SERIOUS WARNING
- Most Forex traders lose all their money.
- Using the robot posted here in trading Forex does not guarantee success.
- Trading this robot could lead to serious financial loss.
- Trading this robot without understanding its underlying trading strategies guarantees traders will lose their money.
- This is not a set-and-forget ea; there is no such thing and anyone who tries to claim there is, is either stupid or lying. This ea requires frequent manual intervention.
- At best, a trading robot is only 90% as good as the manual strategy it trades. At best. At worst, it can be much less effective. If the strategy is rubbish, so is the robot.
- To trade this robot, you have to understand:
- How to use EA's.
- The concept of basket trading.
- The Average True Range indicator
Once a Something is a joining together of Once a Week at http://www.stevehopwoodforex.com/phpBB3 ... f=5&t=3587 and Once a Day at http://www.stevehopwoodforex.com/phpBB3 ... 551#p93551, plus a new option to trade with straight stop loss and take profit exits.
Bob pointed out in his 10.7 thread that weekly candles tend to have full bodies - not always but a strong tendency. Look at a few W1 charts and you will see this.
This suggests that once the weekly trading direction is established, there is every likelihood it is going to continue in that direction. This gave me the idea for the Once a Week basket trader EA.
It was not long before I was changing the EA inputs so that it opened a basket at 8.00 London time, then closed it at 16.00 every day. Given that I was already trading the EA once a day rather than once a week, and that I needed slightly more effective trade management, I decided to adapt OAW, and so OAD was born.
Once a Something offers three trading options:
- trade once a week as originally coded (OAW).
- trade the basket once a day, with a list of inputs to control trading days and times. Trades are viewed as a basket and closed either at a take profit figure or at you chosen closing hour (OAD).
- open a basket once a day but there is no close hour or basket take profit. Trades are sent with an individual take profit and stop loss, calculated as a percentage of ATR
- TradeOnceaDay: opens and closes the basket within the day.
- TradeOnceaWeek: opens and closes the basket once a week.
- TradeOnceaDayTpSl: opens the basket once a day with each trade having an individual stop loss and take profit.
That is all that OAS does. There are no management features apart from a cash take profit - although this is a tad more sophisticated than at inception, so read the inputs details below. You can opt for individual trade management or more advanced basket trading management by using:
- my MPTM (Multi-Purpose Trade Manager) available at http://www.stevehopwoodforex.com/phpBB3 ... ?f=21&t=64
- Paul's MPBM (Multi-Purpose Basket Manager) at http://www.stevehopwoodforex.com/phpBB3 ... he%20post.
- PairsToTrade: this is the list of comma-separated pairs you want to include in your basket. Linked to this and much further down is ShowPairInfo. If ShowPairInfo is set to true, OAW will display a list of your pairs and associated information on the chart. The purpose of this is to allow you to check that all the pairs are available via your broker, and to see information to help with your input choices. The pair is not available to you if the Bid shows up as zero. Once you have deleted unwanted pairs, set ShowPairInfo to false to cut down on processor use. Forget about pair suffixes - anything I code automatically takes care of these.
- MinimumTradableMovementPercent: this is the smallest number of pips the market must move away from the weekly open to allow a trade. OAD and its mum, OAW, quickly showed that taking trades when the market was close to the weekly open often resulted in them looking as though they had been taken in the wrong direction after the market quickly reversed. I have no idea whether the default of 10% is any use - we are talking pure guesswork here.
- MaximumTradableMovementPercent: individual trades are not sent if the market has already moved beyond this percentage of the weekly ATR. The default here is also pure guesswork.
- anyone who needs Lot or TradeComment explaining needs to spend time with a therapist.
- CashProfitTarget: you have in your mind the profit in dollars, euros, pounds, martian qqxzzxqq or whatever you want to bank as a profit target. The default represents c. 2% of the balance of my GP demo, so play with this and find a value that suits your account.
- CashProfitTargetPerTrade: if > 0, this tells OAD to multiply the number of trades on your account by this figure, to create a CashProfitTarget resulting from this calculation.
- AlwaysOn. If left to the default of 'true', this input tells the ea to loop around its decision code twice a second instead of waiting for the next tick. To see the difference this makes, turn it off and compare the displayed 'Current profit' on the chart with the actual profit displayed by your platform. If 'true', this causes difficulties with accessing the inputs window and platform freezes if you try to do anything at all whilst EA's are enabled, so remember to disable them first. You will see what I mean the first time you forget. OAS ignores this input if TradeOnceaDayTpSl is enabled.
- These options apply to both versions of trading once a day. Set the xxxCloseHour inputs to anything > 24 if you trade OAD with stop losses and take profits and do not want all the trades closed at a set time.
- TradeMonday. If left at the default of 'true' OAD will trade on Monday. If set to false, it will sleep for the day.
- MondayTradeOpenHour is the input that tells you at which time of your trading day to send the trade on Monday. This input works on your own local computer clock time, so it you want trades sending at 10.00 am then enter 10. Forget about broker time etc.
- MondayTradeCloseHour tell OAD when to close the basket if it has not hit tp.
- Subsequent TradeTuesday etc inputs give you day to day control over your trading days and hours.
- ShowTradingChoices tells OAD to show a list of your trading day/open/close choices.
- AtrPeriod: this is the period input for the W1 ATR that is the minimum and maximum percent of movement allowable for the ea to send individual trades. Leave it alone unless you know what you are doing.
- ATR for trade exit inputs:
- ExitAtrTimeFrame: the time frame for the atr. Default is the D1 chart.
- ExitAtrPeriod: the number of days for calculating the atr. The default is the default value of the indi.
- ExitAtrStopLossMultiplier: multiplies the atr by this percentage to create the stop loss.
- ExitAtrTakeProfitMultiplier: multiplies the atr by this percentage to create the take profit.
- Trade once a week inputs:
- DayToOpenTrades. In CrapQlx, days of the week are numbered 0 (Sunday) to 6 (Saturday). This input allows you to specify the day to send the trades. 1 = Monday; 2 = Tuesday.
- HourToOpenTrades is the input that tells you at which time of your trading day to send the trades. This input works on your own local computer clock time, so it you want trades sending at 10.00 am then enter 10. Forget about broker time etc.
- DayToCloseTrades and HourToCloseTrades tell OAW when to close the basket.
Pop the ea on a demo in time for next week. It is a basket trader, so you only need it on one chart - I suggest GJ. Select your trading option, then make any input changes you require, save them as a setfile and leave the bot to do its thingy.
Have fun.
dudest variant on Once a Week
dudest has posted an ea that works along the same lines, but is an interesting looking variant. Try it out.
Link: http://www.stevehopwoodforex.com/phpBB3 ... f=5&t=3612
Brief description:
1. Currently applied on 10 pairs only
( AUDUSD, CADCHF, CADJPY, EURNZD, EURSEK, GBPJPY, GBPNZD, NZDUSD, USDSGD, XAUUSD )
2. Apart from CADJPY, CADCHF and GBPJPY, the others assume that the Monday candle is telling a lie; so on Tuesday, the trade that is opened is opposite the Monday close
3. StopLossPips and JumpingStopPips are provided by half the 5-day ATR.
JS only moves SL to BreakEven ( +2 pips BEP default )
4. This one uses the Broker's time, not the local computer time.
Matters of general interest
Go here to download and run the script that will fill your platform's missing chart history: http://www.stevehopwoodforex.com/phpBB3 ... f=15&t=254
Read this post:
http://www.stevehopwoodforex.com/phpBB3 ... p?f=6&t=78 Newbie traders, read this for inspiration and warning. Those of you who have suffered losses, read it for inspiration.
Masterly summary of hedging: http://www.forexfactory.com/showthread. ... ost4977179
EA coding
I receive may requests to code EA's. Traders, if I code your EA for free, then I will share it here. If you want me to code your EA without sharing, then my fee is $100 payable into my paypal account. I explain why at http://www.stevehopwoodforex.com/phpBB3 ... ?f=15&t=79, at the bottom of the post.
Useful utilities/EA's/scripts
- MaryJane has posted a fabulous utility to allow us to resize EA input windows: http://www.stevehopwoodforex.com/phpBB3 ... f=5&t=3427
- Multi purpose trade manager: http://www.stevehopwoodforex.com/phpBB3 ... ?f=21&t=64
- Account equity analyser: http://www.forexfactory.com/showthread. ... ost4709098, which includes a template for both USD and the Euro.
- Past-trades display indi by squalou; shows a graphical display of the success/failure of trades in your History tab. Breathtaking piece of work. http://www.forexfactory.com/showthread. ... ost3830610
- My shell EA – the code I use to produce EA's so quickly. http://www.stevehopwoodforex.com/phpBB3 ... ?f=15&t=79
