002097's PwR scalping auto trading robot by Steve Hopwood

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 - turning it off at news time, that sort of thing.
6. At best, a trading robot is only 90% as good as the manual strategy it trades. At best. At worst, it can be much less effective. If the strategy is rubbish, so is the robot.
7. To trade this robot, you have to understand:
   1. How to use EA's.
   2. The concepts of: higher-highs and higher-lows; lower-highs and lower-lows, for Aurora.
   3. The concept of the power of 'round', or 'big' numbers.
   4. The concepts of breakeven, trailing and jumping stops.

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22nd October 2011. This EA appears to be a failure and I no longer have any interest in it. Continue at your own risk. This is not a reflection on the trading strategy. What follows is the original thread.
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DO NOT USE THESE EA's ON LIVE ACCOUNTS

There are two EA's available here:

 

1. Aurora
2. Gi

The only difference between them is the pending trade trigger.

AURORA

Introduction

cmac0351 asked me to look at this thread with a view to coding an EA for it: http://www.forexfactory.com/showthread.php?t=292877

Weekend backtesters: remember to widen the MaxSpread input or this filter will stop any trading.

Here is my understanding of the system:

 

1. Very short-term scalping
2. M5 EU chart. Look for trades at the start of each new candle.
3. PwR indi:
   1. Blue = rising trend
   2. Red = falling trend

4. Candle_Range_in_pips: Must be <= 15. > 15 stops the trade.
   1. MinimumCandleRange is an optional extra filter that is not part of the original spec. If the trigger candle is < this value, the trade is not taken. The default of 0 turns this filter off.

5. Send a pending Buy at the previous candle high + spread when the previous candle's:
   1. PwR is blue
   2. high is higher and low is higher than that of two candles ago.

6. Send a pending Sell at the previous candle low - spread when the previous candle's:
   1. PwR is red
   2. high is lower and low is lower than that of two candles ago.

7. Stop loss: hi-lo of the previous candle, depending on trade direction. (I have included an optional StopLoss input that will override the hi-lo).
8. Take profit: fill price +- (depending on direction) length of the candle. (I have included an optional TakeProfit input that overrides the auto-calculated tp).
9. Unfilled pendings are deleted after 15 minutes.

The attached indis are downloaded from post 1 in the thread. You need them in your indi folder. You do not need them on your chart for the EA to work. You may want them on your chart for visual confirmation of the EA's behaviour.

Trading hours
These inputs work on you computer's local time, so you need to know what time it is where you live that the European markets get going and close down. Do not ask me about them here; do so and I will bar you from further posting in any of my threads without further warning.


Trading direction
None of these filters form part of the OP's system. I include them because they are part of the jiva bot that I have adapted for use here, and because they make sense to me.

The 'Trading Direction' inputs allow you to control the direction the EA can trade. If you only want it to trade in one direction, then set the other to false and turn off AutomateDirection.

From mysticgenie, I learned this:

 

1. if the market is below yesterday's pivot, it tends to fall
2. if above, it tends to rise.

From Ibuks, I learned this:

 

1. if the market is above the H4 candle open price it tends to rise
2. if below, it tends to fall

I have added two filters that allow you to take advantage of one or both of these ideas. Turn AutomateDirection to true, then select UseH4 and/or UsePivot to tell the EA to work out the trade direction for itself.

MustBeContinuingTrend is an input that allows you to tell the EA that the PwR histos must be moving in the right direction for the trade as well as being the correct colour.

Money management
Courtesy of jmw1970, we have the facility to trade lot sizes based on a pre-defined risk percentage. The lot size will adjust to reflect the amount of the account we are prepared to risk on each trade; this is based on the number of pips in the stop loss.

To use this feature:

 

1. set Lot to 0 (the default). Setting Lot to a >0 size will force the bot to adopt this lot size.
2. set RiskPercent to whatever percentage you are willing to risk.

Many thanks, jmw1970.

'Round', or 'Big' numbers
If UseRoundNumberFilter is left at its default of 'true', Aurora will not trade if:

 

1. the open price for a buy is below the next high number and the tp is above it.
2. the open price for a sell is above the next low number and the tp is below it.

Stealth
All of Aurora's activities are hidden from the crims. These features are only available whilst Aurora is running on your platform and your machine is connected to the net, and your crim's server is up and running:

 

1. 'Pending' trades are not sent directly to the crim's server. Their 'fill' price is held in the bot's memory. The pending price line is marked by a dashed green (buy) or red (sell) line. If the bot is unloaded for any reason, it will attempt to pick up where it left off by recreating the pending trade from the pending line. If the market has moved too far away from the 'fill' price in the meantime, the trade is cancelled.
2. There are 'hard' stop and take profits sent with a 'filled' trade. Once there is a trade open, A will look for opportunities to close the trade at a distance of HiddenPips (a user input that defaults to 10) from the sl/tp.

The hidden stop loss and take profit are represented on your charts by dotted lines - green for tp and red for sl. The trade is closed when the market crosses these lines.

Breakeven, trailing and jumping stop functions work by moving the stop loss line, which in turn triggers trade exit at the appropriate point. You can also manipulate these manually by selecting (double clicking) the line and dragging it or changing its price in the line's properties window.

These functions are basically those from mptm, so users will understand them. Any of you who do not, find out. Clutter up this thread asking about them and I shall bar you from further posting in my threads; there will be no second warning.

The Breakeven function is slightly different to that of mptm. It is intended to combat those situations where the market almost reaches tp then retraces, eventually to stop loss. The point at which these bots move the stoploss line to breakeven is calculated as BreakEvenPercentageOfTp percent of the number of potential pips profit. The default is 75%,. Suppose the tp is 20 pips; when the market reaches +15 pips, the bots will move the sl to breakeven.

Maximum trades per day filter
These two inputs allow you to control the number of wins and losses you will accept during the day's trading:

 

1. MaxAllowedNoOfLosses
2. MaxAllowedNoOfWins

They work with the trades you have in your history tab, so make sure this reflects your trading for today only; having a longer period in your history tab will calculate the overall profitability of Aurora over a longer period, but will stop trading once the value of these inputs is exceeded.

The function is purely a tally function; it does not worry about consecutive wins/losses. Setting thes inputs to 0 will disable the stop-trading function; Aurora will still calculate and display the overall position from the history tab.

Cci - applies to Aurora only
I have added this filter following requests; it does not form part of John's strategy. The default CciPeriod of 0 turns this filter off. Google Cci to find out what the indicator does; this thread is not the place to find out.

Hanover - applies to Aurora only
The Hanover module allows us to trade in the direction indicated by hanover's Recent Strength indi. I consider this to be the most significant development in my time at FF. Details in the Hanover thread athttp://www.forexfactory.com/showthread.php?t=319709


Conclusion
I have no idea whether this EA will prove to be profitable. I can say that it has started well.

One caveat to this. Developers of scalping systems routinely claim that they trade their system mechanically. Do they f*!!. They use as much market 'feel' as anybody else who has learned to survive the train-wreck that is Forex trading. Market 'feel' is impossible to quantify into an EA at this stage. Having uttered that warning, the OP's thread is still up and running after 6 months, which is a lot more than most of the threads I have opened; that represents a damn good start to me.

We shall see.




Gi
Gi has her genesis in this pm from John:
"Hi Steve!
As I said on Aurora's thread I have some more kinda half-cooked systems on my mind.
For the last months I've been testing/trading the Aurora system manually. At the same time I started to implement what I now like to call Aurora's even hotter sister; Gi.
She uses the Slope Direction Line as main and only indicator.
She trades longs when the candle's body is above the line and shorts when it's bellow the line opening pending orders like Aurora does but she don't care about Hh Hl, etc... That is, at the opening of a new bar, same R:R
"

The Slope Direction Line indi is attached. You do not need it in your indicator's folder; thanks to jmw1970, the code is contained within the robot.



Matters of general interest


Read this post:
http://www.forexfactory.com/showthre...11#post4923611 Newbie traders, read this for inspiration and warning. Those of you who have suffered losses, read it for inspiration.

EA coding
If I code your EA for free, then I will share it here at FF. If you want me to code your EA without sharing, then my fee is $100 payable into my paypal account.


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 Also at http://www.forexfactory.com/showthre...98#post4709098, which includes a template for both USD and the Euro.
4. Past-trades display indi by squalou; shows a graphical display of the success/failure of trades in your History tab. Breathtaking piece of work. http://www.forexfactory.com/showthre...10#post3830610

Most promising trading EA's

 

1. BigBob: an implementation of Nanningbob V10. http://www.forexfactory.com/showthread.php?t=309980. The strategy is fantastic and I am having a ball trading it manually. The EA is the most promising I have coded so far.
2. Trendy: http://www.forexfactory.com/showthre...82#post4840182, but should be left behind by BigBob.
3. Reversi: http://www.forexfactory.com/showthread.php?t=294255 – I have traded this live.
4. Rip: http://www.forexfactory.com/showthre...98#post4777998
5. The Beast: http://www.forexfactory.com/showthre...=1#post4135863

Wow, that was quick work! I may just be a quirk on my end . . . on strat tester, EA isn't cancelling pend stop order after 3 bars. I see the 15 minute setting. I assume EA doesn't read the strategy clock in minutes, and it will work fine on demo? Find out monday, (well tuesday, monday is US holiday).

Also, stoploss is to be the height of the signal candle. Strat wasn't doing this either.

Still, fewer bugs than usual in a first version.

Great work, Steve

Just a question, Steve.
Have you another life as the forex ?

Yeah thats what i want to ask Steve to..

Is that it?

We shall have to see. I was getting expiring trades in ST last night whilst the crim was open for business. I am not getting them today. Maybe some time thingys do not work properly without ticks from the broker. I can sort this out for sure tomorrow night.

To quote post 1 in the thread:
That is what the EA does. It looks horrendous in ST over the weekend because of the massively widened spread creating a huge gap between the fill price and the sl.

If the stop level changed during the development of the thread, to fill price +- candle range, someone had better say.

Hehe. These days, it takes me longer to prepare the first post of a thread than it does to code most EA's. I don't spend as much time coding as people imagine.

I do spend quite a lot of time, though.

Fantastic. Cheers.

MQ4 for other indi

Wow Steve, this was fast!
I will test it next week, widened spread and a notebook with no price data prevent me from doing any work on this for now.

Thanks for coding this, for the last months this system was consuming most of my days, maybe you just made my life easier.

Have a nice weekend guys, now it's beach time!


"Oh, one more thing. We all know that the single most important feature of any trading EA is its name, and the name of this one is rubbish. Anyone able to come up with anything sexier?"

Couldn't agree more, I used to give girls names to all my systems, feel free to change it.

Cheers. I wanted to see how the coder gets from fractions to whole numbers for the pips count - something I usually muck up.

Ok, let's name it after your eldest. What is she called? Make up a fake if you don't want to give a real one.

Aurora..

Russian boat 1917 started great october revolution..

A question for the mathematicians. Given that:

 

1. L = a flexible lot size
2. C = the known cost per pip (I have the code to extract this)
3. R = a user inputted risk expressed as a percentage, so that 1 = 1%
4. A = the account balance
5. S = a known stop loss

what is the formula for returning L from the other combination of variables?

if you convert the SL into points (ie 10pts for 1 pip on a 5 digit broker) the following works

double FreeMargin = AccountFreeMargin();
double TickValue = MarketInfo(Symbol(),MODE_TICKVALUE);
double LotStep = MarketInfo(Symbol(),MODE_LOTSTEP);

double RiskPc = 5.0; // 5pc risk

double SLPts = 1000; // 100 pips

double Exposure = SLPts * TickValue; // Exposure based on 1 full lot

double AllowedExposure = (FreeMargin * RiskPc) / 100;

int TotalSteps = ((Exposure / AllowedExposure) / LotStep);
double LotSize = TotalSteps * LotStep;

Thanks. Do me a favour, please, and have a look at double CalculateLotSize(double price1, double price2) to see if you can work out why it does not work properly.

RiskPercent is a user input. The passed parameters are the trade fill price and stop for a buy, stop and trade fill for a sell. SLPts should then be the difference between these two prices adjusted for x digit crims.

The higher the RiskPercent input, the lower is the returned lot size, not the other way around as it needs to be.

Cheers

Sorry Steve

mistyped as I was writing the code in the message

double FreeMargin = AccountFreeMargin();
double TickValue = MarketInfo(Symbol(),MODE_TICKVALUE) ;
double LotStep = MarketInfo(Symbol(),MODE_LOTSTEP);


double SLPts = price1 - price2;
int multiplier;
if (Digits == 2) multiplier = 100;
if (Digits == 3) multiplier = 100;
if (Digits == 4) multiplier = 10000;
if (Digits == 5) multiplier = 10000;

// SLPts*= multiplier;
SLPts = SLPts / Point;
double Exposure = SLPts * TickValue; // Exposure based on 1 full lot

double AllowedExposure = (FreeMargin * RiskPercent) / 100;

int TotalSteps = ((AllowedExposure / Exposure) / LotStep);
double LotSize = TotalSteps * LotStep;


The changes are in RED

Regards, John

forgot to mention, you would also need the standard error checking code of

double MaxLots = MarketInfo(Symbol(),MODE_MAXLOT);
double MinLots = MarketInfor(Symbol(),MODE_MINLOT);

normal code to calculate

if (LotSize < MinLots) LotSize = MinLots;
if (LotSize > MaxLots) LotSize = MaxLots;

Fantastic John. Many thanks.

Latest update is post 1 guys, with John's money management code. Details in post 1.

Hi Steve

I might be reading the code wrong but I cannot see any call (that isn't commented out) to the

AutoTradeDirectionDetection() function

in which case the filters that you mention of UseH4 and UsePivot cannot be applied.

Regards, John