Sixths trading - an EA by macman, Bob and Steve mk 2

SERIOUS WARNING

1. Most Forex traders lose all their money.
2. Using the robot posted here in trading Forex does not guarantee success.
3. Trading this robot could lead to serious financial loss.
4. Trading this robot without understanding its underlying trading strategies guarantees traders will lose their money.
5. This is not a set-and-forget ea; there is no such thing and anyone who tries to claim there is, is either stupid or lying. This ea requires frequent manual intervention.
   
6. To trade this robot, you have to understand how to use the Sixths indicator. To learn how to do this you need to learn NanningBob's V5 trading system, so go to http://www.forexfactory.com/showthread.php?t=246113
   

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Before reading this, read http://www.forexfactory.com/showthre...25#post5118825 then return here and carry on. The link will save you a lot of wasted time.
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Welcome to The Beast. Congratulations on finding your way here. Some of the brightest minds at FF are at work on this project. It is a fantastic piece of trading software.

There is a comprehensive user guide attached - th pdf. Read it for details of the trading strategies and info about the inputs. The pdf will direct you to the thread that produced the system that led to The Beast's creation (Nanningbob V5). You need to understand that system, but this thread is not a you-must-read-all thread. Read the user guide then keep up with the latest contributions and you will not go far wrong. If you have trouble reading the coloured sections in the guide, read this post http://www.forexfactory.com/showpost...postcount=1763 for a solution.

Confused, baffled and bewildered newbies, dump The Beast on demo charts, make sure the lot sizes are acceptable to your criminal, accept the defaults and sit back to watch until you do understand what is going on.

Live trading
Many of us are trading TB live and have been for some time. In an average week, it makes 1 - 1.5% profit on the balance at the start of the week. As the balance increases, so does the profit.

DO NOT mortgage the house and start a live account with $50,000. Forex trading requires traders to demostrate two huge personality traits:

 

1. Patience
2. Balls of steel

The idea is to start with a small account and grow the balance into a large account. This takes time - hence the patience bit. Once your equity exceeds your deposit (equity = balance - drawdown) by a comfortable margin, you are playing with 'free' money and can breathe a sigh of relief.

You need balls of steel because this trading leaves your account in drawdown (i.e. open trades with a 'loosing' balance) most of the time. I run my account with a near-constant floating dd of 5 - 10% of the balance. If you cannot tolerate dd, then go away now.

Lot sizes need to be tiny enough to withstand a colossal move against you without causing sleepless nights. It is impossible to offer accurate advice, so experiment on demo; if your lot sizes regularly cause more than 10% floating dd, then they are too high. For what it is worth, here are mine:

 

1. Broker: IBFX Australia
2. Leverage: 1:100
3. Lot size: 0.01 lots per $200 balance. Therefore my current lot size is 0.09 on my account balance of $1,807 (20th May 2011).

Various account-related filters make it possible to trade TB on umpteen charts without rising blowing the account, so long as your lot sizes are sane. You do need a lot of charts to generate a decent trading volume; TB is not a trading tart.

Much of this thread concerns development of the first incarnation of The Beast and is of no relevance. I closed the thread for a while; we were developing Beastie and I thought this thread had run its useful course. This turns out to be a wrong assumption. Posts following its re-opening begin at post 620 on page 42 (http://www.forexfactory.com/showpost...&postcount=620.

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Updates that do not appear in the user guide
None of this appears in the user guide. It is experimental and I cannot guarantee that there are no bugs.

Remember also that this is experimental. The only proven White Box trading method is the Original.

1st June 2011
Recent discussion has centred around the fact that most pairs of White Box pending trades are filled, and how best to take advantage of this. TB now has three White Box trading method:

 

1. Original: on entry to the box, TB sends pendings as described in the user guide. UseOriginalMethod is the input that controls this.
2. Inverted: on entry to the box, TB sends opendings thus:
   1. A Buy Limit order where the Sell Stop trade would otherwise be sent, i.e. below the white box.
   2. A Sell Limit order where the Buy Stop trade would otherwise be sent, i.e. above the white box.
   3. UseInvertedMethod is the input that controls this

3. Same price: on entry to the white box, this sends Buy Stop/limit and Sell Stop/limit orders at the middle white line. You might need to widen the box to avoid 'invalid stop' errors. UseSamePriceMethod is the input that controls this.

SleepSecondsBetweenTrades sends TB to sleep briefly in between trade sends; set it to zero to turn this off. FXtime requested this feature as his crim has a minimum time in between trades; it occurred to me that it might help avoid missing the second trade send because of the 'trade context busy' error so beloved of the crappy MT4 platform.

4th June 2011
slowkey posited this at http://www.forexfactory.com/showthre...0#post4660300:

 

1. trend is up if: 100sma > 200sma and market is > 100sma, so only box trade long
2. trend is down if: 100sma < 200sma and market is < 100sma, so only box trade short
3. any other conditions = ranging, so no box trading

I coded an ea to trade this. After the first few days, this looked to have legs, so I have added this method as a filter to the White Box trading method. The advantages are huge:

 

1. we can apply the balance, only-trade-a-currency-twice etc filters that are such an advantage in ct trading.
2. no more hedged pairs filling both sides of the trade. Granted, the one that does fill can easily turn into the loser that needs Recovery that the original losing side of the hedge did but hey, life is never perfect.
3. US citizens now have access to White Box trading

I know what inveterate tinkerers you folks at FF are, so the moving averages are user inputs. I have buried them at the end of the inputs so they do not get in the way - look for the "----Moving averages----" inputs.

An important point to note is this: because TB sends only one White Box trade using this method, it immediately becomes a CT trade so far as TB is concerned.

ONLY TRADE THE ORIGINAL METHOD LIVE. THE OTHER METHODS HAVE BUGS AND/OR ARE STILL EXPERIMENTAL.

1st November 2011. The Beast With Hanover
I have not completely replaced The Beast with this version because it will be a miracle if LUC does not take his buddies out for a bender.

There are two sets of inputs: one for White Box trading, prefixed by "Wb"; one for CT trading, prefixed by "Ct". There are separate time-frame inputs for both; inputs are entered as normal. There is only one set of confirmation and threshold inputs.

The Hanover filter is only called at trade-send time. If there are no trades likely, then the screen values are likely to be out of date. When first run, they will not display at all.

Coders, I have used a variable, TradingStyle, to hold either 'wb' or 'ct' to tell TB which time-frame input to use in reading the RS values. The file reading functions are called from within void WhiteBoxTrading() and void CalculateTrades().

I have removed all the WB trading options; if we use Hanover to guide our trading direction, then we do not need the options. If you still want those, then continue to use The Beast.
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Margin level hedge monitor EA
This ea monitors the margin percent and will hedge the pair if the ml falls to 500. Load it onto a chart for the pair that is causing the trouble, set your hedge trade lot size and select the buy or sell. Don't get any of this wrong; there are no idiot checks.



Ok, have fun. Make profit. The rest of us are.

http://cdn.forexfactory.com/images/s...m/big_grin.gif

Useful utilities/EA's/scripts

 

1. MaryJane has posted a fabulous utility to allow us to resize EA input windows: http://www.forexfactory.com/showthread.php?t=299017
2. Multi purpose trade manager: http://www.forexfactory.com/showthread.php?t=89371
3. Account equity analyser: http://www.forexfactory.com/showthre...16#post4693716

Most promising trading EA's

 

1. Reversi: http://www.forexfactory.com/showthread.php?t=294255
2. Ibuks: http://www.forexfactory.com/showthre...88#post4656888
3. FTLR: http://www.forexfactory.com/showthre...85#post3831885

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Traders familiar with my work need read no further.

Posting restrictions
I have restricted the ability to post in this thread to: traders with at least 1 voucher; and traders on my 'buddy' list. I have done this because I do not want the thread cluttered with 'newbie' questions about the basics. New/inexperienced traders, this is not intended as a direct insult. What I want here is discussion with traders who fully understand what it is they are doing; when you newbs have been around a while, you will come to understand what a difference experience makes to the posts a member writes and shudder at the recollection of some of the questions you asked. I do. http://cdn.forexfactory.com/images/s..._the_floor.gif Go to your profile page; there is a link to the FF page that describes the voucher process.

Do not attempt to get around this by sending me pm's asking for help with your basic problems. Doing so will earn you an automatic ban from all of my threads.

I have set up a partner thread to this one and Nanningbob's at http://www.forexfactory.com/showthre...66#post3948666
There, you can post the questions that you cannot post here, about anything you need to know. Someone with the knowledge and experience you need will answer. I opened it for Nanningbob traders, but feel free to ask about this robot as well.

Traders/coders with experience who have not yet been vouched for, can get around this restriction be being added to my 'buddy' list; all you have to do is pm me to ask me to do this.

Here we go...
I was waiting for your reaction on the other thread...

Well done my friend!

I think your signature probably sums up my feelings.

Cheers

Thanks Steve,
I was getting a heck of a headache.....

whip

gpse sent me an email pointing out a bit of a bloop in the auto BarCount code. For the coders, I declared multiplier as an integer rather than a double, so > H1 charts would usually display incorrect sixths lines.

This is corrected in post 1. Cheers gpse.

I did post some issues in tb, hopefully that post can be addressed at some point?

I would not count on it. Especially tonight.

Even tomorrow, you had better be sure they really are issues.

You are a God Send for my simple brain. As I mentioned before I am running the beast live on five pairs with default settings, with exception of Primary trades only 0.01 lots, on a fresh account with FXDD Malta (these yankee brokers are finding some strange places to set up shop!!!). After 10 days my account is in profit $61 with around DD of $4 (FOUR Dollars). So as you say this thing is not broke so why fix it. IMHO there are many other profitable concepts and they should have their own threads. The BEAST is the BEAST and thus far it is working as it should, so it must not be tampered with. Fine tuning and refining yes, but tampering no.

Kind Regards

Us Simple Brains have to stick together. For More Complex Brains, we have the likes of macman, to whom we really owe a debt of gratitude.

The Gap worked well for me tonight. UJ +64 on the Primary plus the extra from the Secondary.

If only all days could start out the same.

Hi to all - with thanks to the brains behind the system.
Am testing the beast on 11 pairs, monopoly money. Just primary trades. Will not use recovery or hedging, but a fixed stop loss around 3xATR, and, keeping an eye on the pairs twice a day or so, opt out of taking new trades at the slightest whiff of trending.

Bon voyage to all for the coming week.

Sounds like A Plan to me. I hope it works for you, because then it can work for the rest of us.

Can't imagine they aren't 'really' issues, as there is no point in having 'reentrypips' input if it ignores it by the time it gets there.
But hey, since everyone seems content with it the way it is, will probably never be fixed I guess.

I have been running a demo of TB since the 12th of october. Started with 25k. Trading .3 P and .1 S on 12 pairs. Current balance is 32,895 with a 3600 open DD. That is still a 17% gain in equity in two weeks. Changes? .... we don't need no stinkin' changes. (shameless take off on blazing saddles)

Hi Steve,

thanks for starting this fresh thread, are you a mind reader?

Have a great week

PC

Support to you Steve for keeping the thread pure and simple, by the way I beat you on EJ, 96 pips on the primary. (111.914 to 112.873)

What pairs are you trading, Plateman? I have had some luck with about 12 pairs.. but i put that down to luck. Seems like 4 majors and GBPJPY is the was to go!

Steve...now about turning this EA into a grid trading one using renko bars... ONLY KIDDING!!!!!

Hi Everyone

Does anyone still seem to be getting the pendings not deleted or in the journal the message that so and so order could not be deleted still
I still get both errors yet I have the lastest version
This was the fix that gpse did when steve was away
Can you all look at your journals and see it you get the message anywhere
Thanks
Edit ; sorry look in the experts tab aswell

I'm trading 12 pairs, GBPUSD, EURGBP, EURUSD, USDJPY, GBPJPY, EURJPY, USDCAD, AUDCAD, USDCHF, AUDJPY, EURAUD, and AUDUSD. I did well on the EURJPY trade because I'm using BE=40, BE Profit=10 and Trailing stop=30, but this strategy is unproven.