I've had dozens of profitable baskets from Brians pitbull so will add my knowledge of it. As long as it's balanced correctly, one can actually leave it running for a pretty long time without too much worry. It makes money 2 basic ways.
1. you get lucky with one of the fastest moving pairs which goes into profit and stays there until you take profit. ie, a normal trade not unlike any other.
2. the fastest moving pair goes against you and into dd. after which you need to wait for correlated pair on the opposite side of the basket to come forward. then you give it 1.5x the lots of your dd pair (which balances your basket) and hope to take profit from that one.
Brians original pitbull basket was a little difficult to work with for me since i'm in the US and we need to use correlated hedges. i needed to pull gbpusd and usdjpy from his basket in order to give myself a couple good playing cards for balance in an emergency. after a while i switched my basket to the t101 universal hedge which balanced the basket more to my liking. I noticed everyone trying to trade the 2 fastest moving profit pairs and dd pairs at the same time. outside the US that isn't a problem because you can hedge them if they all swing against you. But in the US you will only want to trade the fast moving profit pairs because the only way to balance your basket(should they move against you) are the pairs on the opposite side.
Here's a quick example. Let's say i have a balanced basket with eurusd on the long side and gbpusd on the short side. eu is going into profit so I buy a .1 lot. gbpusd on the other side of the basket is going into dd but i do nothing with that pair. now fate is against us, and my .1 lot of eu flies into dd bringing the whole basket down and gu becomes the fastest moving profit. so right away I have to buy .15 lots of gu. this balances the dd and gives me some profit above the hedge. after i'm comfortable with the profit i will close the trade and then wait to see if it still has forward momentum before opening another gu. Now, as most of you know, you can literaly hedge yourself to death trying balance positions and control dd. the best way I found is to just relax and stop yourself at level 3. for example if my .15 lots of gu went against me right away i might add another .1 of eu when it came back into profit and that's it. no more hedging or u'll dig a huge hole. besides, you will have 8 or more other pairs you can use to balance as well. Hope this helps.
SteveHopwood wrote:The first of what will be many updates is in post 1.
I have done some extensive remodelling of the code, including amalgamating all the pairs into one input. We are using a virtual basket to trigger our trades, and so do not need buy/sell pairs. Also, the pairs selection was faulty.
I am new to Pitbull, and did not realise that you guys are using it as a basket trader. From reading your posts you appear to need:
- 1) a basket take profit
2) a basket trailing stop
3) a basket close hour
4) to tell Pb to stop trading for the day, once a basket is closed successfully
Anything else?
