always trigger. how far did price go over the line an was it for longer than only one tick? (It should also trigger if it is only one tick but there might be the possibility that start() was not called for this tick because it happened too fast and the previous call to start() was not finished yet). If the stop line really does not trigger under some circumstances this would be a bug.
  • #112
  • Jul 7, 2010 5:15am Jul 7, 2010 5:15am
Quoting 7bit
The stop line should always trigger. how far did price go over the line an was it for longer than only one tick? (It should also trigger if it is only one tick but there might be the possibility that start() was not called for this tick because it happened too fast and the previous call to start() was not finished yet). If the stop line really does not trigger under some circumstances this would be a bug.
I donīt remember exactly.
I saw the price cross the stop-line, but did not analyze how long and what distance ( maybe it did not move the whole spread-distance ).

Since nobody else has reported this, I assume it is not a bug.

Quoting TJPLD
Pyramiding is probably as old as the markets are.
Even Jesse did it.
Yes, he used pyramiding, but he did not write an EA and he does not mention Grid-EAs. LOL.

I have witnessed people tweaking Grid-EAs for years but only 7bit turned it around to an anti-grid thing. That is a great achievement.
This is called creativity.
  • #113
  • Jul 7, 2010 1:48pm Jul 7, 2010 1:48pm
Quoting fxtr51
I have witnessed people tweaking Grid-EAs for years but only 7bit turned it around to an anti-grid thing. That is a great achievement.
This is called creativity.
I have seen somewhere in the oanda forums a posting by somebody who did almost the same (manually on the oanda platform). This posting was iirc from 2007 or so, there are some old threads about grid trading. He called his invention "burst grid". I only found it later after I already designed the first version of my EA but technically the burst grid would be prior art.
  • #114
  • Jul 8, 2010 2:45am Jul 8, 2010 2:45am
Aye, pyramiding in this style has been done manually for a while now. It used to really be a pain to keep setting up the orders, especially when the market would turn and negate all your orders anyway.

That said, 7bit is definitely the first to make publicly available such a fantastic piece of time saving code. For that, I am extremely grateful! It has opened up some very unique and interesting opportunities!

When I make my fortune, I'll definitely remember to send a tip your way.
  • #115
  • Jul 13, 2010 2:22pm Jul 13, 2010 2:22pm
Most of the EAs that I have tried previously were, mostly, a waste of time and money (had you used them on a live account).

Thanks to 7bit, Snowball is an exception. It works very well and the results in demo account are encouraging. I think that some SL & TP adjustments may be necessary, according to the daily range of the pair that you are trading.

I've yet to have it switched on when the EU does one of it's false break outs and then gets stuck in a 40 pt range for 6 hours though! Perhaps some form of conservative progression, of the mini lots, may recoup those losses. Has anybody tried this approach?

This is an EA that I will be using, constantly, as part of my "hopefully never lose again" strategy. Congratulations 7bit on developing this. A nice job.
  • #116
  • Jul 15, 2010 9:57am Jul 15, 2010 9:57am
7bit, for this ea to work, does the mt4 has to be turned on all the time so that it will run? or will the ea run even when mt4 program has been shut down?
  • #117
  • Jul 15, 2010 10:19am Jul 15, 2010 10:19am
Quoting hewtwok
7bit, for this ea to work, does the mt4 has to be turned on all the time so that it will run? or will the ea run even when mt4 program has been shut down?
It's no an automated System.
Even if it was it has to run somewhere in order to do something so turning of MT4 or your PC won't exactly help.
  • #118
  • Jul 15, 2010 10:23am Jul 15, 2010 10:23am
Quoting hewtwok
7bit, for this ea to work, does the mt4 has to be turned on all the time so that it will run? or will the ea run even when mt4 program has been shut down?
Once the EA is started (i.e. smiley face) and put in long, short, or bi-directional mode (by clicking one of the EA's buttons) it actively manages the positions until one of the exit conditions occurs. The EA has to be running all the time until it's in stopped mode. If you manually turn it off without clicking the EA's stop button, you'll potentially run into trouble.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
  • #119
  • Jul 15, 2010 7:40pm Jul 15, 2010 7:40pm
Quoting hewtwok
or will the ea run even when mt4 program has been shut down?
I have not yet succeeded in writing computer programs that run without a computer but i keep trying. This would be a breakthrough and greatly reduce hardware costs.


The trades all have stoplosses attached to them, so the worst case after a black out is ending up with all trades closed but no new ones opened, should the price reverse afterwards.
  • #120
  • Jul 15, 2010 7:53pm Jul 15, 2010 7:53pm
Hey there 7bit,

I tried it out yesterday successfully. My initial experiment was to do a bidirectional breakout of a consolidation range that had formed on EURUSD.

It ended up staying range-bound and I got stopped out 9 times in a row before things finally broke out. It ended up closing in profit.

What I may do in the future is spread out the steps so that they're a multiple of the current trading range. The initial steps were too close to the range so they kept getting triggered and whipsawed.

Even better, wait for an even smaller consolidation (low volatility period) and leave it at 20 pips. This seems almost perfect for volatility breakouts.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
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