The Captain: an always-in auto-trader by SteveHopwood

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 strategy guarantees traders will lose their money.

I received this pm from The Captain:

"Steve,

I am an intraday trader but am testing a new system and I need an EA. I'm wondering if you would be willing to help me out.

It is a very simple EA, I'm willing to bet one of the simplest you've ever coded. Here is what I am looking for.

Let's assume blue are bullish candles and red are bearish.

Candle prints blue, buy.
Candle prints red, sell.

But have it continuous. Fore example. keep buying on every blue candle close, until a red prints, and then close all and reverse.

Blue-buy, blue-buy, blue-buy, red-close all and sell, red-sell blue-close all and buy etc.

With the following selections

Lot Size
Time Frame
TP and SL (in Pips)

That is it, very simple. Hopefully you could help me out or point me in the right direction.

Cheers!"

The bot is attached. When dragged onto a chart, it will wait for the opening of the next candle to send the first trade. Users trading the high tf's might want to enter the first trade manually.

Everything happens at the opening of a new candle, so backtesting in st is quick and easy - set it to open prices. H4/D1 are the profitable time frames but Cap can tell you more.

I have not coded in the TF choice, so trade the bot on your chosen tf.

I included my fav Rsi trend filter (UseRsi) to see if it makes any difference to lower tf's. It appears not but is easy to play with.

Please address questions about the trading method to The Captain. All I have done is code the bot and know nothing of what is in TC's mind.

Have fun.

Another toy to play with.... Great one Steve..

Hello Steve, subscribed !

This is more or less my exact trading style I tried to describe some days ago. I will watch this very close and try to contribute when I have more time.

In short : I use two indicators instead of the candle closes, but the rest is nearly the same !

Cheers a lot, George

Thank you Steve, I´m in.......

Cap, I just had a bath-loll.

Given that once a price has moved in the same direction for a while a retrace is coming, is it worthwhile:

 

1. having a cap on the number of trades that can be opened - a MaxTrades input?
2. When MaxTrades is reached, adding a trailing/jumping/candlestick stop?

Steve , u wont believe me when i say , i was thinking about the captain's idea , thanks alooooooooooot

Hi Steve
Another Toy to play.....


I am in...

velli

dear all,

FYI, based on my back test result, the eurusd and usdchf on 4H TF and enable RSI filter that could got profit performance from 2010 to now, but before 2010 the performance are bad.

Steve , i am not so good with historical and backtesting ,but i will use Dukacopy MT4 demo and test , and i will put results here , also i will forward test for the next 6 months but after the backtests , thanks a lot again.

i am glad to catch one of ur threads from the beginning

I am demoing this on the D1 chart, and I realised there is a need to avoid the Sunday candle, so I have added a CriminalHasSundayCandle for this. With this set to true and the trading period being the D1 chart, Cap will look at Friday's candle on Monday.

Update in post 1.

Hehe. It remains to see whether this one goes the way of most of them.

Hello

This cute little ea could be doing nice if put on renko chart.

Just have to make the ea ignore the second candle when on renko, to avoid unnecessery losses...

Ideal renko candle size is 10 to 50 pips, been trading this way for some time, and it is profitable...

Thomas

the simplest makes wonders , can you also add the previous version please ?

Steve , can you check the idea here
http://www.forexfactory.com/showthread.php?t=74793

, could be good to avoid small ineffective reversal candle , i am not asking you to make an EA like that , but you can make use of that

It seems a good idea, I m interesting I start forward test on TF 5mins.

How know which is the best TF for this EA.

the best is to test , but giving noise eliminations and taking spreads+commission into consideration , then anything above 4hr is good (4hr is good too) , but u can test on whatever you want , and see the results urself

Steve,
Did you add the maximum number of trades threshold feature?

Hi!
may be heiken ashi will do better job?

No I haven't. Not for any reason other than I haven't.

Let's see how this goes for now. If it looks good in a week or so, I shall add max trades, balance and only-trade-a-currency-twice a la TB.

Thanks again for making this Steve. I have no system in place, and this is more from an idea I have been testing.

So far the EA works great with a couple of bugs I have noticed.

1. If loaded on a chart in the middle of a 4 hour bar no trade is taken, which is good. However, this is hard to explain but if loaded the same way and on MT4 all the data hasn't loaded on the chart, and you grab the chart and drag it, the EA enters an order, sometimes twice.

2. I tested on a 1 minute chart and works flawlessly, but had it running on a 4 hour and came home to notice there were trades running both ways on the same pair (this could be from some of the trades that were opened during the chart drag I mentioned, and therefore did not close)

3. I just noticed that on my last 4 hour close it opened 2 identical orders for many pairs.

4. Is there any way to disable the trade context is busy error that happens when running on a lot of pairs? From what I have seen this has no effect as the EA seems to retry until the order goes through.

My manual backtesting with an excel spreadsheet shows far better results, I'm not sure why. I think I will test on visual mode and slow it down so I can watch candle by candle to try and find any differences.