Buff's SMSF EA

As promised, here I would like to discuss my latest version of my SMSF EA. Attached is the latest version which is designed for the new 610 MT4 build. My work on Manus island PNG has now finished up so I'll be able to spend more quality internet time on my trading, which I am looking forward to. I'll explain the features of the EA as I go along and also discuss settings I use, but for now I just want to get the thread up and running. Cheers. Jim

Thanks,but can you please share the indi's too?
Edit: Found them,but got this alerts...

bazze,

Glad you found the indicators okay. I wouldn't worry too much about those alerts that come up in the 'experts' folder as I get them too and everything seems to still work fine. I have zero technical/programming skills so not sure what it all means anyway.

Thanks also for posting a screenshot of the actual indicators used as that will help.

With regards to the horizontal lines on the charts at the arrows, it is easy to remove them if you wish. Just go into QQE & MACD dual signal indicator settings and modify LineLength to '0'. This feature was added by the developer of this indi to help his own trading where as I don't really need to see them. This indi was just designed to give a good visual of where the crosses of the MACD Platinum and QQE Adv are actually in sync. It is not used for anything else. When I am testing I tend to use this indicator only and adjust the settings on it to move the buy/sell arrows as I don't have to see the actual two indicators used to determine those. Just makes for a cleaner chart.

I will be updating this thread later today with further detail and settings. Just have to do a few things first, like find a job Cheers. Jim

Hi Jim,

Slightly off topic, hope its ok to ask, can I assume from the name of your EA, that you are trading this within your SMSF?

Any issues with the ATO?

I did think they had an issue with funds sitting at a broker? Any advice appreciated as I would like to do the same.

cheers, Fred

You are correct Fred, I am trading this EA in my SMSF accounts. Haven't had an issues with ATO as yet and I have been audited 3 years now and no issues with compliance. Mind you, I think the auditors can't believe the number of trades completed each year. But that should be decreasing somewhat now as I am going out to much longer timeframes ie 4hr and daily. Looking for better quality of life, hence the developing of EAs like this one. Cheers. Jim

Hi buff, could you please point me in the right direction to download the indicators. Thanks

neastie,

Attached are the two indicators required. Also there is a 3rd custom indicator attached called QQE and MACD dual signal. As described above, this is just a very handy visual indicator that makes it very easy to see where the two main indicators actually give their combined signal. Full explanation and some settings coming very soon. Cheers. Jim

Thanks buff for the indicators

Thanks for the answer,Buff...

Let's get into this now. Job interviews lined up for later this week so I can relax a little now.

bazze was kind enough to post a screenshot above in post #2 so we can all refer to that. This EA basically relies on two main indicators for all it's signals. These indicators being MACD Platinum and QQE Adv. Both are custom indicators which can be downloaded from post #7. There is also the option of using a MA as a filter. More on this later.

When you go into the EA Inputs, you will notice the first part refers to the Filter Settings. Now you don't have to use any of these if you don't want to. Probably the best way to describe them all is by example. I have found pretty good set up that works for me. Keep in mind that I normally use a $10,000 account balance for backtesting and my standard unit size is normally 0.1 lot. This is just for consistency. A lot of my testing is also done on the EUR/AUD pair as it tends to have some nice big moves at times.

In this set up I am placing the EA on a EUR/AUD 4hr chart and using the EUR/AUD Daily chart as a filter. So I'll just run through some of the settings and explain them.

FilterTimeFrame has to be 1440 as this is how many minutes are in a full day. UseFilter_1 is false. This filter refers to using the same two indicators as filters on this higher timeframe. The settings directing below UseFilter_1 refer to this filter if it was being used. I normally just leave them as default, which is 12,26,9 and 1,8,3. UseFilter_2 is set to true. This is the MA on the filter timeframe. Here use 30 as MAPeriod and 3 for MAType. So it is a 30 LMA. UseFilter_3 is also set to true. This refers to the slope of the MA where it will only take trades if the slope is heading the right way. eg if we are buying then the level of today's MA has to be higher then yesterday's MA level. If not, it won't initiate the buy trade until it is.

Then we have the Trade Opening Settings. These refer to the settings on the 4hr chart the EA is attached to. In this set up I am using 10,20,7 and 1,6,2. Just work your way down and put the numbers in that order. The first three refer to MACD Plat and the 2nd group of three refer to the QQE.

So basically now we have the 4hr chart taking signals based on the MACD Plat and QQE indicators and filtered by the MA only on the daily chart, where price has to be above the 30 LMA and the LMA has to be heading up for a buy trade, and vice versa for sell trades.

StopLoss is set to 120. TakeProfit is left blank which will default to 0.0. OpenLot is 0.1. Now UseAutoLots is a money management tool based on account size and size of stop. If you leave it as false, the EA will use the OpenLot position size for every trade. If you select true, then you have to put a number in the Risk_Ratio field. Try 2.5 here just to give you an idea and after you run a test over a few years, check out how the position size changed with each trade throughout the entire sequence.

Then there is StartTradingTime and EndTradingTime. I leave one of these blank and that will ensure you trade the full 24hrs every day. If both times are also the same, this too will allow the EA to trade the full 24hr period.

Then there is Management and Exit Settings. FridayCloseTime just leave blank. CloseAtEndTime set as false. FilterTFClose set as false. UseBE set as false. BEPoint and BEProfitPip can be set at anything as I am not using UseBE, so it doesn't matter. UseTrailingStop is set to true. TrailActivation is set at 50. TrailingStop set at 160. TrailingStep is set at 1. And that is all that is required.

Have a play with these settings on the example pair I have given and even mix it up a bit. Use autolots on different settings to see how it affects your overall profit and drawdown etc. Any problems or questions, feel free to unload on me. I'll go into more detail later about some of the other options and other set ups. Cheers. Jim

And just to get an idea of what sort of results you should get based on the above settings with autolots set at 2.5 on a $10,000 account, testing from 1st Jan 2009 until 16th Mar 2014. Keep in mind that this is only backtesting and is not entirely accurate nor reliable, but it will give you a pretty good idea. I'm also of the opinion that you would have to optimize your settings every few months as the market volatility is always evolving. Just my thoughts.

So checking the Report I had 9361 bars in test and 90% modelling quality. Total nett profit $98,445.72. Profit Factor of 2.56 and an Absolute drawdown of $1,989.73. There were 389 trades in total. Expected payoff of $253.07. Max drawdown of 24.28% which I can live with. 43.44% of total trades were profitable with the largest profitable trade being for $11,793.06 and the largest losing trade being for $2,564.46. Average profit trade being $956.86 and average losing trade being $287.56. The issue may be with the largest number of consecutive losses which was 12, but I think this is balanced out by the Average consecutive wins and losses at 3 each. I can live with that.

The initial trade on the 8th Jan 2009 was for 0.23 lots. This got as low as 0.17 lots in May that same year before slowly recovering where it eventually finished up trading around 2.36 lots near the end. It is not the most exciting trading in the world and it did take some time to get into decent profit, but that is where I think more regular testing would help. Anyways, just for your info and hopefully your testing will get results pretty close to that also. Cheers. Jim

thank's for share Jim.
this one looks promising.
just do some bt based on your direction, it give a fair result. eventhough still giving error object creation function.
i already put all indi too.

i would like to contribute and do a proper bt, but first gonna get rid those error first, while i have lack on ea programing

thank's in advance

No worries fxindikator but I'm not sure that this object creation error is such an issue. The same thing has come up on all of my EAs over the last few years without any other problems. They all seem to run okay on both demo and live accounts. Maybe a Programmer can explain what it actually means. Cheers. Jim

I just want to give you a couple of other ideas on how to use this EA. If you like trading of the daily charts and are happy with the indicators I use, ie the MACD Platinum and the QQE Adv, then you could quite easily just use the EA as an entry tool where it will get you in a trade automatically on a nominated signal. You could then manually control the trade and remove the EA from the chart. At the time of entry you could also set a nominated stop just to protect you against any huge moves against you, then again, when you come back to the charts, you can modify this stop manually. Plenty of options where you could ass the MA or the slope of the MA. For those that like daily charts and little screen watching, this method is ideal if you were trading 20+ pairs.

Now you may have noticed trading times on the EA. Here you can set times according to your MT4 platform times. For example, you wanted just to trade the GBP during the London session, then on my platform this would be 08:00 to 16:00 (in that format). Then you have the option of either closing all trades out at 16:00 if you selected true in the FilterTFClose field. If you leave it as false, then the open trades will just play out according to your other instructions re stops, trailling stops etc, but no new trades would be opened. You may decide to trade the 5 min chart using the 60 min chart as a filter during this time. Basically the trend of the 60 min chart would determine if you were buying or selling and the 5 min charts would enable you to buy on the dips and sell on the peaks, so you are building into a position. You may even consider cutting down your trading time and not setting any stops, targets etc and just letting the EA close you out of all trades at the session end. Again, plenty of options.

Just to explain a couple of other inputs. FridayCloseTime gives you the option of nominating a certain time every Friday that you want to close all open trades. This is if you don't like holding open trades over the weekend where there is a chance of gapping. If you don't want to use it, just leave it blank. It is based on your MT4 platform time also which maybe different to your local time. Most of the others, I have already covered or are pretty well self explanatory, but if you have questions, fire away. Cheers. Jim

Thank you,Buff...For the inputs on how to use this EA...

Hi buff. Nice EA you got there. Can u share the BT please. Thanks

Hi Buff
Is the EA built for MT5 only ?

I'm getting a string ErrorDescription when I load it to my MT4 charts.

thanks Stan

Hi Buff,

EA is not working on 610. it gave error see the word file attached.

bomi

I haven't had any problems doing this for the last few years. Just make sure you choose an auditor / annual reporting company that treats your Forex account as one investment rather than treating each transaction within the account as an investment - otherwise you will be up for some nasty "Bill Shock" at the end of the financial year!

This occurs because the EA is accessing an external indicator which isn't actually visually running on a chart, but the indicator is trying to draw information on the chart. It doesn't do any harm other than create a massive MT4 log file. You would need to edit the indicator itself to stop the error messages, or better still incorporate the indicator logic into your EA.

demolationz,
If by BT, do you mean backtest results? If so, yes I will post some of mine here but I'm also relying on others to complete their own backtesting and maybe share their settings/results here. I've only got so many computers and MT4 platforms running at once.

stan3188,
As per my first post, this EA only works on the latest MT4 build which is currently at 610 I believe. I believe that Metatrader has basically given up on MT5 as it just wasn't being embraced by us traders at all, so this latest build has incorporated a lot of the MT5 technology. That's what I was told anyway. Gees I can still remember switching from MT3 to MT4.

Bomi,
I checked out that error and I'll check with my Programmer as I have no idea. But having said that, I am currently running this EA live on three platforms on my VPS, so I did a check on all of them. And yes, I have the same error come up on all of them and they are all 610 builds. But I can assure you that the EA is working on all of those platforms. So not sure what it all means but I'll try and find out.

skoda2008,
Thanks for answering that previous technical question re the object creation error. That makes sense and I'll run it past my Programmer to see if she can modify it. Also good tip re SMSF re Auditor. My old Auditor actually recently had a heart attack (nothing to do with me) and has since retired. My Accountant is looking for a new one for me. Hopefully he'll choose wisely.

Cheers. Jim