Free EA - Piggy n The Middle

My suggestion is to have a function for ProfitTarget, like 10€, which means that close all trades and start with new cycle when the Equity reach the value of StartBalance of the cycle + 10€. For me this is the best way how tho reset all and be more safe.

Only warning and willing to help ... much peace in the heart

Cheers Carneiro! I appreciated your participation this this thread.

I close all trades when I noticed my account equity has reached the setting i have for the day. I only close this particular trade at total pips of 1000pips and the equity profit was 613.6pips and the floating and commission is 392.8pips.

This is another account I started after the first account, I set equity to just 200pips for this account. As at when I close the total pips is 369.7pips I closed at 213.5pips with float and commission at 156.2pips.

The main point is running all day may not be too safe as market condition and news changes all the time. Having a daily target at which you make profit and stop trading I think is the right thing.

Cheers

Hi Yonnie,

Some answers for your points:

- "I have my own gridding system, but yours works better in tight ranging conditions. did a test on AUD/NZD and NZD/USD and have a few questions........ for the 1 month period 19/3 - 18/4 2015 NZD/USD the best results were for a 70 pip grid. is that about the grid size you would use?"

Yes this is a good number for those pairs. But over time as the daily ATR changes you can increase the grid step with it - this too can be built into the EA.

- "macro range relative to the daily volatility: don't understand why this has any bearing on the choice of the pair to trade the grid. we don't know what the trading range in the coming year would be. if anything I would think that the best pair would be the smallest grid size compared to the daily ATR."

It is not really relevant to this thread and is more in line with BWILC stuff - just my macro grid take on it. I worked this stuff around the fact that we have an extreme high and extreme low as known facts for a pair and that they were very unlikely to be breached for long periods of time. And so build a grid system within these boundaries. Not for this thread.

- " if a sell trend reverses and creates the first buy order, you exit the 2 dangling sell trades with the profitable sell trade 2 steps above. if there is none, exit 1 dangling sell trade with the profitable sell trade 1 step above? would you recommend closing the other dangling sell trade at a loss? is there a disadvantage of closing all toxic trades at a loss if no profitable trades are available?"

Ok, this is hard for me to explain but I'll try.

Firstly you need to map it out on paper - there will no longer be sell trades above if price reverses direction - see my rules (one sell will have already closed for profit and the other is at BE which will be killed off as the PA comes up through the grid step). So you will be left with two stranded sell trades on the bottom step in your example ... at this point. Here is how to get rid of these without the grid losing any step profits.

So to continue your example using the "dual trade system": lets say as you mentioned you start your grid on downward moving PA and it created a Sell, Sell (SS) at step1 and then moved on down to step0 - it would first open two new sell positions here and close out one of the sell trades from step1 and move the other to BE. So now if PA moves back up and breaches step1 it will open two buys (BB), as it moves on up further it will now close a buy as it reaches a new step and move the other trade to BE. So at every point the grid is closing regular trades for profit. But now you start to see your equity line track south of your balance- because of the toxic sell trades at the bottom of the grid. But as it moves more steps up the equity line will slowly reverse and, if enough steps are breached in the buy direction (for this example) then it will neutralise the toxic trades completely. In fact under this example you would only have to move three steps upward to neutralise one of the bottom sell trades or both will be neutralised together after 5 steps up. So you can now use a systematised logic approach to eliminate these toxic positions based on what the PA does.

Of course, the price may reverse again before it gets up to step5 and so you have the over-layed logic of the "asymmetric" close process to take care of these opportunities (see point 2 below)
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There are four ways your equity can catch up with your balance in a grid system - and this is ALWAYS what we are after.

1/ that you close out the grid - and who is going to do this when it is churning out the pips and in good profit - so you either force-close your grid (eg EOD, or news event), in which case you may be caught in a loss or a profit - or you're going to use this "method" when you're in the pooh and deep in a drawdown. Aaaahhh - but I hear some say that they will close their grid at 1000 pips profit at the end of a day - all good but what if this is not reached and it gets to 993 pips - and then disappears into a five week DD. So this is a weak tool and not the best idea unless you can figure out some way of consistently close out when the grid is in profit using a system.

2/ That you have a close mechanism for trades against the (short or long term) trend. Daniels EA addresses this to a good degree (with a trade cluster profit target which is also independent for the buys side and sell side) - and is why it is a good EA to build from. this mechanism will certainly help close out toxic trades. (I call this an "asymmetrical" close mechanism - there are a number of ways of making these very efficient)

3/ Directional bias - this helps by producing more profits on the 'price' side of the grid. Again Daniels EA has this option and I think the mechanism with trade direction based on whether PA moves up or down to a grid step is a nice simple and smart way of getting this directional bias without all the use of lagging indicators (although you can use some of these also - but I reckon PA is the best)

4/ Elimination of toxic trades in a trend. I use the concept of the "Dual Trade System" logic (as explained above) to achieve this.

With a smart trade bias approach and a good asymmetric close process that allows independent buy and sell closes and the ability to close our toxic trades - you will do well for long periods of time. But really without a specific toxic trade elimination capability when the price action moves into the inevitable big trend - you are merely "shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic" and your account will blow up at some point.

Try back testing your setup on the Euro/USD for the period May 2014 to March 2015. ..... Maybe you got stuck in a trend like this at the beginning just because your setup couldn't make it to that 1000 pips for the day and only got to 993 before going into a rapid initial DD and you figured that's ok it'll climb out of it. Well, you could always make your target 500 pips for the day - with your fresh new account.

- "in a strong trend, you leave the profitable trades open with large paper profits to close out future toxic trades. now you get a strong trend the other way with hardly any toxic trades - wouldn't your paper profits go up in smoke? is there a reason why not to cash in all the profits when a trend reverses and just accept the losses of the danglers when no profitable trades are present? do you have any more tips you are able to share?"

Because when do you know the trend has truly reversed - YOU DON"T. So them's the breaks - the dual trade is not part of the profit - never. So forget about it. It's your ticket to a permanent grid system that is stress free - hopefully. It's a business when you get to this point. I am just a retail trader like everyone else here but I have traded my main account at over $400K USD at times - and you can't do that with the chance of hitting that iceberg.

Sorry for another ramble!

Tim

That was a VERY interesting ramble. Thanks!

knickalls

This EA will kill this $25,000 demo account guys, with 0.01 lots. -$6000

Maybe it's your settings...

I can run GBPJPY at 0.01 lots and have no more DD than about £600

Just watching ... see the changing of pairs of D1 candles with JPY
Had the 1st candle D1 closing green ... where the price was today? GJ + 200 pips
just watching

Are you by any chance a very aggressive set?
I already said before, but with my 500$ demo account it almost blew up when I had round number at like 0.005 instead of the preset 2.0 . Which was already very aggressive. However 6000$!? You must run a very aggressive set.

No, my settings in GJ is the settings of Carneiro shares.

Keydcuk can you share your settings to GJ please?

The settings that Carneiro have given are for the EURGBP pair.

Because round numbers are not the same on all pairs, this is why they did not work for the GBPJPY. I will repeat this so you know.

JPY pairs
0.01 = 10 pips
0.05 = 50 pips
1.0 = 100 pips

MOST other pairs
0.001 = 10 pips
0.005 = 50 pips
0.01 = 100 pips

My recommended settings are to use 2.0 for round numbers and a TP of 100 or 190.

The TP of 100 will give your less profit long term but it will carry less DD. The TP 190 will give you slightly better profit but more DD.

In a previous post, I shown 3 year backtests of of both scenarios and that if the lower DD option was chosen, you could trade more lots and overall make more money this way. Currently as it stands, at TP 100, the best DD is around 600, that is 600GBP. I am currently testing a revised EA to hopefully get this even lower.

Happy Pipping!

Daniel

This week the market is trending so hard. avoid such situations. You need to exploit the EA in better situations and its not difficult to find favorable situations. This week on Monday London, The market is so trending. Pairs moving without any considerable retrace. Testing gridding EAs in such situations is not a good decision. You will have to spot out better timing to test, better pairs and better locations to test. You can't apply gridding set and forget. Wish you best of luck.

Seems to me that EU/GBP would be ideal for this as it typically retraces quite a bit. I am testing it.

I apologize if it seems that I'm lurking just here without contribution. This idea of grid trading is new to me and I find it fascinating. I am learning a lot here and do not mean to offend. Thank you sincerely for all of your hard work.

Nahhh, speak your mind. Feel free! Everyone is welcome! It takes a lot to offend me. You certainly have not.

ok...I have a solution...trade reverse

really , not joke....take all positions in opposite would maybe maybe the holy....how did you lost with 0.01 6 thousand? unbelieveble

Bigger Pardon Sir, We are in Strong Trending days since Monday London. Trending is very bad environment for gridding techniques. I got a 300% gain on my real account this Monday but lost all because of dis-connectivity to brokers servers and i very hardly managed to close the trades on B.E . No worries. Hopefully, I will do it again. This is all part of this game. Days will come when you will be wining big. But the important thing is to not loose the heart my brother.

I AM MENTALLY BANGING MY HEAD HERE!

Sorry, I just needed to say that...

I have added Piggy n The Middle v4-1 to post 1.

1. I was going to wait till I get version 5 out with a slightly new way of trading that was going to shave the DD a little compared to the original version but things have been very inconclusive and I have tried so many different combinations of tests I am almost at wits end but still have a couple things to try.

2. In v 4-1 and/or v5 was/is going to have a close all trades at equity gains % but the software I am programming with is currently restricting me of programming it as a fixed value and not as a variable for you guys and gals to set. I am currently trying to get a fix for this. Bare with me, hopefully it is coming soon.

SOoo.. all I got so far is a bit of a headache but a triple Trade Hours Filter.

As edited in post 1, this is default set to trade 3 periods of 00:00 - 23:59. You will have to deal with trades not taking place for 1 minute of the day. Hopefully there will be no opportunities. Sorry, there is no work around for this. It is simply how the EA block works. (Rubbish!)

I am trying my best people. I am not a coder but have undertaken to make the EA that is available. I have been approached by a few coders but none of them could confirm to me 3 simple things that I have asked before I share the mq4 file.

1. That you have a concrete idea before I share the file so that "their" idea gets filtered through me to ensure we all get this idea and that nobody runs off without thread followers to have the information.

2. That the mq4 file does not get shared.

3. That the mq4 file gets passed back to me when modified.

Am I asking too much here? Are my ideas too far fetched to ensure we all get the best of any idea and/or modification that comes or gets done?

Or am I just being too overcautious and paranoid? I don't know. Anybody tell me...

Anyway, thanks for your interest and support in this project.

Happy Pipping!

Daniel