trend catching with NonLagDot indicator

5% trailing: You mean a proportional trailing stop? Can't find any settings for that in the EA?

Have a close look at this ea, look for "dPropSLRatio".

Higher risk.

Forgot to include the site with the info...
http://www.fxstreet.com/brokers/plat...4-f003d49c0fcc

Happy Newyear to all!

somehow i dont get such extra ordenary results even when i use your settings. i only get 10k max in a year... what kind of broker or spread are u using in the backtest?

what lot are you using?
what is your starting amount ?

lots calculated from system
10k eur

Ummm ....

Dude - do you really believe in BT results made by this MT4 thingy ? And you hope you could even compare them ?

No bro, never ever .... make forward tests and then pray for getting the same results at live accounts !


P.S.: The right point about all these fancy BTs is: you could perhaps get some orientation about the principal possibilities of the instruments like EA + indis - that's all !

If you read about backtests and consider all "rules" than at least from my experience, backtests are pretty accurate. But sure, backtesting is as hard as live trading.

Backtesting and optimizing of inputs has its place if done correctly, but if done poorly all you are doing is curve fitting.

I personally backtest and optimize first over the previous year (in sample period), then I take that result and test over the year previous to that (out of sample period), and then finally I test over a period of at least 5 years that include both the in sample and out of sample period (extended period). If the inputs are profitable during the in sample period, but not during the out of sample period or extended period it was over optimized and curve fitted. If it is profitable in all three, it is worth forward testing live.

The backtest just gets me into the ball park, but it is the forward tests that are the real deal. Without back testing it could take years of forward testing to get the same results, if the frequency of trades is very low, such as daily weekly or monthly time-frames.

I am about to complete my backtesting of this system on 10 different pairs over 4 different time-frames using the described method. When it is complete I'll post a spread sheet with the results. So far the daily time-frame seems to have the best combination of Profit Factor, Expected Profit, and % DrawDown.

Anyone will be welcome to use the settings to test, either forward or backward, as much as they like, or disregard them all if that suits them. It is up to their own trading style. I personally like to trade them as a basket, since the pairs have varying degrees of correlation, for added safety.

GREEN pips to one and all.

This is exactly the point of testing and running the numbers. It can be fun to see what could have happened with the right numbers, but no two years are exactly the same. A trader needs to know if he can keep his capital safe during tough times and truly capitalize on the good.

Thanks SmoothTrader for sharing your experience - I'm curious about your detailed results of qualified BTs !

I wanted to touch on the issue of money management.

There are a range of techniques to control your investments in varying complexity

1. Fixed wager, wager as percentage of equity, wager as percentage of equity but based on the projected stop loss
2. Fixed stop loss and fixed take profit
3. Set stop loss and take profit on a nominated ATR (Average True Range)
4. Close trades on reversal of indicators, close trades on the TDI (traders dynamic index)
5. Trailing stop loss
6. Set stop loss to break even after a nominated pip profit.
7. Set take profit on a risk v's reward nominated ratio
8. Increase wager by a nominated multiple progressively on losing trades (up to a limit 20% of equity)
9. Increase wager on successive losses (up to a preset limit 20% of equity)

For any given currency set and time period, the equity curve and maximum drawdown are progressively improved as points 1 to 9 are introduced.
Points 8 and 9 are perhaps the most controversial. We all are aware of the Martingdale system and how it has been comprehensively disproven. The casinos control this type of bet progression by setting minimum and maximum wagers. Typically the maximum is 100 times the minimum. For example a minimum $5 table will allow a single wager of $500. In Martingdale a progressive losing bet sequence would be 5, 10, 20, 40, 80, 160, 320 and then the final wager would be 500 but that bet would result in an overall loss even if it was a winning wager. So in reality a sequence of 7 losses only allowable to recover a profit of $5.

We have tools which are much more sophisticated, such as being able to regulate our risk v's reward ratio, minimum wager of .01 and a maximum wager of nominally around 50 so our minimum to maximum ratio is around 5000. This combined with the risk v's reward ratio and the ability to set our bet progression ratio to any figure give us a very powerful arsenal. Combine all this with our detection abilities (fundamental and technical), I sincerely believe we are only tapping the surface at the moment. Our opponents are the market makers and the major bankers who control the price flow. We all know how many EA's are in existence both commercially and through the forums which display great promise with curve fitting techniques and ultimately never hold up because of the constantly changing marketplace.

We have witnessed the CHF and Chinese Yuan repositioning during the last year where many got burnt. Nobody really had the insight to see these events coming but now we see some brokers actually advertising that they are going to prevent client negative balances in a bid to retain customers.

The most powerful weapon by far is the ability to leverage your investment.

In a nutshell, just say we have a potential investment of a percentage of our equity say 2% of $5000 ie. $100.

So we wager $100. Realistically what are our expectations, say win $100 or lose $100.

What if we viewed it like this - if we lowered our investment size but employed a trailing stop loss, set stop loss to breakeven, increased our wager size with consecutive losses, employed a risk reward ratio and set a minimum level for a result not to be treated as a loss.

Here is the basic result on a back test (AUDUSD 01112014 to 31012015 on a 1 min chart)
Simple TP and SL with no trail $1930 and various increasing returns as each successive factor is introduced -
Up to the ... full optimization $28,429.

This is the astounding part - that return was produced from a initial investment of 0.5% of equity. The absolute essence of it is the stop loss multiplier of 2 (the result of an optimization from 1.1 to 2 with a step of .1) and the low initial wager. I have purposely capped the maximum wager at 20% of equity. (After that back to the .5%). The values achieved during back test will of course vary with scenarios. My preference is for a starting point of 1.5% of equity and a StopLossMultiplier of 1.2. This gives a progression of 16 losing trades before reaching the 20% cap of equity value. If you reduce the initial starting point percentage you are able to achieve a greater losing sequence before reaching 20% of equity. As a result of my back testing on all currencies and all time frames the 16 loss sequence seemed quite adequate.

The real point here is that you need to be in a position to make the most of that winning trade when it comes, and if it takes a number of break evens or low profit wins (because of the trailing stop loss caught up), you are giving yourself the best chance to capitalize. You have to accept that sometimes you will have a "bad hair day" when the trade simply goes pear shaped from the beginning. The majority of your trades will be in the break even or trailing stop loss scenario and this is where this money management strategy excels.

I have amended the EA for the NonLagDot indicator to give you the option to increase your wager after subsequent losses but capped the progression at 20% of equity. By default, this option is not enabled (as with SetStopLossToBreakEven). The iniitial outlay is now preset to 2% of equity by default. My explorations suggest that the 30 minute timeframe produces the best result over 2015. Another observation is that a trailing stop loss actually yielded reduced results compared to a fixed stop loss.

Please read Post #291 carefully as it is full of commonsense.

*Edit EA changed to amend Lot Size based on Stop Loss and Account Leverage*

First and foremost, "THANK YOU" to Lebanesse for sharing the structure of this system, and to Dave C for coding the EA for us all.

Over the past few days I have been running backtest and optimization testing, as I described in post 291 utilizing the EA from post 219.

I have attached a spread sheet with the settings for various time-frames and their corresponding results. I optimized on three variables (StopLoss, Take Profit, and MA Length) while keeping the rest of the inputs at their default settings. For the Out of Sample testing, I only tested the top 1 or 2 time-frames from the In Sample Test results, and for the long term test, I only tested the top In Sample Test results.

From these Backtesting results, I will begin forward testing all pairs beginning Monday. I won't be giving day to day results, but I would gladly report monthly results for those that are interested.

I hope that some of you find this information useful, and if anyone has questions you can always ask or PM me.

May GREEN pips flow into your account, your heart, and your life on a daily basis.

Here's complete 2015 Dukascopy 1min GMT data with weekends filtered out.

Use Tools, Options, Charts to ensure max bars in History and Charts is set to 512000

Use Tools, History Center, Import to move the unzipped data into the 1 minute section of the relevant currency pair.

Don't forget to make the relevant shift adjustment for your platform.

​Another 7 Non Majors.

MANY Thanks for the gift guys. Trying to digest it all...

I should have mentioned that clean data is vitally important for proper backtesting.

Thank you.

GREEN pips to you and your family.

The free giving is what inspires us on these forums and I wanted to acknowledge the huge amount of effort and time that has been expended to produce this spreadsheet which can be downloaded above with thanks to SmoothTrader.