Another $100 Experiment

My greed and compulsory trading have again sabotaged my account.

My EA is sane and was just doing well but me, myself and I, have again derailed everything as always. So I have to admit that during the day I have to stay away from any terminal connected to my account.

So next corrective actions will be:

 

1. Remove Metatrader from my smartphone & tablet.
   
   AND
   
2. Try to forget Fx and Forex Factory during the day and stay concentrated on my day job.

The first point is already completed and this should help me to accomplish the second.

Now, I have to reboot my account and start from scratch again and just let the EA do its job.

Here are the post-mortem figures:

You will be a man, my son!

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you.
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting.
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream —and not make dreams your master
If you can think —and not make thoughts your aim
If you can meet Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools.
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings —nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute,
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run.
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And —which is more— you’ll be a Man, my son!

Rudyard Kipling, 1910

After a new and difficult start due to a tight range in the euro, the EA finally recovered even from a partial crash and Im finally terminating this first month of trading with green figures and a very good performance. Its worth noting that I had a record of 18 consecutive losses a week ago and that didnt hurt too much the account.

I managed this time to remain away from the temptation of trading manually. It was good to remove Metatrader from my terminals, Im now less addict at knowing what the euro is doing and could even forget about it several times for one or two days.

The goal now is to rinse and repeat in the coming months what I have done this month, accumulate trades and trading days and discover how this EA trades to see if it can replicate in real the exceptional performance that I see in the back tests.

Starting last week, I also added 2 additional signal providers. That brings the total number of signals to 12. I see now that its becoming really difficult adding more without degrading too much the drawdown figures so I guess that 12 is more or less the maximum number of signals that it can trade simultaneously and this could more or less indicate that I'm reaching the end of the development for this EA.

I have also decided to report the account figures to this journal only each month instead of each week. This will also help me in not staying too much focused on Forex and reserve my energy for other matters.

Next update at end of November.
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October Account Figures.
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And my litle trading map, where each box represents a month of trading.

Attached Image (click to enlarge)

Wow!

End of last week and yesterday I just witnessed at which point the EA risk was just set too high (my greed), account margin went as low as 600% so I had to be pro-active and made a live modification of the EA yesterday in order to lower the risk. Fortunately, the EA more or less recovered and is now trading at more comfortable margin levels thanks to said modification. This is okay as I knew that I was trading at maximum risk. Now I have to lower that risk and obtain different draw-down and margin figures.

I can also confirm that twelve is almost the maximum number of useful signals for this EA. Trying to add additional exotic or less exotic signals only replicates what other existing signals are already giving and this worsens the available margin.

I still could made some minimal adjustments and general optimizations (no curve fitting). I still have to finalize my yesterday (urgency) modifications before letting it trade until the next big event. I guess that I will have some work during this month to be ready for next year with a more secure EA.

On the account side, I was having a good month until yesterday when my gains were almost erased but I prefer that instead of a wiped account. Today the balance shows almost $100k and this is an important milestone as it's almost the minimum capitalization. The account is not so bad showing 33% profit after last month 45% not even taking into account that I added funds to the account.

Two months traded in the plan. This month is the latest in the luck stage and a crucial one as the Fed should raise its interest rates (or not) which should bring some volatility, bring some profit and be a good stress test for the EA.

Account Figures.



EA Calendar.

Draghi showed his water pistol and this had a bazooka effect on my account.

The EA is now in version 4G as I have implemented a command interface on it which deserves some words on this journal.

The idea is to artificially increase the risk (profit) on major events like the one of yesterday. The mistake I made before yesterday was to activate that function too early, the day before in fact, and with already some high leverage used, I think I was already higher than 10:1, instead of waiting a little more or even not have used it at all with already such a high leverage. hopefully the account doubled thanks to the big jump on EU.

Today, I have activated this feature some minutes ago as we will have the NFP 6 hours from now and the leverage is at 1:1 so I think I'm on the safe side.

I still don't know if this feature will be an account booster or killer, only time will tell, I think that it would be more my ability to use it wisely that would decide for that but as I have a tendency to be too greedy I will program the prohibition and automatic deactivation of this feature when leverage is already or coming too high.

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As always.... Good Luck my Friend !

Thanks David !

It's good to have luck, I think we all need it but most important is to keep what I call the scientific approach, I mean:

1.Trial, 2.failure, 3.correction, 4. back to 1

This is just what I do, I try, then my account blows up, I correct (the EA and often myself lol) and then I try again...

A little update to follow posts #64 and #65.

Post #64: I have reduced the risk a bit more and simplified (unified) the lot calculation for all signal providers. Of course the profit is reduced but the EA is safer now. Forward live test will tell if it's safe enough.

Post #65: I back tested the increase of risk by setting it automatically on every friday for a short period of time and only with a leverage less than 5, the result was that the EA crashed. My conclusion is that this is not a good idea, so I decided to remove the interface.

I'm now at version 5.00 dating from yesterday 6 dec 2015.

Another little step...

The EA has now traded 3 months non stop and produced 1300+ trades thus validating this first "luck" stage.
It's now clear that there is some potential in this code and I look forward to see how it performs in the next three months.

EA figures:



EA Calendar:

Attached Image (click to enlarge)

Hey BT,

How has Januari been? still good?
Nice thread, good luck with the system.

I created an FF account just so I could get an update on this story. How is it going? You must be nearly out of the current phase and on to the next?