Peaky Fifo

[cozybooks]

Greetings Traders!

Yes, it's been a long time since I've updated Peaky Fifo, but the Demo and Live account are still running.

Having a demo run for over two years has been very educational. There were great returns early on, then during 2019 several pairs just kept moving in one direction and the drawdown kept growing. The August drawdown of$ 3,113 grew by slightly more, but not much. It illustrated that you certainly would have needed a $ 10,000 account bare minimum to survive.

Since August, it's been even more interesting, as price moved back in the other direction, and the Sixths lines had moved so far from their original spots a year or two ago that opposite signals started to get generated on a regular basis. Each opposite signal closed all of the open trades even though they were still in the red, and set a new pending trade in the new direction, just like it is supposed to do.

The result was that drawdown dropped while the balance dropped as well. The last few trade closures have been back in the positive direction. The demo account balance is now $ 15,924 with a drawdown of $ 800. So, a drop of $ 753 in the current balance, but a drop of $ 2,313 in the drawdown, so overall it is quite the improved position.

The live Oanda account being run by Ditto is now at $ 639.02 with a drawdown of $ 46.66. So, I've had a drop of $ 63.20 in account balance, but a drop of about $262 in drawdown, again, quite the positive result from the doldrums of August.

I'm happy to let the EA log some actual losses as it in effect, resets everything for the coming months. It will be interesting to see if I can get back to a steady balance increase over the next year. Either way, I'll keep Peaky Fifo running. It is quite the interesting live/demo test to run for a long period of time. I still have a long term goal of running it for ten years and seeing how high the equity can go (well, if I make it that far!

Happy trading!!! I've learned a lot letting this run for so long.

Steve

[cozybooks]

btw, I kept forgetting over time to reset the TP and distance between trades - a definite limitation in using a clunky Old EA since my TP is 150% of the Daily ATR (365), with a minimum profit of 105 pips. My distance between trades is 300% of the Daily ATR. Still, it only took 15 minutes to update all of the pairs.

It was quite the stark reminder of how much volatility has dropped. Most of the pairs had a TP above (and in some cases far above) the 105 pip minimum, but now most are below it. Most pairs saw a 15-20% drop in TP and distance levels, and in the case of USDJPY, the change was more like 40%. I also managed to catch a mistake in which the distance between trades for NZDCHF was set to 512 pips - hmmm.... could take quite a while to generate a second trade on that pair!

Oh well, a reminder I suppose to reset them every three months instead of once a year.

Happy trading!!

[SteveHopwood]

coz, I am often to be found banging on about the need for patience in the various SPB threads. You have to be the ultimate example of patience.

Fantastic stuff.

[cozybooks]

oanda-live.png

Hey Steve,

I somehow missed your last post, but it is very much appreciated.

I think I'm only able to have patience with Peaky Fifo by having other trading accounts to occupy my time. I tend to forget to even check Peaky Fifo for days at a time, and sometimes I've missed out on trades because ditto shut down over the weekend for some unknown reason and the trades only made it to my Oanda account much later - sometimes three or four days later. Of course, sometimes that worked for my benefit! I supposed it's the ultimate in stress free trading!

I end 2019 with Peaky Fifo getting back to doing what he does best. Lots of trades closed, a few more with a loss, but enough with profits to move Peaky Fifo back into the black for December.

Global Prime demo now sits with a balance of $ 16,277 and a very manageable drawdown of $526. End of 2018 had a balance of $ 14,404. That's an increase of $ 1873, for a an return of 13% for 2019 (or 18.7% on the original $10,000 demo account balance). That might not seem like much, but it's a heck of an improvement on a savings account, still better than the average return on the stock market over the long term, and pretty darn good considering this year saw a lot of losses to overcome in the third quarter.

Live Oanda account sits at nearly $709, with a drawdown of about $31.00. I ended 2018 with a balance of $564, so that's a nifty increase of $ 145 for a return of almost 26%. I'm thinking back to my original $100 investment in December, 2017 and even with the extra $30.00 I added later on to protect against drawdown, it's hard not to be happy with those results! btw, the 'realized profit/loss' on the Oanda screen print doesn't account for all of the profit because at some point Oanda forced me to switch to a different account on their new servers, so it only shows the realized profit since that time.

Have a wonderful 2020 everyone! ... Steve

[cozybooks]

February about to come to a close amid some crazy chart moves. One of the features I like the most that Steve put into Peaky is moving the stop orders as the market moves against you.

NZD has been crashing this month, but Peaky Fifo currently has no open trades on EURNZD or NZDUSD - just a stop order that keeps moving. The buystop for NZDUSD has moved about a hundred pips, and the sellstop for EURNZD has moved about 150 pips.

Demo now sits at 31 months. Balance has increased to $16952, an increase of $ 675 in just two months. Drawdown is a still manageable 817. Even if you were to close everything today, that's a nice tidy return for 31 months for a demo account that started at $10,000.

Oanda Live account, which started 27 months ago at $ 130, now sits at $777, an increase of $ 68 in just two months, with a drawdown of $ 59 - Nice when the increase in two months is larger than the total drawdown.

Next time I report the Oanda account balance will be lower, as I'll be doing what I should have done quite a while ago, which is to remove my original $ 130 investment, so I'll only be working with house money going forward.

Peaky keeps doing its thing!

[cozybooks]

I posted this idea a while back, but I am finally going to implement it myself.

I still have a couple of Forex.com accounts from my early trading days (well, they were sold to Forex.com at some point). I had managed to take an 8k investment and turn it into 3k in about 18 months before I found this forum. It has slowly been making it's way back up to about $3,800, and I am using it now for a strategy involving SMA60 and HGI for just five pairs.

Anyway, my original idea on Peaky Fifo if you wanted to be ultra conservative was to run it on a demo, then wait for some pair to get to the point where it had opened three trades or at least had three trades with stop orders. At that point, you would set up that pair with Peaky Fifo on a live account, on the idea that you've avoided the first two trades already and thus limited your exposure. It sounded nifty in theory, but I'm going to use the live Forex.com accounts to put it into practice over the next year and see how it plays out.

btw, Forex.com is great for identifying obvious trades. On their Empty4 platform, when a pair is really beginning to move after central bank surprises or changes, they will grey-out the pair for about 24-36 hours until the big move happens, preventing you from making any trades, or even closing a trade you have open if it is going against you. When the big run begins to slow down, they release it and are happy to let you trade, being the decent sort of folks they are. I complained long and hard to them about this, but they deny it ever happens for more than a minute or two after big news. Those of you lucky enough to have Global Prime accounts - I can hear you chuckling right now! Anyway, last week I discovered that if I use one of Steve's scripts for sending a market or stop order trade, it actually works and opens up a trade for the pair. I've used it once successfully since then - it could be a whole new trading strategy! Wait for Forex.com to block out a pair, identify the obvious trading direction, and use a script to send a trade.

Happy trading!

[cozybooks]

A good start to my new strategy. I had set up audcad back on Feb. 27th because it had three trades open in Peaky Fifo. Over the next couple of days it opened two trades on my Forex.com account as the pair continued to drop, but with the surge upward today, the two trades just closed for about a 200 pip win.

[cozybooks]

Hi anyone who blindly steps into the Peaky Fifo forum by accident!

It's been a tough 2020 for most everyone, and our family has been hit too. Lots of tough personal trauma in our family all year, which finally reached me. I was very sick for about six weeks with all of the typical covid-19 problems that the docs said wasn't covid-19 but I am finally on the rebound and getting back to trading.

Peaky Fifo has mixed news.

Shortly after my last post, AUD crashed (almost reached 55 cents on my AUDUSD chart). I wasn't worried about the demo, but I knew the strict U.S. margin requirements were messing up my live account, because I had taken all of my original investment out, plus a little bit more (about $200 total out of the 777 balance). I closed some of the oldest trades at a loss across the board, thinking I was covered, but when AUD did its biggest crash on the 19th of March, Oanda closed almost all of my trades due to margin issues. This left ditto trying to unsuccessfully add back the trades. What a mess!

On well, lesson learned (maybe?). Once I took out my profit I should have adjusted the trades remaining and adjusted my ditto percent for the new balance left.

The bad news is that my mismanagement of the live penny account has left it at a current balance of $ 195.00 (good news is that this is all profit since I took back all of my original money plus about $70 profit back in early March). If you take into account the $200 I had taken out, this leaves me close to $400, but well below the $777 I was at in early March.

The good news is that my demo is somehow still running uninterrupted since August of 2017. What a ride! Even though I closed about $2,000 worth of losing trades on the demo in March to try to avoid the margin problem on my live account, it has chugged along and made back its money.

Demo account now sits at $ 18,557 with a drawdown of only $38. If I hadn't closed all of those losing trades on the demo back in March, I suspect the demo would be up over $ 20,000, as my demo balance was down around $15,000 after doing that.

So my original $10,000 demo account is looking pretty darn good a little more than three years after it started at a cool 85% return. Worst drawdown in the three years was a little over $3,000. We'll see what the coming year brings.

Best of health and better times for everyone!

[Wavegarrick]

It's been a tough 2020 for most everyone, and our family has been hit too. Lots of tough personal trauma in our family all year, which finally reached me. I was very sick for about six weeks with all of the typical covid-19 problems that the docs said wasn't covid-19 but I am finally on the rebound and getting back to trading.

Hi Cozybooks,
I wish you all the strength and health with you and your family. It has been a tough year across the world, in every way. I feel for you as I have had a personal tragedy with the loss of my Mom just recently due to Covid.
Stay Safe
Cheers
Leon

[cozybooks]

Hi Leon,

Very sorry to hear about your Mom. This year has certainly put trading in perspective, but now it's a welcome distraction.

Lots of good people I've gotten to know on this forum, but Leon is the ultimate first class guy, cheering everyone else on with words of encouragement and putting incredible amounts of time and effort into what he posts.

I argued with my brother once that there are really only two types of people in the world. You either say about someone, "Thank God he's not my neighbor", or "I wish this guy was my neighbor instead of ..."

Everyone knows which side Leon comes down on.

Best to you Leon and everyone out there.

Steve