Slopey Peaky Bob

[SteveHopwood]

I have written a progress report folks. See post 2.

[SilverTrader]

Thanks Steve

Battling off a laptop at the moment while I wait for the container to arrive in New Zealand with all my screens etc. Soon as it does, I'll have another go at SPB, thanks again for a detailed and informative update.

[dclayw]

After about 8 weeks 3 of my demos (SPB3) were doing great, one was up around 50% and the other 2 30%. They are still doing pretty well but over the past 2 weeks and particularly this week they have dropped back to about 20% up and the other 2 12% up, so quite a draw-down. The demo doing best is with distance between trades set to 20 (other 2 are 30) but ofcourse that is the one that gets smashed the most when things go pair shaped.

Worst pair on all 3 demos is EURCAD which formed a top late Dec last year and has been going down ever since. I would say that standard H1 1682 peaky has been pointing up all of this year. The EA keeps buying it but it continues to fall. 3 or 4 pairs behaving like that at once would do serious damage to any account, even trading 0.01 lots/$10k.

What can be done with pairs behaving like this? With SPB3 it's balls of steel so grin and bear it and that is likely going to give the best outcome in the very long term. But speaking generally on the SPB EAs what could be done? I'm not sure if recovery type strategies are the answer, bailing out when SS changes opposite not really an option either, that performs poorly in my experience and kills too many good trades. Basket TP might help but I feel results may be no-where near as good. Maybe using peaky on 2 timeframes would help, i.e. both peakys have to agree but even that wouldn't have helped with EURCAD, both H1 and H4 peaky pointing up all of this year.

I definitely think we are on the track here with peaky/SS combo, there have been some spectacular results. But as Steve said you must be able to live with the drawdown. So any way to minimise it is key. Once you get to a certain level of experience, and for me that means no use of stops and trading small with a decent size account, drawdown is the ONLY thing that matters.

[lamdog330]

Basket Trailing Stop didn't seem to kick in. I think I have seen this before.

My intention was to have the trailing stop kick in at $70.00, BasketTrailingStopGapValueCash at $10.00 with a BasketTargetCash set at $90.00. This morning, when I was still groggy, I looked at Empty4 on my phone and saw the basket was up to about $84. Cool. But the basket quickly dropped and within a minute or two I was down to $52. I quickly ran to my desktop machine and hit the nuclear option and closed the basket at $43.00.

Shouldn't the Trailing stop close the basket when it backed down from $70 down to $60, or is there a conflict with the $90 BasketTargetCash? Perhaps it was latency in my VPS?

Here are my settings.

On Desky, I figured out I have to enable both TreatAllPairsAsBasket and UseBasketTrailingStopPips.

[SteveHopwood]

I have talked about needing patience when trading SPB. Here is another great example, of a basket that closed yesterday:

Patience rewarded.png

The basket closed on Friday October 11th 2019. The first trade was on 12th September, so this blasted basket hung around for a month. It was in a small profit to begin with, then soon turned south. It was still thousands of pips in the red and over $1,000 into cash DD two days before closing. DD roughly halved on Thursday, then disappeared within a few hours on Friday before rapidly hitting its 1,000 pips TP.

Baskets do not always take this long to close but be aware that they can. Pleasant when they do, mind.

[strcat32]

It would have worked out for me too, but i made the massive mistake in leaving GBP pairs in.
On Friday it bought EURGBP and sold GBPCHF leading to a massive drawdown.

Just warning everyone to be aware of the political context.

[SteveHopwood]

It would have worked out for me too, but i made the massive mistake in leaving GBP pairs in.
On Friday it bought EURGBP and sold GBPCHF leading to a massive drawdown.

Just warning everyone to be aware of the political context.

I suggest that SPB is the wrong EA for you if you are concerned about either, or both, news events or political context.

It is definitely the wrong EA for you if you are worried by drawdown. I have mentioned this in passing, occasionally, as I seem to recall.

All you gain from taking pairs out of your trading list is limiting your opportunities to trade when the markets move in your direction - and they will, eventually. "Eventually" can be a while in arriving; understanding why is the cornerstone of trading any of the SPB tribe. You are definitely demoing the wrong bot if you have not grasped this.

[SteveHopwood]

Yet again, the value of patience here.

My most recent basket started on 22nd October. It diddled around for nearly three weeks, going nowhere.

At least the swap was positive.

It took about 30 seconds, a few minutes ago, to go from a tiny bit into the red to hitting its 1,000 pip take profit. The result was just shy of +$200.

Always good when that happens.

[tomele]

Yes, patience is key.

My live account looked this two weeks ago:

XAUUSDfH4.png

Now it looks this:

XAUUSDfH41.png

Am I tempted to intervene manually? Not at all. I wait for the next run up.

Cheers.

[SteveHopwood]

Thomas, you would have to be inside my brain to know just how thrilled I am by your post.

Just as with Gertje and PoS, I am monumentally proud that your success is based on software that I created.

Fantastic stuff.