Find a great mechanical entry system with me

Only post in this thread if you would like to post a 100% mechanical system that will be part of this project. For any comments/criticism/condemnation/advice/tips you are welcome to pm me but please keep this thread clean.

I’m currently teaching myself to program and I have been testing a few strategies without too much luck. I often end up playing around with different exit strategies to try and optimize the system.

I’ve also realized that most 100% mechanical systems are not profitable over a long time.

I have now decided to try and find the best mechanical system/s with the highest winning percentages using a very basic exit strategy, where TakeProfit and StopLoss will be an equal amount of pips (e.g. Take Profit is 20 pips and StopLoss is 20 pips).

Once we find these systems they can surely be optimized with better exit strategies but we need to find systems that will consistently enough move in the forecasted direction first. (We may later open specific system threads.)

I hope this project will be valuable to beginner traders and traders without any programming skills to be able to test their strategies. If you spend hours doing manual backtests of 100% mechanical systems, you can save a lot of time by using a simple program.

For now only post your system if you have a basic system that you would like me to program and test. Please see the rules below.

I will also contribute some of my own systems. The results of the system will be posted in the forum once programming and testing has been completed.

I will also provide the poster of the system with the EA to play around with different settings. This will not be an EA that can be used for live trading; my programming is not even close to that standard (and an error may just wipeout your account). It will be a basic program to test your strategy.

Your system must comply to the following:
- 100% mechanical system i.e. no trader discretion at all, this does not mean indicators only – some price action systems can be programmed too. (If you are not sure if your system is 100% mechanical and programmable pm me before posting your system).
- TP and SL of equal size but minimum 10 pips
- Any timeframe (or multi-timeframe) from M1 to W
- System must make at least 2 trades per month
- Your rules must be clear and to the point, I don’t want to guess how the system works. Type out your rules before posting them, test if you can do a manual backtest following only those rules you have typed out.
- Point out whether your system should open a trade only at the end of a bar or any time the criteria have been met.

Testing and results:
- Testing will be backtests based on my MetaTrader historic data
- Testing will be done over a 5 year period, firstly on EUR/USD but also other currencies if there is potential
- Results will be posted as : “Number of trades”, “Average pips won per trade”

Only post in this thread if you would like to post a 100% mechanical system that will be part of this project. For any comments/criticism/condemnation/advice/tips you are welcome to pm me but please keep this thread clean.

Here are my rules for what I call the 4hr Fractal Channel Breakout. First you set up the chart with the fractal and fractal channel indicators on the 4hr chart ( you don't necessarily need the fractal indicator but I like to use it.)

The entry rules are quite simple, once you have a defined fractal (at least 2 bars on either side, the fractal will be the highest or lowest bar in the 5 bar formation) you open a long trade if price moves above the fractal high by 5 pips. I use a 30 pip take profit and 30 pip stop loss. This is just a random number I picked that seems to work decently, you can probably use different numbers for different pairs but I haven't done enough testing to find out what numbers to use for each pair.

I only take the trade one per breakout, so for example a long trade is triggered and price then moves against you to stop you out, I will not re-enter the trade if the fractal is broken in the same direction. I suppose you could re-enter but I've never tried it before so I don't do it.

The attached chart shows where you would enter a trade. I used a 50 pip TP and 25 pip SL for this one and entered in my Oanda demo and price hit the TP by 2 pips. The short trade would be the exact opposite, when price moves past the red line by 5 pips you would short.

The idea is to only trade every 4 hours so you check to see if there is a valid fractal formation formed and if there is you set a limit order and move on with your day. I hope I explained that clearly enough, if you need clarification on any part of the system let me know.

trublu

I've attached a very basic EA to test the fractal breakouts, before trying different settings please check if the EA takes the trades correctly by comparing it with manual trades over a short period. At the moment the EA will take re-entries on fractals (e.g. if we take a fractal break long and price then moves down under that fractal it will trade the next break too).

Remember to edit TP, SL and Buffer according to your broker's digits, add a zero to all three if necessary.

This is my backtest results with my Fractal Breakout EA. I have tested daily and 4H timeframes with the same setting, TP 30, SL 30 and Buffer 5. Interesting results... Comments welcome.

Interesting results, when you get a chance can you try 50 TP and 25 SL, when I tried to do it, it was showing my TP at 60 and my SL at 30, I've tried those numbers before but not what I was looking to test. I'm also interested to try it out after you program it to not re-enter, I wonder which way is better. Thanks again for making the EA. I'm going to link my old thread about fractal breakouts where Dopey is talking about this type of trading and how he does it. It might be able to help us out here with choosing specific TP and SL numbers.

trublu

http://www.forexfactory.com/showthre...=164704&page=3

Starting at post 36 is where he gets into measured moves.