Slopey Peaky Bob

[billv]

To those trades who complain about DD, I say this.
It is important to understand the strategy used in these EA's.

If we ignore the various entry signals, the EAs are basically adding to losing trades
and this practice will inevitably result in draw down and if there is a long trending period then our pain can be prolonged and extensive.

I have been using a similar strategy in my own EA's for several years now and although it can be very profitable, it can also blow our account.

Being caught in 1 bad trade is bad enough but when we trade baskets, being caught due to exposure to the same currency over several pairs can be devastating.
Therefore it is important to limit our number of currency pairs and to try and exit trades early on in a trend.

HERE IS AN IDEA FOR THE SPB PROGRAMMERS
In my attempt to lower my risk In my own EA and also in the POS + Awesome E's ,
I enabled symbol closure and I also added 2 extra symbol closures
I made symbol closure my priority so if I see 1 pair opening more and more trades I want that pair to exit as quickly as possible.
I do this by lowering my profit expectation.
My symbol take profit target drops as more trades open.

Of course this practice will make basket closure harder.
So we could end up with a more permanent DD with many small groups of trades (2 or 3 or 4 or 5 etc trades in each currency) BUT I don't mind that at all because I only trade in the +VE SWAP direction
and small numbers of trades are easy to recover.

In fact many open trades will close by themselves daily and if any of these pairs persists we can either close that group of trades manually or we can simply wait for auto recovery to take place,
but I prefer to keep -ve trades open because one day they will be recovered and until that happens, I get to keep the +ve swap which helps my bottom line.

HERE IS AN EXAMPLE OF THE SYMBOL CLOSURE

input string bas2="---- Symbol Basket trading ----";
input bool SymbolTradesBelongToBasket=true;
input int SymbolMinTradesOpenForBasket=2;
input double SymbolBasketCashTakeProfit=15;
input double SymbolBasketCashPercentageTarget=0;
input string bas3="---- Symbol Basket trading ----";
input bool SymbolTradesBelongToBasket2=true;
input int SymbolMinTradesOpenForBasket2=6;
input double SymbolBasketCashTakeProfit2=5;
input double SymbolBasketCashPercentageTarget2=0;
input string bas4="---- Symbol Basket trading ----";
input bool SymbolTradesBelongToBasket3=true;
input int SymbolMinTradesOpenForBasket3=10;
input double SymbolBasketCashTakeProfit3=2;
input double SymbolBasketCashPercentageTarget3=0;

[SteveHopwood]

A third week with no profits.

Worse, I actually lost just shy of a couple of hundred dollars, courtesy of some daft over-trading on Gareth's account.

I thought SPB on that account was set to grids of three trades set 40 pips apart; it was actually set to 5 trades at 30 pips apart. I kept an eye on the account once I saw how many trades were outstanding. My line in the sand was a margin level percent of 125%, so I closed down everything at 124%.

This leaves the account with a $575 balance which is a shame but entirely self-inflicted. The account is still worth more than double its nadir of $226.

My lack of attention to detail is never a good thingy; sometimes it is a very bad thingy.

This leaves the overall profit on the three accounts since going live on April 12th at $2,003. Still a good job - just not quite as good as it should have been.

[SteveHopwood]

Hey folks, can I ask you to look at this post http://www.stevehopwoodforex.com/phpBB3 ... 56#p163056 and respond accordingly please?

[Gertje]

It does make me wonder whether there is an optimum turn on time for bringing a new account online.

What I notice with PoS on the H4, is that everytime at the end of the month the DD increases substantionally, only to recover in the first week of the new month.
My demo went from a floating -5% last week to +2% now.
Same positions, nothing closed in between.

This is just using Peaky on the H4, no idea if SS has any influence.

[dclayw]

The several weeks of drawdown with SPB seems to have coincided with me starting to play around with this EA. Sorry about that, please accept my sincere apologies.

I've thought long and hard about what settings to test. But ofcourse one of the first I tried was my old faithful SS settings of 0.8,14,50. These are the settings that seemed to work best under most conditions. Some may remember that I ran a 6 month long test on the D1 and several 3 month tests on the H4 (http://www.stevehopwoodforex.com/phpBB3 ... =87&t=4925) . Was somehwhat successful in terms of pips made but the drawdown way too scary, particularly on D1. This was just trading the SS, nothing else.

The idea with 0.8,14,50 is to avoid the chop as much as possible. Entries are later but generally more accurate. When basket trading, later entries should not matter all that much.

I've just started tinkering with SPB, running tests for the entire week and shutting all trades down Friday evenings. Basically OOTB settings except:
CloseMarketTradesOnOppositeColour=true (I learned never to fight against what SS was telling me)
SendImmediateMarketTrade=true
TreatIndividualPairsAsBasket=false
UseTradingDoneForTheWeek=false (for now anyway)
I am using an ATR based grid as well.

I ran 2 tests with these settings (v1t), one with SS at default of 1,7,50 (T1) and the other with SS 0.8,14,50 (T2). Last week T1 lost 720 pips, T2 gained 67 pips. So far this week (07:25 GP broker time) T1 is losing about 60 pips and T2 just took a basket (265 pips). I'm using $30 targets.

Very limited testing thus far but in this choppy time those SS settings seem to be holding up. Might lead no-where but food for thought.

[alecsa72]

Since Peaky on Steroids had been inactive this week due to lack of moves, I thought I would try SPB on the same account where I had PoS.

Results are very good - while in 4 weeks I had about 21.6% equity increase with PoS (avg about 5%), so far with SPB I added another 20% equity increase in a single week, and it's not even Friday yet.

Settings mostly out of the box, but I have butchered the code quite a bit myself (Version 1L) - by adding a section to rollover period which deletes all pending orders during rollover period - I don't want to leave pending orders over that period since there can be some wild swings.

If this (live) account survives for more than 2-3 weeks I will post the "butchered" code, if anyone is interested

The SPB comment in the pic is from SPB, the other 3 were from PoS, all running since week of May 05

Well, after almost 2 months of un-interrupted testing my "butchered" SPB version came to crashing halt. I have gained about 100% in equity, only to lose it in the past couple of weeks

GBP and NZD based pairs killed my equity, I closed all trades today to avoid margin called, it was a small account anyway, just for testing, so no big loss

Back to drawing board I guess ...

Capture.PNG

[Wavegarrick]

GBP and NZD based pairs killed my equity, I closed all trades today to avoid margin called, it was a small account anyway, just for testing, so no big loss

Back to drawing board I guess ...

Hi Alecsa,

I am in a similar situation as you with the similar based pairs. Fortunately on demo. It has been a nice run but has come to an end for the time being.

It is definately back to the drawing board and I am no where near giving up on SPB. Here is what I am thinking. I look at why Gertje is so successful with Peaky on Steroids. It must be realized that Peaky on Steroids does not have an extra filter like Super Slope which gives momentum and entries at the correct time, so Gertje has been at a disatvantage all this time but his trades have come through with the greater trend and successfuly so.

So looking at what Gertje does, my thought process goes towards having slopey peaky Bob run with peaky on the 4hr timeframe 1682 bars ago and a possible 2nd Ea running on the Daily timeframe 1682 bars ago.

I will look at increasing my distance between trades to between 50 and 100 pips.

I will look at activating " Trading individual pairs as Basket" In stead of "All trades belong to a Basket"

The recovery option with Peaky on Steroids works wonders and I believe it could be a great addition to Slopey Peaky Bob and if Steve or anyone could look at this I would be very greatful or tell me if bollocks..

Cheers
Leon

[SteveHopwood]

The recovery option with Peaky on Steroids works wonders and I believe it could be a great addition to Slopey Peaky Bob and if Steve or anyone could look at this I would be very greatful or tell me if bollocks..

Cheers
Leon

'twill be done.

[zafh]

GBP and NZD based pairs killed my equity, I closed all trades today to avoid margin called, it was a small account anyway, just for testing, so no big loss

Back to drawing board I guess ...

Hi Alecsa,

I am in a similar situation as you with the similar based pairs. Fortunately on demo. It has been a nice run but has come to an end for the time being.

It is definately back to the drawing board and I am no where near giving up on SPB. Here is what I am thinking. I look at why Gertje is so successful with Peaky on Steroids. It must be realized that Peaky on Steroids does not have an extra filter like Super Slope which gives momentum and entries at the correct time, so Gertje has been at a disatvantage all this time but his trades have come through with the greater trend and successfuly so.

So looking at what Gertje does, my thought process goes towards having slopey peaky Bob run with peaky on the 4hr timeframe 1682 bars ago and a possible 2nd Ea running on the Daily timeframe 1682 bars ago.

I will look at increasing my distance between trades to between 50 and 100 pips.

I will look at activating " Trading individual pairs as Basket" In stead of "All trades belong to a Basket"

The recovery option with Peaky on Steroids works wonders and I believe it could be a great addition to Slopey Peaky Bob and if Steve or anyone could look at this I would be very greatful or tell me if bollocks..

Cheers
Leon

But POS is more of a revision to the mean type strategy where you are buying the bottom and selling the top. SPB is more of a trend strategy where you will be taking buy / sell signals from the top / bottom all the way to the middle. As SPB is a grid based EA you will end up with a lot more open trades, and you use the recovery wouldn't that mean even more potential open trades?

[zafh]

One thing the recovery does which I thought was very clever (the idea came before I joined) is it sets pending orders and waits for price to go in the direction, rather than market orders. So instead of adding another position every 50 pips price goes against you, you add a stop order every 100 pips, 50 pips above or below. If the market doesn't reverse then you have less exposure an close out for a smaller loss.