Scoobs and squalou: what a combo

[SteveHopwood]

Wonderful, wonderful creatures, 14-16 year olds. They bring me endless entertainment.

Yes, they're endlessly entertaining if you can send them HOME after an hour!!!

Yep. They come to me knowing that I am going to: be sympathetic; laugh at the exploit that gained them a lunchtime detention; agree that the after-school detention was harsh; consign homework to Room 101; side with them against their parents.

Then, having stirred sufficient mayhem, send them home.

[SteveHopwood]

Our apologies to those of you who came here to read about trading. No doubt we shall return to this soon. In the meantime, talking about kids is much more entertaining.

[squalou]

The problem with having an always-on EA here is reading sq's indi. Signals generated by his indi are based on the user's DaysBack input. sq does not store values in buffers (I think). The indi is a visual thingy and represents s/r by drawing fib lines. What is relevant is the next/previous s/r, not R1, R2, R3 etc

That is why I do not think I can automate my idea - and if I cannot automate it, then who can?

Already forgotten about TIB, Steve ? Stack overflow syndrom... i know how it feels...

Probably a good basis to automate this.
Adding the RSI filter shouldn't be a big deal.

Sq

[SteveHopwood]

Last week was a breakeven week. I had to close out a couple of trades after the price retreated back inside the range, and I spend most of the rest of the week building an uncooperative basket, with just a couple of trades closing to allow the breakeven.

This week, the markets have resumed their trends, so look at the pic. Us trading babes-in-the-wood do not often see a position like this.

This is demo, but I am gently dropping the occasional trade onto my live account as well.

[ianp]

What can I say .......

I have manually closed 2 baskets this week one on Wednesday for 330 pips and one today 535pips.

Maybe it was luck or the fact that once I started the EA, I just left it alone, apart from moving a couple of stops to B/e...

Thanks guys this is my new favorite toy..........

[SteveHopwood]

What can I say .......

I have manually closed 2 baskets this week one on Wednesday for 330 pips and one today 535pips.

Maybe it was luck or the fact that once a day I stsrted the EA and then I just left it alone, apart from moving a couple of stops to B/e...

Thanks guys this is my new favorite toy..........

It is good fun, and not time-consuming as well.

I am still treating the trades as individuals for now, but am wondering whether to go down the basket route. The highest the current basket has been is just short of 9% of the starting balance - and the oldest trade in it is only just over a week old.

I guess I am just not used to trend trading. The trendies say that trades can remain open for days, weeks even months. So far as I am concerned, the trades open for months are those that went so heavily into dd that it will take them months to recover.

In case you have not already got something similar, I attach an indi I knocked together. It keeps track of the highest profit the basket has reached, and saves this figure to your hard drive so it can pick up following a restart (Global Variable editable via the F3 key should you want to alter the value manually). The indi is producing the figure of 186.69 at the top left of the chart.

I am not trading everything available. Looking at the Rsi Trend indi, I see umpteen pairs set up for trading, but I am happy with what I have for the mo and can manage the trades easily.

That last sentence prompted me to add Click and Drag All Stop Losses. This is an EA that works like C&D Takprofit and StopLoss, except:

• 1} It ignores the take profit
  2) It picks up the stop loss of all open trades that belong to the chart, drawing a dashed yellow line to represent their value (I chose yellow because it is more visible than the usual red on a screen dominated by red/brown if squ's indi is loaded). Move the line, and the EA will adjust the stop of the relevant trade.

I might make C&D into a Stealth stop loss manager at some stage - 'hard' stop is HiddenPips away from the line etc; we shall see.

Carry on having fun. I am.

[SWG123]

Nice one Steve, I think I feel a demo coming on.

BTW, you say in the first post that you don't bother about spread, which can be quite hefty for some of these pairs. Am I correct in assuming one EA triggers based on bid and the other uses the ask price?

[SteveHopwood]

Nice one Steve, I think I feel a demo coming on.

BTW, you say in the first post that you don't bother about spread, which can be quite hefty for some of these pairs. Am I correct in assuming one EA triggers based on bid and the other uses the ask price?

This is trend trading. Trades can remain open for days, weeks, months. Spread is irrelevant. So is swap, but it bothers the hell out of me, so I take notice of it. That is simply my weakness.

Both the waiting EA's work off the Bid - that is the price shown on the charts.

[SteveHopwood]

The markets have opened tonight and my demo account is up just under 20%

No way would I have let this kind of profit run had this been a live account. I would have closed the lot with a self-satisfied smirk. This is a demo, so I have set mptm to follow all the trades with a jumping stop of 100 pips instead.

[SteveHopwood]

Curious that this thread has attracted so little attention. Maybe my round-robin "Hey guys, a new toy to play with" have more impact than I imagine, and I have not sent one for this thread.

So, study the attached statement. The slightly odd start balance is because I had a demo account trading as I describe in post 1, that I buggered up when my Waiting EA code was not quite right. I started again with what would have been the original balance starting with $2000 and up $70. The statement says everything.

More to the point is live trading, and anyone who ignores this bit really is an idiot. Everything I describe from here on concerns my live trading account.

I have a number of trades left behind horribly into dd from my experiments with The Beast. I long ago decided to deal with these one by one as part of my learning-to-trade stuff.

So, first up was the simplest. A GBPJPY buy, left behind before the latest Big Tumble that saw the pair hit its all-time low of 116.845 back in August. Not a problem, except that the buy trade was taken at 139.701, so that is quite a lot of pips in the hole.

Good thing I had long ago eschewed Bob's 'tiny lot sizes' philosophy - and also might explain why I have no interest in risk-based lot sizing. A number of hedge trades that I closed prematurely added lots to the balance but nothing to the equity.

This blasted trade was sent on the 8TH April last year. It hung around for months, with the so-called psychotic GJ going nowhere for ever and ever and ever.

Shortly after I came up with this trading idea, the damn GJ started to move, so I started to take live manual trades as the demo started to show that the idea had some legs.

I have continued to take buys as the market broke the latest resistance. The brilliant upsurge today has worked wonders. At its worst, that blasted GJ trade was -$230, or roughly 10% of the account balance (yes, I know, but you have to be inside my head to understand my attitude to dd It doesn't kill me, ok?). As the market has risen, I have stacked more buy trades, gradually locking more and more profit as the day continued.

So, that maximum dd of $230 is converted to a positive upl of +$46 courtesy of: scoobs providing the overall trend direction; sq providing the trade trigger.

I have moved the stop of all the profitable trades to within a couple of hundred of pips (largest trade is +640 pips) or so of the market so that lots of profit is locked in should the market instantly retrace on Monday - always a strong possibility given the strength of the move today. Come what may, the method has offered up lots of profits this week. If the GJ move continues next week, then I shall continue to follow it upwards. If not, I will probably be left with that original trade but also with a clearer idea about what to do about it.

So, what I hope is that by this time next week: the GJ basket will have closed at a magnificent profit; I will have made a start on reducing the eurchf and gbpchf baskets still outstanding from the Big Beast days. If I can sort out that little lot, then I really will have learned how to trade.

Possibly.