Follow My Leader auto-trading EA

[SteveHopwood]

Hi, wanted to post my settings and test this EA out. One little problem though.. EA keeps opening orders and then close them all in a loop till all money is gone.

criminal: FXOpen
settings: OOTB

any ideas what I'm doing wrong? I'd like to contribute with some results!

Follow the link in post 1 'Useful utilities/EA's/scripts' to Matt's script for a possible explanation and solution.

[SteveHopwood]

Member: jboy
etc

Cheers. I have put these in post 1.

[jboy]

Both EUR and GBP basket triggered. Already ran into my first problem. I forgot to take out the GBPNZD from the OOTB settings for GBP pairs, and it kept giving me this error. And I couldn't stop it, so I had to close the chart. Reloaded, but I hope I got the magic numbers correctly since I changed them to separate the EU and GU groups.

Steve, although I have been giving this some more thought. Sometimes, a pair will move because of the other currency in that pair. For instance, if GBPJPY goes past the threshold, it could be that the Yen is the pair that is really moving, and it has nothing to do with GBP. But if we use the logic of this EA, we would be trading as if the GBP is the dominant currency. Just something that popped in my mind just now. But we'll give it a shot and see what happens. I really see Forex fundamentally, and that's how I usually trade. I look at the fundamentals, and see what politically and financially on the macro scales will move price, and so I always think about this even when everyone is using technical indicators to trade.

[SteveHopwood]

Both EUR and GBP basket triggered. Already ran into my first problem. I forgot to take out the GBPNZD from the OOTB settings for GBP pairs, and it kept giving me this error. And I couldn't stop it, so I had to close the chart. Reloaded, but I hope I got the magic numbers correctly since I changed them to separate the EU and GU groups.

Steve, although I have been giving this some more thought. Sometimes, a pair will move because of the other currency in that pair. For instance, if GBPJPY goes past the threshold, it could be that the Yen is the pair that is really moving, and it has nothing to do with GBP. But if we use the logic of this EA, we would be trading as if the GBP is the dominant currency. Just something that popped in my mind just now. But we'll give it a shot and see what happens. I really see Forex fundamentally, and that's how I usually trade. I look at the fundamentals, and see what politically and financially on the macro scales will move price, and so I always think about this even when everyone is using technical indicators to trade.

Yep. The trading logic could be completely flawed.

[jboy]

Here is something else to think about. Each pair has different amount of movement. Daily movement on EURGBP is much smaller than EURJPY. And this would favor the more volatile pair to be the dominant pair.

Steve, I see that you wrote in post 1 that there is 3 types of exits. Can you talk about #3 a little bit more? I think I'm seeing a problem with #3 already on my baskets. My baskets are being whipsawed between buy and sell baskets because 1 pair is hitting the threshold as a buy, and then subsequently, another pair is hitting the threshold as a sell. Then it liquidates my buy basket, and starts a sell basket. This cycles again and again without letting it hit the TP or SL. At least that's is what I'm thinking it happens because I'm seeing the basket cloth with small gains and losses.

[garyfritz]

Sometimes, a pair will move because of the other currency in that pair. For instance, if GBPJPY goes past the threshold, it could be that the Yen is the pair that is really moving, and it has nothing to do with GBP. But if we use the logic of this EA, we would be trading as if the GBP is the dominant currency.

Agree completely. That's why I thought the currency-strength indicator might be useful -- you could see if the GBP was strong, or the JPY was weak, or both.

[jboy]

Yes, that would be a good feature to keep in mind. I think we just let these run for a week, and see what happens before we start tinkering. Your curreny strength indicator might be a good filter.

I think the more important issue right now is 2 pairs moving in opposite direction, and both hitting the threshold on buy and sell baskets. A lot of pips will be lost just in the whipsaw cycles of opening and closing the baskets. Your currency strength indictor might also give us a filter to help out with this issue as well.

We just have to figure out which is the leading and lagging indicator. If your currency strength indi is leading or is our threshold on 1 pair leading? I would guess that the threshold on 1 pair is a much more sensitive indicator....which is why it has a lot of false readings by itself. The EA is trying to predict which way a whole basket is moving by only looking at 1 pair's movement.

[SteveHopwood]

Yes, that would be a good feature to keep in mind. I think we just let these run for a week, and see what happens before we start tinkering. Your curreny strength indicator might be a good filter.

I think the more important issue right now is 2 pairs moving in opposite direction, and both hitting the threshold on buy and sell baskets. A lot of pips will be lost just in the whipsaw cycles of opening and closing the baskets. Your currency strength indictor might also give us a filter to help out with this issue as well.

It could be that we want a single trigger pair per group, or maybe some confirmation from other pairs in the basket. We shall see.

I have not expanded on exit strategy 3; you have done so quite nicely yourself. It could be that we do not need it. We shall see.

It could be that the whole thing is slightly off the mark and would be better for Gary's Currency Strength, buying the GBPxxx when GBP is strong etc. We...... Come what may, I am doing nothing with Gary's indi until he is fairly sure it is working properly. It is looking good to me.

My settings are getting murdered.

[Jason Rogers]

Note: GBPNZD, GBPAUD and GBPCAD aren't available on FXCM.

Hi YouCrazyKids,

I thought you might like to know that GBP/NZD, GBP/AUD and GBP/CAD are all available through FXCM including on the Empty4 platform. You can right-click on the Market Watch window and select “Show All” to see the available currency pairs.

Jason

[garyfritz]

Steve, I will try to resolve the issues with the indi (in my copious free time ). But since I haven't written any EAs, I haven't discovered if they use the same braindead stupid benighted idiotic f'ing DUMB execution model as indicators. I don't know if fixing the indi will make the code work in an EA.

Though I suppose in a pinch you could just call the indi with iCustom. Grubby but it would let us test it with a minimum of braindamage. If it turns out to be a money machine, we can always put more effort into it to make it pretty.

I have a strong suspicion that buying baskets based on the currency strength will work well, but that's beyond my ability / time limits to hand-test. Once I get the indicator working, maybe you can throw it into this or another EA with iCustom and give it a quick sanity check.

EDIT: OK, I did a very quick simple test: running on H4, JPY was the weakest currency from 2/9 through 3/23, and AUD was weakest from 3/23 to 4/12. By buying all xxxJPY pairs from 2/9 through 3/23 you make about 200+500+600+800+200+500 = 2800 pips. (!!) Selling AUDxxx and buying xxxAUD from 3/23 to 4/12 makes about 20-45+200+140+35-100+120 = 230 pips. 10 wins out of 12, over 3000 pips in 2 months, trading only the weakest-currency baskets. Add in the strongest-currency baskets and you'd probably roughly double those results. It probably won't look as good when you don't have such long clear trends, but it does look promising...

And I don't think that's the optimal way to use this. I suspect "buy all baskets whose index is rising" and "sell all baskets whose index is falling" would work MUCH better.