Holy Graily Bob 'n Dotty 'n SuperSlope

[SteveHopwood]

Great results dclayw.

It looks as though this bot should be getting more attention than it is. I shall give it a bump in my wrup tonight.

[Wavegarrick]

Great results dclayw.

It looks as though this bot should be getting more attention than it is. I shall give it a bump in my wrup tonight.

I absolutely agree with you Steve. Dclayw has stuck by his guns since the beginning and it also shows that we need to persevere with an Ea and not just give up a soon as we see a few bad results.

Great stuff

[cozybooks]

Hey dclayw, what great results! If I understood what you were saying a couple of months ago, you changed the code so that you weren't considering what was happening on the current candle.

I've seen where you would have had to make changes in the Readindicatorvalues and LookforTradeClosure sections, but can you let us know what changes you've actually made to the original EA?

It would be interesting to run some long term tests with your original settings along with some B/E and J/S variations, but the great thing about what your test is doing is that on a real long run, you get the full run - nothing cuts it short except for a ss colour change. Great dedication to run a long term test like this and it provides the rest of us with a lot of information. Thanks for your efforts!

[SteveHopwood]

Even better dclayw, would you mind posting your version please?

I can link it in post 1 so people can try both the original and the version you adapted for your own use.

[dclayw]

Ok Steve, below is basically a re-hash of a PM I sent to Leon a while back.

I made some very slight tweaks to the code to get the EA to do what I wanted. The mods are trivial and ensure that:
1. no trading decision (either entry or exit) is made on the current candle
2. no exit occurs on threshold (yellow SS colour)

I include my documentation for the changes below. Line numbers might be approximate. Note also that I started this test 4 months ago and it is still running with the EA and libraries that were around at that time. I don't think the EA has changed at all during this time but the include library certainly has, shouldn't make any difference though to the way I'm using the EA.

Change 1:
Lines 738 and 747 were commented out.
This code determines long and short CSS cross respectively. Initial code tests the SS two candles back, one candle back, and the current candle. I do not want any trading decisions made on the current candle so I comment out that current candle test.
E.g. Line 738 is for a long cross and reads: if (SsColour[0] == green). I just commented this out.

Change 2:
Lines 851 and 874.
This part of the code tests if a trade should be closed because of SS colour change.
E.g. Line 851 tests if a long trade should be closed and reads: if (SsColour[0] != green).
This will close a long trade on either a red or a yellow (threshold) SS colour.
I'm using a threshold and I do not want to exit on yellow SS colour because on good moves it's often just a small reaction (well sometimes not so small).

For long trade I changed this to: if (SsColour[1] == red), so long trade will only close when it comes across red SS colour (one candle back, does not test current candle).

Here's my version of the EA that produces the results in the thread:

Holy Graily Bob n Dotty n SuperSlope (mymod2-b1).ex4

Here's the set file that produces the results in the thread:

HGBnDnSS Magic 113 (D1 14,50,0.8).set

You may note that I have EveryTickMode set to true. Without that setting I found that some trades were missed because of spread events at rollover. I had to ensure that the trade was taken when the spread event finished. This is very important on D1 because you absolutely cannot afford to miss a signal. EveryTickMode is the only way I could get this to work. The setting has a side affect in that if a trade exits (e.g. manually closed) in the same time period as the entry occurred then the trade is just re-opened. This problem can be worked around.

EverytickMode can also cause problems if the EA goes bananas and starts closing trades when it shouldn't, can lead to hundreds of trades opening/closing, can be somewhat controlled with the MinMinutesBetweenTradeOpenClose setting.

Note that with D1 trading this would be very easy to trade manually without an EA.

The results have been good but remember that even 4 months is a short period of time when trading on the D1, still waiting for the account to blow up. The first 2 months were pretty consistent at around 500 pips/week, wild swings during 3rd month, up and down by 1500 pips, latter part of 4th month caught some big moves (that are still going). My initial idea when I started this was to come up with optimised stop/TP by analysing MAE/MFE but I'm not so sure on that now. My preliminary testing showed it just killed good trades, although it might control the drawdown to some extent.

Open to suggestions on how to improve this, staying on those long runs but controlling the drawdown. I'm resisting adding filters, I played with 6ths filter, it did not help, I've cut down the number of pairs being traded, early days so far but it is not helping either. I've played with taking 500pip baskets (using APTM), early days too but has not helped either. Not sure if trailing/jumping stops would help, they would kill some big runs and it's the big runs you need to keep.

I've tried this on shorter timeframes, generally not so good. Blew up a H1 test after a few weeks, which kind of suggests that eventually this D1 account will go to.

Note also that this test holds trades over the weekend, which I would never do live.

[nicolkoekoek]

Hi dclayw,

Thanks for sharing, it is really appreciated that you are like all of the coders here, willing to openly share your findings and code!!

I have been using the HGI for quite a while and got some really nice trades on the daily/4hr. NOT THAT I WANT TO distract from the HGB Dotty SS, but maybe it could help to find another angle to improve the overall. I use three standard TMA(56)'s just to get an area to look for trades :TMA(56) on Weekly, daily and 4hr. if the price auction is above the weekly and/or daily TMA on the daily chart, I look for HGI entries on the 4hr chart, outside the daily TMA (Magenta lines)and 4hr TMA's (white dotted lines). I know the TMA indicator repaints, but it just helps to get the area of interest, for the longer swings. And on the higher time frames it doesn't make that much of a difference. I like to trade this way, since I can trade with really small stops, with the USDJPY I went even all the way down to the 5min chart to get entries in the right area (8 Sept).

below I show the daily and 4hr chart, from this still open trade;

JPYUSD daily St.png

JPYUSD 4hr st.png

Again it is just an idea that works for me, so far, and might give you another suggestion, nothing more.

Keep smiling, Nicolaas

[SteveHopwood]

Ok Steve, below is basically a re-hash of a PM I sent to Leon a while back.

Thanks very much for the post. I have linked it in post 1.

[dclayw]

While I've got this test running I'll keep reporting the monthly result, so here's the 5 month update for my native SS test. Remember this is really just a baseline test to see what happens over the longer term. It's giving me some good info in terms of pair selection and how far a trade can run (MAE/MFE).

This is the first losing month, about -ve 500pips, although month 3 only made about 2-300 pips. Also a slight glitch this month where the EA missed one trade on GBPCAD for some reason, would have resulted in +180pips. Still, it's averaging about 70 pips/trade at 1 trade/day on average. This month the overall pip result (since test start) ranged between 6700-8500 pips. Drawdown is of the order of 20% and has happened more then once (0.01 lots on a $1000 account, although this demo is actually a $10k account).

I have another test running now with just 10 pairs, best performing pairs over the past 4-5 months, closing trades for the weekend and re-opening on Monday morning if still in sync with SS. With this one I'm also going to take TP loosely based on good old RSI. No stops of any kind, just exit (and reverse) on SS colour change as with baseline.

113.PNG

[trader689]

thanks for the update dclayw, i have also been testing your modified EA on D1 charts for the last couple of months, recently with a 500pip basket TP via MPTM classic (as i felt that although it made good equity gains, profits were not being locked sufficiently) and i'm very happy with the performance

thanks again

While I've got this test running I'll keep reporting the monthly result, so here's the 5 month update for my native SS test. Remember this is really just a baseline test to see what happens over the longer term. It's giving me some good info in terms of pair selection and how far a trade can run (MAE/MFE).

This is the first losing month, about -ve 500pips, although month 3 only made about 2-300 pips. Also a slight glitch this month where the EA missed one trade on GBPCAD for some reason, would have resulted in +180pips. Still, it's averaging about 70 pips/trade at 1 trade/day on average. This month the overall pip result (since test start) ranged between 6700-8500 pips. Drawdown is of the order of 20% and has happened more then once (0.01 lots on a $1000 account, although this demo is actually a $10k account).

I have another test running now with just 10 pairs, best performing pairs over the past 4-5 months, closing trades for the weekend and re-opening on Monday morning if still in sync with SS. With this one I'm also going to take TP loosely based on good old RSI. No stops of any kind, just exit (and reverse) on SS colour change as with baseline.

[dclayw]

Here's my 6 month (24 week) update for my native SS test. This will be the last one. Continues to have very good runs but for the past 2 months has given it all back and then some. It was fun while it lasted. I learned a lot.

Some pairs are consistent bad performers with this strategy, see AUDCAD, went from bad to worse each and every month.

There is still potential here.

mn113.PNG