it's a small matter

Hi Hayseed

Thanks as always for your time and help with the explanation

Working on something similar but different and have found your stuff here and on YouTube very insightful.I will share if I stumble on anything that is really usable.

You have done well in the past and I'm sure presently as well.

All the best

Rooi

Hi hayseed,
Thank you very much for the explanation. actually I was making losses since 6 months back. after looking at your account I get good idea from that. thanks again

it's common to read something along the line of, 'for every buyer there is a seller'..... this somewhat implies an orderly balance of buyers and sellers..... richard arms 'ease of movement' indicator points out where that is not so true..... it can be applied to forex even though true volume, as in share volume, does not exist......

the 'emv' indicator below is alexander gettinger's version...... alexander is one of the key coders at fxcodebase, which is probably the largest collection of lua indicators for fxcm's marketscope platform....... you must over look the sunday gaps which give false emv readings......

when buyers dry up, the waterfall chart pattern begins in earnest...... supports are broken and true range records are set....h

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iresh asked me a good question the other day...... basically, "what's the deal with all the trades"...... ....... let me explain......

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to trust an ea you must first do your best to break the ea..... in the past 30 days there have been almost 1000 trades here with almost double that more pending that were cancelled.... not sure if you can see the trade comments, but if so, look how many contain the words 'fifo' or 'sell vs selllimit' ..... or any other comment that refers to order placement or closure..... there would be several thousand if you included all the pending orders......

with ibfx i had 1 standard account for real trading and 5 mini's for ea testing/breaking..... when ibfx dumped us on fxcm the 6 were reduced to a single standard account..... so everything i'm testing/breaking is lumped into that 1 single account...... don't expect to see any pattern...... yet...... that will change 1/1/16......

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couple important points.....

first, to my knowledge there is not a single ea or script posted on the net that will deal with fifo order closure rules in a 100% effective manner with large numbers of orders placed by various methods and timeframes across several days..... the orders with fifo in the comments were just me perfecting the order closure routine..... and that is not as easy as you might first think......
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second, fxcm lowered their spreads, and added commissions, for some of us..... the total savings related to the lower spreads can be calculated with simple math or a few lines codes..... those saving's are easy to see...... but at what potential cost to an ea trader......

you might be introduced to the error 136...... 'off quotes'...... the bottom line is your order did not go thru...... now we can give that error any number or description we want...... but the bottom line will still be the order did not go thru...... what is the cost of that missed trade......

when you run ea's the trades must go thru..... they must be coded in a way that prepares them for every if(then) and what(if)......... the trades with 'sell vs selllimit' or similar in the comments were perfecting that...... and that is not as easy as you might first think......

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and quite a few trades were testing closing partial lots, closing partial profit and/or closing partial loss that would adhere to fifo rules......
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one last small note on spreads...... i must ask myself is spread really hurting me..... would trading with 0 spread and 0 commissions make that much difference to me..... really..... and of course i'm referring to my manner of trading....... trading manners do vary considerably......

the brokers, at least mine, are giving me access to something very valuable..... so they make 20 or 30 bucks on every standard lot..... phffft..... i plan on making 1000..... now who gets the best deal......

the picture below is my etradefx account which quite often has gains or losses equal to the total account value linked to this explorer..... the arrow is pointing at the euraud spread, was between 3 and 4 pips this morning..... some might say high....... i was happy to pay it......

spread, or lack of, is only one small part of the trading dilemma for me.... probably like number 99 on a list of 100.......h

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I guess FIFO is one reason I temporarily put my EA project on hold. I cut my teeth on Trading Station, which shows what the average sell/buy for all the legs of a given pair's positions together and motivated my habit to set a target price for the entire net position, as opposed to a target price for each individual leg which, I think, would be cumbersome to do manually, especially if you have to keep FIFO constantly in the back of your head. The first leg, after all, may not be your "best" leg, so to speak.

When I started using MT4 (primarily as demo to first get the feel of the thing), I immediately saw that it doesn't group traded pairs together and then show you what the net value of the position is so that you can set a target price with reference to the value of the net position (which I am certain not going to calculate manually). I know that there are EA's that will assist you in doing that, but my feeling is that MT4 was built around either (1) non-FIFO environments; or (2) "old school" trading in which the primary trading style was a single entry trade (which is not something I've taken a shine to).

I may have another hack at it if I develop some patience for the task and settle on what I want to use as a base indicator for trades this coming year. Originally, I was all hot on Daily Fibonacci Retracement Pivot Points, but have now taken a liking to the 3 Level ZigZag Semaphore indicator which does a pretty good job of showing support and resistance that you can fashion entries and TP's with.

On a side note, I have often seen that "off quotes" message in MT4, especially when trying to set up orders manually for (in particular) exotic pairs that may not be entirely liquid at that particular moment in time. I would most often see it with EUR/TRY and USD/RUB, and I would have to sit there (sometimes for several minutes) to enter an order manually in this "off quotes" state. I imagine with other pairs, this state is often a period of milliseconds when the platform -- for whatever reason -- is unable to determine what the best bid and asks are and so won't let you enter an order, rejects the order, and then basically throws it into the trash bin. Naturally you could program the EA to reattempt the order, but then the entry has passed ... .

But this is not something I had particularly thought of, since the EA I anticipated working on would set up entry orders, rather than sit in a kind of waiting state to enter an order when, for example, price lined up with a given ZigZag Semaphore point. I guess my thinking was with ZigZag's in particular that the ZigZag and/or Semaphore would potentially repaint after an order was entered, which is naturally not what you want (although one solution to that would be that the EA would exclude the use of Semaphores painted within x number of candles). The Pivot Points were kind of less problematic from the repainting standpoint ... .

As usual, I meander before I get to my point ... . But is there any advantage to coding the EA in such a manner as to only send out an order precisely at the time when price reaches value x versus having the EA fashion entry orders that execute when price x is reached?

Hey Haysee what sall we do now. I think EUR going to be recover now. our all trades making losses.

Hey Hayseed, you must be using a grid/martingale system, am I correct? I highly respect you as a trader and fellow programmer, but you also must know by now that those types of systems ONLY end in disaster... ?

Nevertheless, I respect you even more for making your works public.

Hi Hayseed,
Can you direct me to a good coder or can you help with coding and indicator which draws automatically draws blue rectangles on the right side of the chart?
The blue rectangle height is equal to that of the channel and you can see, the size of the channel is quite stable. The channel is the Envelope(15) STD 1 for the High and for the Low.This size can be updated once a month, but the rectangles to advance in time to the right as times goes by. However, the vertical position does not goes up or down, but it is fixed, once a trade is started.
I draw these rectangles manually and they are useful to manage TP/SL and position size, by counting how many blocks away from my entry the price is.
Attached is the template and 2 different charts -a trending and for a market that stopped trending.

Thank you!

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hey iresh..... sorry to be late in replying here, as mentioned to you december is my least active month..... yes, it appears the eur is recovering.... several factors for that.....

as to what we do now, we wait...... and enjoy the holidays............h

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hey smash..... sorry for the late reply...... mentioned earlier that nothing can be drawn from my orders this month..... i am working on several routines to close large numbers of orders and several ea's are being tested...... before with ibfx i had several mini's to test in..... with fxcm, i have only one standard account, the one seen here...... that gets expensive......

they are not martingale..... some are placing larger lot sizes so i can test closing partial lots which encompasses many orders and avoid fifo errors..... imagine having 170 orders and wanting to close only 33.7 lots......

a couple are placing 5 selllimit/sellstop or buylimit/buystop orders in 20 pips increments which is of course the grid appearance.... sometimes i use smaller increments when i need an answer quick...... much later other ea's are placing additional orders on top of those to give the same orderopentime()..... doing so creates the fifo error..... also some pending orders are being modified in price so they will not open in proper ticket number to orderopentime() sequence..... this also creates the fifo error..... imagine having 257 orders and wanting to close them all.....

i am working on a video titled, 'when is an order an order'..... and how to avoid fifo errors.... below are some of my notes.....

have no fear, this account will be in the top ten next year........... happy holidays......h
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here is a current screen shot of where i have modified another run of orders to intentionally create fifo errors..... one is out of sync as to ticket number sequence vs orderopentime() sequence and two blue line orders have the exact same orderopentime() as do the two red line orders..... these all will cause the fifo error code 150.... this essentially stops the ea or script.....

there are probably at least 20 more intentional such errors in my account at this time...... these are for me testing, nothing else...... testing can be expensive.......h
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hey liviu..... sorry to be late here..... been on road for a few weeks....... wrote a quick indicator that draws rectangles equal to the envelopes.....

it's pretty straight forward ...... you can set the startprice to your order entry.... if left blank it will use the bid.... steps set the number of blocks up and down..... drawup and drawdown options..... periods is the envelopes ma periods, 15 default...... timeframe option if needed..... deviation option is 1.0 by default.....

happy new year.....h

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fixin to be the first of the month...... it's a habit of mine to download a new platform on the 1st after weeding out all but the most useful code from last month...... kinda like house cleaning......

will post several indicators over the next few days..... some might be useful to you......

below is a simple alert indicator that is of value to me...... it has inputs to set specific above and below alert price values..... also.... the pips input, which is my preference, sets the alerts a distance from current ask.... all four of those lines can be dragged to other areas if need be....

i commented out the hour alert because so many have trouble understanding time as it relates to metatrader/sever/local....... it's more for an london open wake alarm for me......

the divisor setting is to limit the frequency of alerts..... if the indicator is on many pairs in a fast market, a news flash might set off alerts at a frequency that hinders the platform use..... a setting of 10 will alert only every 10 ticks..... 5 would limit it to every 5 ticks and so on...... 10 is my preference..... this gives me time to readjust the levels.....

this is used by me all day, but of most value at night......h

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Hayseed, Thank you for your time and help and have a Blessed 2015!

in trend following trades that run for thousands of pips, my goal is to keep the average price above 50% and better still above 61% of a possible daily retrace.....

the indicator below is the graphics part of an ea that places the trades and calculates the next entry lot size.....

if you have open trades it will calculate the average lot weighted price and draw the magenta line..... this helps me verify my above 50% desire.....

the bars input sets the look back.... so a value of 10 would take the highest and lowest prices in the 10 bars and draw the box..... the common fib lines, 23, 38, 50, 61, 75, will be plotted on the right hand side....

in 2015 there should be at least 6 pairs with trend moves of greater than 1000 pips.....
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the olu pivots indicator was a request.....
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as always, mq4 provided so feel free to modify the code if need be......h
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great works! All I see is green pips*
*a few reds doesn't count

Wow, what a great tool ... . Kind of wraps all the tools I use now (Fib Retracement Pivot Points (over various time frames) + net position value calculator) into one neat indicator ... . Thanks ... .

You keep me amused all the time with your generosity. May God bless u always!!! Happy & Prosperous New Year to you & family.

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and the tortoise is off...... no rush......

my sights are still on the 2012 lows, except in the case of the eurusd where parity now comes to mind....... the euro is under pressure from every angle...... 1000+ pip movements are very possible in 2015...... but expect the tide to change several times......
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there was a time when spreads were a concern to me.... thought those days were long past..... but recently, after ibfx's departure and fxcm's entry, a new term and it's impact was thrust on me...... negative spread..... where the ask is actually lower than the bid....

have spent the past 6 weeks rewriting and testing ea's and scripts to be prepared for it...... no point in wasting any more words on the subject other than to say it is an unnecessary pain........

below is an ea than monitors spread.... it checks by marketinfo(mode_spread), and also verifies by the math (ask-bid)...... it records the highest and lowest observed....

it uses global variables to protect those max and min values in case you accidently close the chart..... you can manually delete the global variables to restart the max min values.....

have removed some of the features that would only result in confusion.....
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happy 2015 everybody...... and hope the happiness flows across every border...... h
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jap, negative spread is something excellent but in reality achievable only if one has multiple market makers price feed..plus, one needs to be institutional to move notional from one bank to another, dont know how would retail do this when all orders are still open.