I was intrigued by this very simple trading method and was wondering how it would perform over the long term. Initially i think I must have downloaded an old version because firstly it did not always run well (in back test) and I stumbled over some bugs or misunderstandings of the code(?)
Initially I had some very good results just using the recent history, but lots of bizarre things happened over a longer history. It took me a couple of days to resolve a number of issues and get a proper understanding of pipmasher. Unfortunately, this means my tests don't directly correspond to pipmasher any more so if you are having good results with pipmasher then feel free to ignore what I learnt from pipmasher-hacked.
I added an D1 ATR based stoploss and take profit method as past experience with fixed stop losses has not been a good one. I also added a function to peek at last Friday's expired trade and add it back in for a few more days and allow Monday to trade because there were several missed good entries where Monday went back into the long term trend!
Just like every simple entry method: I found periods of very good results and periods of very poor results: so it helps if this is just used as signal generator rather than autotrader.
The first chart was my first play with pipmasher which had a couple of Mondays going back into the long term direction and also it shows when this method can work well:
pipmasher-gbpusd-d1-dec2014.png
Short term good results:
34 2015.01.02 11:40 t/p 5 0.41 1.54818 1.55534 1.54818 193.28 10273.99
This next chart shows alternating monthly bars which results in pipmasher reversing the long term trend every month so that the MN1 candle trend is often opposite to the trade direction, so it could be an example when not to use the EA:
pipmasher-gbpusd-mn1-bars-2014.png
The results for the first half 2014
Feb to July 2014 Backtest results:
106 2014.07.11 16:15 expiration 12 0.62 1.71876 1.71724 1.72183 0.00 9886.84
So about six months of a not so good time to use Pipmasher-hacked.
And finally a hot flush from summer until winter:
80 2014.11.12 00:15 modify 10 0.42 1.58211 1.58458 1.57717 0.00 10567.35
81 2014.11.12 14:15 sell 10 0.42 1.58211 1.58458 1.57717 0.00 10567.35
82 2014.11.13 00:30 t/p 10 0.42 1.57717 1.58458 1.57717 202.02 10769.36
making a nice return, followed by a touch of flu:
pipmasher-results-Aug2014-to-Jan2015.png
One final thought, this EA is very simple and compact compared to that monster EA that I usually work on. Perhaps one could complement the candle direction with ADX, out of many lagging indicators I find this to be useful sometimes. I was looking for an EA to complement ZB4's signals and sometimes this would be good for that. If I have time I'll see if I can improve the trend detection of my hacked version.
The other thing I noticed is that it misses out when there is a strong trend with no pull back so there is scope for stacking entries and following strong trends perhaps using pull-backs on a faster time frame?
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:youknow: )