European Breakout Grid Trap Strategy

[forextrader-radioman]

Hello Dietmar,

I did a quick hackjob in allowing the Euro v4 EA to start at a defined price instead of time. [...]

Have a go at it?

I dunno lol

Hy Mantkinth,
many thanks for that coding! ... I will try this modified EA ... and those " invalid stop errors" ... I guess that is related to the br0ker. If stop is to close to entry price. Would be much better if takeprofit and stoploss levels are hidden for the br0ker (generally better imo) and with that, you can take what ever you want as stoploss or takeprofit, even 1 Pip *g*, this is the common way by real trade management EAs ...

But, to be honest, that would make this EA into a killer machine ... and who want´s that? *g* we all are addicted to the risk and fun thing (no risk - no fun), otherwise we would trade for making money

Best wishes to you and yours,
Dietmar

[forextrader-radioman]

Hy
see screenshot, the EA placed the grid lines at wrong levels. Setting here in this example was 20 pips grid lines, 3 levels, 4th level is common TP (and SL for the other side). The EA startet correct at price 1.30615 but the first level was not 20 pips above and below this price, it started higher (40 pips from triggered price level). with the first line, 60 for the second, 80 for the third and so on.

So the middle of the complete grid is not at the trigger price level, it is 20 pips higher. And thats also the reason for the error "invalid..." because the EA will set the first sell-level not 20 pips below the actual price. It will set the first level exact -at- the actuel price (which is wrong).

The complete grid (from top level TP/SL line to bottom level RP/SL line) is wrong about 20 pips to high. It must be set 20 pips lower.

, Dietmar

[mantkinth]

Hmm okay it seems like I need to read more into the code lol, all i did was shove in a price to trigger function lol, I expected everything to work as usual.

I'll see what I can do

#Added,

Okay I did something to the code.. see if this works as you want dietmar. If useing price as the trigger,
the base price will be whatever price you have set.. should fix the wierdness in your previous screenshot.

[forextrader-radioman]

Good Morning!

... looks good! (see screenshot) ... 1001 thanks

, Dietmar

[Nipponho]

Hi Dietmar,

There is a thread over at FF called “100% win grid math ea”. I was studying that strategy before I notice this thread. Not sure if u are aware of that thread, you might like to check it out.

Some one by the nick of ECTrader was able to double his account within a month. His postings appear on last ten pages of the thread. What he did was that he disables the Continuous Trading and load the EA to establish a grid, and remove the EA after the grid closes in profit, and reload the EA again when he feels appropriate. Trading first 2 hours of London, and break, and trade again one hour before US opens and stop one hour after US opens. E1= P+4,E2=P+8, E3=P+12, TP=P+16, vice versa for shorts. At 4 pips increment, it can be used as a scalp. It needs to move 16 pips in either direction for profits, in other words, price must break out of price trap of 32 pips, which is not difficult to achieve if we can time it properly.

I obtained his settings and try to replicate his results for 3 days. Indeed 3-5% per day is attainable if u carefully time your entry. However, my demo went from US$10k to 11k+ and end up at 8k. My last 2 losing trades occurs when price zig zags within 32 pips. Unfortunately the EA is flawed and it closes the entire basket when one side of it reaches profit level, totally forgetting that the other side was at loss.

I tried various versions of those EAs written by FF members and realized that all has this flaw of “forgetting the martingaled recovery trades over at the other side”, not sure if u know what I mean by this. I collected all the versions and put all of them on backtests using various different settings. Disappointingly, all results in negative expectation, and most tests results shows account depleted to the bones. Back tests can only be performed on “continuous trading”, so we cannot time our entries to avoid NFP, fomc etc.. But I think the bad performance is due to bug more than the inability to test on discretionary entries.

I was about to give up on this strategy when I came across this thread and was very delighted when I put the EA provided by MantKinth written by Steve on back test with US$500, 0.01lots and it produces $50 profit over 12 months. 10% return is not extremely impressive, but still better than negative results. Forward results might be better as we can use discretionary entries to avoid zig zags while backtest cannot be performed without turning on the non stop trading function.

From your chart, it seems like u are using 15 pips increment. So your profit level is about P+60. Would you like to consider 4 pips increment instead and do it a few rounds each session? It is easier for price to move out of a 32 pips price trap than 120 pip price trap. Correct me if i got it wrong.

I notice that chances are better when the grid is placed a few minutes before London opens. I was thinking of doing like this, just one entry per day, and that’s it. We will lose many opportunities but in exchange we can avoid “death trade” arising from the non stop zig zag within the price trap.

[forextrader-radioman]

Hi Dietmar, [...]
From your chart, it seems like u are using 15 pips increment. So your profit level is about P+60. Would you like to consider 4 pips increment instead and do it a few rounds each session? [...] .

Hy Nipponho,
thank you about the informations. Well in these days the grid with 3 levels and each level with 15 pips is not working. The normal moving of "my pairs" EU and GU is now much lower and so I trade with only one level (10 to 15 pips) and not 3 levels.

So now the TP and SL level is not the 4th but the 2nd level.

Setting is "martignale = 4, but I am not happy with that, because the EA has a bug in the code, it will not accept martingage = 1,5 or 3 or 3,5 or 5 ... only 2 and 4 is is working (perhaps even bigger, not tested)

I am very sad that in the EA the TP and SL is always transferred to the br0ker and so the EA can not run with settings like "4 pips for each level". For that the EA must handle the SL and TP levels "hidden", but the EA has no option for that. So the levels are dependent to that what the br0ker allows

That is the reason why I do not trade with it very often in these days. I will look out for the thread in FF, again thanks for the infos! ...

IMO for trading with those "strategies" (or all strategies?) it is important -where- the trade is started (location in bigger timeframes, chart "regions" like support - resistance regions, fib-levels and so on) and not -when- (time or time of day) it is starting.
Greetings from here,
Dietmar

[Nipponho]

Hi Dietmar,

Maybe one level is worth a try. I started a grid today at default 3 levels. Bad day, zig zag back and forth, and narrow range. It’s been ten hours, and the grid cannot be closed, basket now down $400. Maybe we should try it in Jan where there is more volatility.

I’m not sure which version u are using. I use the one posted by Mantkinth Fri Dec 07, 2012 11:17 am. Martingale is default 1.5 and it works fine. I set my start lot to be 0.5, so my next level should be 0.5X1.5=0.75. But the orders were fired at 0.38, 0.57, 0.86. Multiplication is correct, but starting lot is wrong.

I also notice Eurogrid EA cannot have a 4 pip increment. Minimum is 8 pips. But I use MGrid EA and set it to 40, same broker, same platform, same demo account, no problem. MGrid is a EA written by FF members. Setting at 40 means 4 pips (this is a 3 year old EA, not written to cater to 5 digits).

U can try the EAs at FF thread, but take note that all contain the same bug of closing baskets at loss. And u are not allowed to manually intervene. If u close any one of the open orders, the entire basket closure is triggered, regardless of whether it is in profit or in loss. But their martingale works fine. Some of the members might have debugged it as they could use it profitably, but they did not post their debugged EA for sharing.

[mantkinth]

Okie dokie, i took a look at the code again about the martingaling not working properly, and its due to the UseDifflevelLots settings, for some odd reason the inital lots are set to be half of what you enter in the setting, and hence when you use martingale, its actually 0.5*1/2*1.5, hence you get 0.38.

Frankly i got no idea what its used for, so i played around, and at least made the martingale work properly if u se that to false.

Maybe dietmar can enlighten me on whats its for, and if its supposed to stack with martingale or one or the other.

Give it a try.

[forextrader-radioman]

Thank you, mantkinth,

well, I don´t know, why there is that strange calculation. The development of the EA was here:

http://www.stevehopwoodforex.com/phpBB3 ... ?f=5&t=116

And during the process there are so many different suggestions implemented by different traders.

Setting like "martingale = 0.5" makes no sense (imo) but martingale = 1.5 or 2 or 2.5 and so on, that makes a lot of sense because that´s the way it can work out of the grid to make profits.

Of course, its needing a lot of margin, so trading with the smallest lotsize would be the best.

But not 0.01 lot (because then the setting "martingale = 1.5" will not work. So the smallest lotsize must be 0.02 lot.

All the best to you,
Dietmar

[forextrader-radioman]

mantkinth, EA works now much better here, thank you! ...

Do you know, why the EA does not always delete all old pending orders? ... very often some old pending orders with specified magic nr. are not deleted after TP was hit.

I wish you and yours a merry xmas,
Dietmar

Testing the EA here now since 24th of dec.:

http://www.myfxbook.com/members/Radioma ... ine/447173