Secret Bob's Basket

[SteveHopwood]

Closed all trades manually. Since I must have a US based broker, hedging trades are not allowed. Have received literally hundreds of alerts about not being able to enter hedging trades were received over the past several days. Can we assume that the EA will not perform as designed because broker rules will not allow hedging trades? The demo account lost 25% of value since Monday. May have to move on if US anti-hedging rules make this impossible. Thoughts and comments please.

Best thing you can do is work out settings that do not create hedging trades. The setfile I just published will do that for you, although you know what I think of people who use setfiles blindly. If unsure what I think, I can always state it a tad more bluntly.

[romsyam]

Good skills Steve

Is that ootb on 4H? It was a tough old week this week.

thanks
Gaz

H4 yes. ootb no. I attach my setfile.

Bear in mind that I am not a fan of using other peoples' setfiles and was only persuaded out of banning their publishing altogether by cogent argument against by highly respected members here. Use it only if you are too dim to work out your own settings - and at your peril for the same reason.

Thanks Steve ,much appreciated. Especially given you're views on set files

I will take a look. Always interesting to see how others run set ups, especially more experienced EA'ers

Gaz

[pacinvest]

Hi Guys
Tested demo set-ups last week with a stoch filter strategy on M15 and H1 timeframes. See attached images for stoch settings used. (note fast settings as per NB10.7)

Results
M15 +700 pips closed trades -30 pips open trades
Big winners EC, GCHF big loosers GJ, UJ, EJ

H1 -333 pips closed trades -151 pips open trades
Big winners EJ, UC big loosers EC, EA, ENZD

Settings out of the box except stoch and trade management which was kept simple with a SL at 100pips and Breakeven and Jumping Stop setting set at a guess for each timeframe. Trend trading only.
The stoch settings are using two higher timeframes attempting to filter ‘the best’ of the SSB trend signals. The near TF is set at 70 and 30 and the higher TF is set at 50 and 50.

Comment:
This EA is truly a tiger by the tail beast it has enormous capability, but as with all trend trading knowing when to stop entering and begin entering is the key. SSB does pretty damn well all on its own, but I think we need a way to limit damage when our trading timeframe is out of sync with PA ranging, retracing or reversing.

Next week I will use just one stoch filter which is at least two timeframes higher than the trading timeframe. Using the stoch close to trading timeframe mainly tries to second guess or improve on what SSB is doing which is good sometimes and not so good at other times. I am not confident we are going to improve on the actual SSB signal with this approach. However with the higher TF it is worth a further look as this week in some difficult ranging conditions my M15 trial was able to minimize bad trades.

One interesting observation from this week was the EUCAD pair. It was a winner on M15 and a looser on H1 with the same trading strategy. This example illustrates how PA works in waves of varying frequency. We never know when that frequency is going to change. To win at this game it is about minimizing the bad periods while being in the game to take the wins. In the next few weeks I will continue with the higher TF stoch filter idea but am looking at some other things to tame the beast.

What I really want to do with the higher TF stoch filter is for it to signal trade when the values are heading in the right direction of the trade and not trade when the values are going opposite the trade. This probably needs to be done on a candle close compared to X candles back calculation. The current method in SSB of just using overbought or oversold level is not really ideal. Bobs fast stoch indy in 10.7 approximates this idea going with the higher timeframe 'current direction' and proved powerful once trade directions were set for day or week or session. Note that we have complete control over trading times in SSB so could hold off until certain hour etc.

Bug notes: – I didn’t find any but I did have one instability event on Friday with one of the demos crashing – have no idea if it had anything to do with the EA. As far as I can work out the stoch triggers worked but with ‘every tick mode’ on it can be a little hard to test with backward visual testing. I think OK though.
Cheers
Vince

[romsyam]

Great work Vince.

The standard settings on the new version in post one doesn't have an ma period. Did you test with that setting at 0?

thanks

gaz

[pacinvest]

Yes intending to trend trade in trading time frame SSB signal

[SteveHopwood]

The standard settings on the new version in post one doesn't have an ma period.

That is my mistake, arising from developing the bot on an H4 chart where this ma is irrelevant and so I set it to 0 to stop extra reads of the moving average indi.

This should always be set to 240 if trying to trade tf's other than the H4 and wanting to trade in the direction of Bob's H4 trend filter - and you should always do that.

[romsyam]

Thanks Steve

That's what I thought. Just checking

Gaz

[veeyem]

Steve,
Noticed the CashProfitTarget in TradeAsBasket section is considering ALL the open trades without filtering by the magic number provided in the inputs. I tested this with opening few manual trades to see the CashProfitTarget considers ALL the trades including those entered manually as well. Appreciate if you can help fix this as this would who would use in live along with manual trades or other EAs. Sorry if I am overlooking something important. Thx.

Ref.
Basket trade management inputs:
TradeAsBasket tells SBB to regard all trades with its magic number as part of a basket and to apply the basket profit targets to them. These are:
CashProfitTargetPerTrade is an adaptive target. SBB multiplies this figure by the number of open trades on the platform to calculate the target. 10 trades at the default of 3 wold produce a profit target of $30.

[Gertje]

Steve,
Noticed the CashProfitTarget in TradeAsBasket section is considering ALL the open trades without filtering by the magic number provided in the inputs. I tested this with opening few manual trades to see the CashProfitTarget considers ALL the trades including those entered manually as well. Appreciate if you can help fix this as this would who would use in live along with manual trades or other EAs. Sorry if I am overlooking something important. Thx.

Ref.
Basket trade management inputs:
TradeAsBasket tells SBB to regard all trades with its magic number as part of a basket and to apply the basket profit targets to them. These are:
CashProfitTargetPerTrade is an adaptive target. SBB multiplies this figure by the number of open trades on the platform to calculate the target. 10 trades at the default of 3 wold produce a profit target of $30.

Veeyem,

What magic did you use?
Leaving it at '0' takes the manual trades as well.

[SteveHopwood]

Steve,
Noticed the CashProfitTarget in TradeAsBasket section is considering ALL the open trades without filtering by the magic number provided in the inputs. I tested this with opening few manual trades to see the CashProfitTarget considers ALL the trades including those entered manually as well. Appreciate if you can help fix this as this would who would use in live along with manual trades or other EAs. Sorry if I am overlooking something important. Thx.

Nice spot. Yes, the adaptive cash (and pips) profit targets are calculated by multiplying the inputs by the number of open trades. I will fix this later.

Having said that, can I remind people:

• I originally conceived this bot as being the sole trader on an account. It takes enough trades as it is. Only a cretin tries to mix other trading on the same account as that being traded by SBB in the teeth of the howling gale of opinion that it is a bad idea to mix different EA's/systems on the same account.
• Insisting on doing so will undoubtedly throw up problems caused by people being too bollock-brained stupid to take any notice of the coder of the EA in question. I cannot guarantee that these problems will not blow your account. The opposite is true; it is probable that they will.
• There are only so many idiot checks that a coder who carefully prepares the 'how to do' information, is prepared to include. There comes a point where he/she simply thinks, "Ok dimwit. Go right ahead and blow your account. You are too thick to take note of my advice. So be it. Some people are too imbecilic to be helped."
• Carry on trying hard enough for long enough to break something, and guess what will happen?