StuffTheNews: a CBI/news 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 impact of major news events and central bank interventions on the Forex markets
      

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Please note: there will be no more development here. Development of these EA continues in my own forum.
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DO NOT USE THIS EA ON A LIVE ACCOUNT. IT IS EXPERIMENTAL.

Welcome to StuffTheNews. The genesis of this EA lies here http://www.forexfactory.com/showthre...42#post5093042. Newbies, read that post for an explanation of CBI.

What I write about the genesis of this particular bot is true. Looking back though, the origin of everything we know about CBI comes from one remarkably generous contributor to FF, scooby-doo. Scoobs is a former trader with HSBC, amongst others, and many of us have benefited fantastically from his advice. The link I posted in the previous paragraph leads you to a post that itself contains a link to the thread that got us all started, where I quote Scoobs' first ever post about all this. If this all appears a bit confusing, here is a direct link to post 1, where I quote Scoobs' first post about all this: http://www.forexfactory.com/showthre...85#post3199485

Scoobs, without you none of this would have happened. Step forward for a huge round of applause.


We developed STN in the Hanover thread, but that thread is about developing robots that use David's Recent Strength indi. Newcomers to all this, read post 1 for an explanation; you will find much there to benefit you.


I envisage two uses for STN:

 

1. As a trader in its own right.
2. As a proctector for existing trades, so long as they have the same magic number as STN.

So, set up a new demo and open enough charts to represent all of the currencies we trade. There is probably no harm in opening lots more, but when high-impact news/CBI events occur, market movement is so violent that having more than one EA trying to send trades can cause your platform to collapse under the strain. When thinking about this, always remember: MT4 is crap.

There are two methods of detecting a violent move in the market:

 

1. UseAstral: the original table tick method. To the best of my knowledge, astral has never posted his real name here, so I use his FF name. STN compars the latest tick with that of TableSize ticks ago, and goes into trading/protection mode if the difference between them exceeds that of Threshold.
   1. TableSize: The number of ticks to store in your table.

2. UseGeorge: wfh200 both sorted out my originally abortive attempt to set up a tick table, and provided a second method for detecting a news/CBI event. wfh200's real name is George, hence the name of the filter.
   1. Per is the number of ticks to calculate the moving average of the Bid.
   2. Channel_Delta is the distance above and below the moving average of the bid to draw the lines beyond which the bot will start CBI trading.

EA inputs
You will find descriptions of many of the inputs in the attached Shell User Guide. I wrote it for issue with bots I code in the future. Where you see inputs described that you do not see in the EA's inputs list, ignore them.


Other inputs specific to this bot and not in the guide:

 

1. CloseOnCBI: if true, this will close all trades linked to the chart and the EA that are in opposite direction to the detected move.
2. HedgeOnCBI: will hedge open trades linked to the chart and the EA that are in the opposite direction to the detected move. This is not currently available to US traders, because they are being screwed by their own government.
   1. CbiHedgeLotMultiplier: the multiplier for the open trade's lot size. The idea is that the strength of the move will allow the winning hedge to overpower the losing original, and close the entire position at breakeven.

3. TradeOnCBI: if true, the EA will trade as soon as it detects a CBI scenario. It will trade regardless of the current position and will ignore normal maximum trade settings. Watch out when experimenting with a low threshold; the bot trades whenever the Threshold input value is breached, so there are a lot of these until you turn off the EA.
   1. TradeOnCbiTP and TradeOnCbiSL are the tp/sl for the new trade.

If you want to play with Strategy Tester, there is a note in post 1 of the Hanover thread that describes how to do this.

I do not guarantee the code is bug-free yet.

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



EA coding
I receive may requests to code EA's. Traders, 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. I explain why at http://www.forexfactory.com/showthre...94#post4431794, at the bottom of the post.



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. Spider. I am trading this live. http://www.forexfactory.com/showthread.php?t=313680
2. The Beast: http://www.forexfactory.com/showthre...=1#post4135863 A number of traders are still trading this live.

_________________________________________________________________________________
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.

Thanks Steve for yet another fantastic bot. Lets not forget that the original idea of having a Central bank intervention module / function came from SCOOBY DOO. If anyone reading this post is not familiar with Scoobys contributions here in FF, I strongly suggest you go to his profile and read his previous posts. We have learnt a lot from him and hope he would guide us in the future as well.

If and when we manage to crack this concept we would end up with an EA trading the news and a module to go into existing EAs.

Kind regards

Good point. I have added an appreciation to post 1. I should have done this at first, but was in a hurry to get the thread started prior to going out for an afternoon of piano teaching.

Another great piece of art Steve.....On this one, post 1 may also need an entertainment guide.....This thing could, and really should, be a lot of fun to watch, you could almost sell tickets......I've got the demo loaded and I'll keep an eye on the Fun-O-Meter.....

Have a great week

whip

My demo is set up. The 4 biggies + GJ + a random sample of others to make sure that cad, aud and nzd are involved.

Let the entertainment commence.

I'm all set up to with a nice spread of pairs, thanks again for all your hard work.

Mike

Another peice of great work Steve here.

Looks like something is going on with CHF at market open, could be interesting if this module catches it!!!

Scoobs

Cheers Scoobs. Fantastic to see you here.

The CHF index is getting very close to being oversold. Will be interesting to see if this continues on a larger scale and some of them break Daily support levels.

I am guessing that this is due to the fact that the Greek PM will/has resigned as the EUR index seems to be gaining ground quickly.

Scoobs.

It is fascinating to watch this on David's Recent Strength indi. The pound is not moving far, but the swissy is tanking, so my gbpchf buy trades are doing quite well at the mo, on the back of the weakening swissy.

Not that this matters here.

What I hope is that none of this will trigger stn trades. These should only trigger when either the pound or the swissy scream off in one direction, indicating that a major intervention/news event has shaken up one of the currencies in the pairs.

We shall see.

Its very strange for the CHF to get hammered during the Asian session.

I am fully aware that EURCHF can go one way or another during this session but not across the board.

If the CHF carries on like this then the CT traders out there should wait until around 7.00am GMT and BUY the CHF currencies because there will be a large retrace back upwards.

We will see!!!!

Scoobs.

It has been fascinating to watch the Swissy tanking today. Even more to see this continuing into the Asian session. Nothing that CBI would have picked up; just a steady drip-drip.

One of the biggest hedge funds decided to drop their CHF holdings. It also seems that the SNB were happy and decided not to intervene.

I did fully expect it to rally at market open but it seems nobody was interested in propping it up.

This leads me to believe that Italy is in serious trouble and the SNB have massive exposure to their debts.

Dont forget that the Swiss are not stupid when it comes to currency trading..............

Scoobs.

steve, just came across this - http://codebase.mql4.com/7894

Haven't looked at code logic yet

It is a thought, isn't it. I haven't looked at the code either, but the idea of the market moving so quickly that it overtakes dynamic pending trade fill prices is seductive.

Gives us something more to think about.

Still up???? Just read about your indignation on BB stop EA - sorry the email address of you-know-who was already removed, so I can not add my support.... But rest assured I stand in your corner.....