As well as dynamic ATR based variations there are boundaries (minimum and maximum stop-loss) for different entry methods and finally I need manual overrides for these boundaries as well (Russian Dolls).
After observing that too many good entries get blocked I decided to have another round of adjustments to the filters so now we have a new set of trades, some the same as before, quite a few lost and plenty waiting to be discovered/recovered.
On this H4 chart below, the general direction is clear and there should be chances to enter sell trades on each of these days: 02, 03, and 04 September 2014. However, due to some excessive filtering only the one on the third was getting through. Sometimes its it not just one filter but several:
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15:00 GBPUSD: : * CAUTION * possible bW1W2FiboTrap
15:00 GBPUSD: : PBRE Sell entry dropped (bW1W2FiboTrap && (iH4Doji) && (dH4Shrinkage < 0.2))
15:00 GBPUSD: : PBRE Sell entry dropped because bTooFarFromH4Ema10
15:00 GBPUSD: : PBRE b7D1SwingBeyondWpRange Dir: -1
15:00 GBPUSD: : PBRE entry dropped because (bWpRangeDone || bDpRangeDone)
However, the H4 chart shows 3 great trading days (except the 3rd has more reversals than the other two): The two small H4 Doji candles are due to price being trapped between two significant Fibonacci levels a common place for a reversal but in this case price breaks-out in the same direction.
'bTooFarFromH4Ema10' was out of date and no longer true.
'b7D1SwingBeyondWpRange' means price has moved a weeks worth of pips which means avoid longer trades.
A closer look at the 4th on M15 shows several good places to enter a trade:
My preferred time is after the price movement picks up at the close of the 14:45 bar which is bigger than the previous bars and closes below a pivot level and a Bollinger band (D1 Lower). There will often be a bounce off the outer D1 Bollingers but there is still strength in the dollar and price is still moving:
After reworking the filters there is an earlier entry at a break-out of two coincident (M15 & H1) lower Bollinger bands and the M15 bar is slightly bigger than previous bars - a good entry although not as strong as the close of 14:45.
Volatility hasn't picked up enough to use the longer range PBRE so ZB4 enters a shorter range PACL trade:
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4 2014.09.04 14:02 sell 2 0.56 1.64472 0.00000 0.00000 0.00 10096.92
5 2014.09.04 14:02 modify 2 0.56 1.64472 1.64651 1.64295 0.00 10096.92
6 2014.09.04 14:54 t/p 2 0.56 1.64295 1.64651 1.64295 95.80 10192.72
The good thing about the PACL entries is they can be over very quickly in this case we get our quota of pips in less than an hour. There is also a chance of another short trade later in the day but once price goes beyond DS3 we could be pushing our luck.
I am now thinking about the possibility of a trade on 2nd Sept, this was clearly a good trading day, but the difficulty for ZB4 is that price has been moving up for about two weeks. Although, the longer term price has been falling, it takes time to establish that the reversal back into the H4 Bollinger is going to continue downwards.
By grep-ing the log file we see that ZB4 acknowledges a change in the direction of price movement towards the middle of the day:
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:94: GBPUSD_245_02092014.txt:1135: 11:30 GBPUSD: : PBRE iDailyDirection: 1
:96: GBPUSD_245_02092014.txt:1142: 11:45 GBPUSD: : PBRE iDailyDirection: 1
:98: GBPUSD_245_02092014.txt:1153: 12:00 GBPUSD: : PBRE iDailyDirection: -1
:100: GBPUSD_245_02092014.txt:1159: 12:15 GBPUSD: : PBRE iDailyDirection: -1
However, I added some safety features to prevent erratic entries near reversals:
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16:30 GBPUSD: : PBRE Y1Y2 bDailyDontSell:
16:30 GBPUSD: : PBRE NONTRADINGDAY: conflicting swings
This does not have to be set in concrete but perhaps there is low hanging fruit elsewhere...
So the only thing we can be sure about is that the experts don't know s***, although perhaps eventually the collapse could come tomorrow or next week or next year or 2016, probably when our attention is somewhere else.