ES Trader's Simple Basket Trading System; an 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 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. 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 principles of Basket Trading.

DO NOT USE THIS EA ON A LIVE ACCOUNT. IT IS EXPERIMENTAL.



Read this thread: http://www.forexfactory.com/showthread.php?t=314701. You must have ESTrader_IA_Don_071911.ex4 running on the same chart that you are running the EA; also make sure your indi colour choices are the same as those in the EA. ES works by reading the value of the labels created by the indi. Shut down your platform, download the indi, EA and template and restart the platform. Drag the template onto any chart you fancy and everything should be set up for you.


I was attracted to the thread because of EA Trader's track record with basket trading.



ES will send a basket of trades when:

 

1. 'Buys Profit' and 'Sells Profit' are both positive - buy the buy pairs and sell the sell pairs. I know this function works.
2. 'Buys Profit' and 'Sells Profit' are both negative - sell the buy pairs and buy the sell pairs. This function remains to be tested.

ES will close the basket when the upl reaches your cash target in ProfitTarget. He will then sleep for the period you have input into SleepMinsAfterBasketClosure - defaults to an hour.

Stop loss is a change of the Buys/Sells profits labels to mixed signals. You can turn this off by setting UseMixedSignals to false. There is no post-close sleep period.

After the first tick, ES goes into an endless loop; the only way to shut him down is to remove him from the chart.

He is a bit rough-and-ready at the mo; we can add sophistication if he proves to have legs.

Have fun.



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.
Masterly summary of hedging: http://www.forexfactory.com/showthre...79#post4977179



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
5. My shell EA – the code I use to produce EA's so quickly. http://www.forexfactory.com/showthre...94#post4431794

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. Aurora, a PwR-based EU scalper at http://www.forexfactory.com/showthread.php?t=312936 has made a brilliant start.
3. Trendy: http://www.forexfactory.com/showthre...82#post4840182, but should be left behind by BigBob.
4. Reversi: http://www.forexfactory.com/showthread.php?t=294255 – I have traded this live.
5. Rip: http://www.forexfactory.com/showthre...98#post4777998
6. The Beast: http://www.forexfactory.com/showthre...=1#post4135863

_________________________________________________________________________________
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 to my restricted threads 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.

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.

Hi Steve....Looks interesting with some good results on the thread.....Is the thread still live....EST hasn't posted in awhile.....Maybe he's just printing money....Will give it a go

Have a great evening

whip

The qulailty of a lot of the posts in the thread are what made me restrict posting here. Poor ES probably thought, "Oh for crying out loud" and removed his thread subscription so he did not have to carry on reading them.

Updated version in post 1; I had forgotten to adapt the CloseAllTrades() function to multi-pair use. This is an essential update.

The sleep-after-a-successful-basket-closure code needed some tlc as well. It is working now in terms of sending the bot to sleep; I am still not certain it is dead right - one of those logic thingies again. The editor Help says that Sleep(10000) sleeps for 10 seconds, so Sleep(60000) would be 1 minute, so Sleep(SleepMinsAfterBasketClosure * 60000); should achieve 1 hour.

The purpose of the sleep period is to avoid piling straight back in as soon as the basket tp is hit. By definition, a move in our favour has taken place, so all the indi pairs are likely to be lined up, and so a fresh basket is most likely to be sent. I wonder if an hour is long enough.

Next thing to look at is exit. Only experimentation will tell if the tp is big enough. Do we perhaps need a basket trailing stop instead of a hard tp? Do we let the basket run aiming for mahoosive profits or scalp a quick $10 much more often?

Then we have the nature of the basket itself.

The way the indi works is this: it simulates buying and selling the USD 4 times each. When all the buys and sells are positive, the dollar has been weak; when the indi trades are reversed, it has been strong.

This means the system is jumping onto the back of an overall trend; we need to start thinking about when to pull out of a basket in the face of a change, or a major retrace on the part of some of the pairs; a news item that boosts the dollar would be a bummer right now. Maybe we need a basket stop loss but you and I have been here before, and know how often one of these would be hit unless it is mahoosive.

We just have to let the bot run for a while and see what happens.

i studied baskets a long time , i can say that they can stay in dd for months , like they can stay in gain for the same period .
if mm is right , account is safe , but can be very slowly growing .
i suggest to use a large take profit , because it can happen that you eat like a bird and you s...t like an elephant .

I went back to ES's definition of a trade signal:

"Put the Indicator on any chart, preferably 1hr.
Look at the Buys profit and sells profit.
When BOTH are NEGATIVE , SELL the BUY pairs and Buy the SELL pairs.
When Both are positive , Buy the buy pairs and sell the sell pairs."


The indi calculates and diplays the Buys Profit and Sell Profit. So you can have a pair - like UJ right now - that's slightly negative. All other pairs are positive.

Current readings:
Buys Profit is 779.20
Sells Profit is 390.22

This should trigger a basket imo. But the EA didn't open a basket.

So if the EA is triggering trades based on Post 1 I think it's not following ES's method:

"ES will send a basket of trades when:
all the buy and sell trades in the indi basket are positive - buy the buy pairs and sell the sell pairs. I know this function works.
all the buy and sell trades in the indi basket are negative - sell the buy pairs and buy the sell pairs. This functionremains to be tested. "

Regards

Nice one Sandy. I completely misread that, taking it to mean, "If all the buy trades are positive .........." etc..

Updated version coming soon. This also gives us an exit that acts as a stop loss - close the basket when either the buys or sells profit turns the wrong way.

Hi Steve, Did not realize you are on this thread. I posted in my thread.

Any how thanks again for your input. Means a lot to me.

Will give it a try and hope we all make some green pips. Don't we all need some with this lousy roller coaster of stock market.

I have been trying out this and my other strategy on CNBC Million dollar trading game and lets hope I can win Million Dollar prize.

Latest update in post 1 - as pointed out by nubchai.

This also offers a stop loss feature; details in post 1.

Thank Steve

This saves me a job. I was about to send you a pm letting you know this is available.

If you would like to send me the source code for the indi, or a version of it with the correct pairs already installed, I can automate the method you describe at http://www.forexfactory.com/showthre...06#post4952406

Cheers

There is a problem with loading up the EA and the indi both at the same time.

It takes the indi a few ticks to settle down - this makes sense as there must be a lot of stuff going on under the bonnet.

When I loaded the latest version onto my platform at the same time as the indi, ES took 2 buys and 6 sells - the result of mixed signals resulting from the indi labels taking time to settle down.

Live with this for now guys whilst we see if the bot has legs. At some stage, I will add a sleep period at the start of its run, to make sure the confused baskets do not happen.

Steve, loaded your auto trader about 10 minutes ago, opened buys and sells and took about 10 minutes to hit its default profit of $100, closed all trades as designed.

now sleeping it says for 60 minutes....

No issues to report...

FxOpen demo broker offset of 2.

Excellent.

When I have some spare occd, I will code the bot so it shows when it will start trading again.

Steve, I just now emailed you the code for the indicator you requested. I could not send it by Pm because it was more than allowed number of words.
Thanks

Kris

I posted wrong chart. Here it goes. Manual trade:
Buy"buy"pars and Sell"sell Pairs since both buy/sell are positive

Here is the chart with the indicator showing both sell/buy in profit

EA placed next trade 61 minutes after close of last trade. o.k.

I was not there to see the conditions at the time of the trade but here is where it is currently..

Excellent.

That stop loss kicked in today when the signals changed.

That was followed by some chop as the ea saw the signals go positive again, then change to negative.......................

I have introduced a couple of threshold inputs to counter this. Positive defaults to $100 and negative to -$100.

Update in post 1.

I had some problem. Was losing a lot initially. I think it is a good idea to have some threshold inputs.
Let me continue testing.