Peaky tweaked and the XAUUSD pair

[SteveHopwood]

This is something I have been playing with for a couple of months. It exploits:
The wild volatility of the XAUUSD pair. It can hurtle hundreds of pips in just a few minutes.
The age-old trading principle of buy low and sell high.

With regard to us, this involves buying a pair when it has reached a low and selling it when it has reached a high. My method is this:

• Identify a significant high and low.
• Measure the distance between them. For me, it must be at least 500 pips and the more, the better.

Imagine that I have identified what is, to me, a significant low. I wait for the market to turn around then I send a grid of buy stop orders:

• The first I call the 'starter' trade. It has a TP that will be equal to that of the highest grid buy stop.
• The next five stop orders are place 30 pips apart. Each has a TP of 20 pips. The idea is one of Bob's, to take advantage of a big move in our direction whilst only ever having two market trades open.

I have described how I find a 'significant' high and low in post 2, to save cluttering up this one with diagrams and explanations. Mine is not a scientific methos and is far from perfect but has been working well for me lately.

This method is a form of Peaky, which might be worth revisiting and trying again on the XAUUSD pair.

The attached, “Hilo distance EA” is an extension of the “Stop order manager” that I wrote for Goldy. Drag him onto the chart and he will:

• Place a yellow high line and blue low line on the chart, a couple of hundred pips apart. I use the H1 time frame but my method is independent of chart time frames, so pick the one you are happiest viewing. You then adjust the lines as you wish, to your chosen peak and trough. The ea 'remembers' their location and replaces the lines should you accidentally delete them.
• Whilst it waits for you to decide to trade, the ea monitors the market movements and moves the lines should it move outside their defined area.
• Use the stop order send/delete buttons once you decide it is time to trade. You are prompted for confirmation each time you press a button so it is hard to go wrong. For some reason I have been unable to find, the, “Send buy stops” button only works of you click the top right corner. Merely change time frames if you accidentally drag a button out of place and everything will instantly be replaced.
• The ea continues to monitor the position once you have placed the stop order grid. Imagine you have placed a buy stop grid and the market falls instead of rising. Eventually the gap between the lowest stop order and the market becomes great enough for the bot to replace the grid so that it will fill at a more advantageous price.
  • Note that this only happens if the 'starter' order has not filled. This is the only time the ea interferes with the trades - you have to make stop adjustments yourself if there is an open market order.

I started to experiment last week, with a tweak of all the above. It remains to be seen if this is successful:

• Send the grid of stop orders without individual TP's.
• Close them all at a pre-selected cash profit target. That is what the “Simplest Basket Manager Ever” EA is for. Input your chosen cash profit target and let it do its job.

The, "Hide all buttons" button
The buttons often obscure the highs and make it hard to see where to place the high line. This button deletes all the buttons from the chart. You recover them by changing the chart time frame, then back to your favourite YF for viewing the position.


Have a play folks and see what you think.

[SteveHopwood]

You may need to open charts in a separate window so you can expand the pics to see the details - Windows Magnifier can also help here.

Those of us who have been around find spotting peaks (highs) and troughs (lows) easy. They are obvious to us:

XAUUSDH1 candles.png

Even so, there is still a lot of clutter but there is a neat solution to help - line charts. Look for the AutoTradingicon in the top icon window. The following three icons allow you to change the style of the chart. The third one along gives us a line graph. There is the same chart but viewed as a line chart:

XAUUSDH1 line chart.png

See how much easier it is to spot the highs and lows and so the 'significant' ones?

Here is the same chart with trendlines drawn from the most (to me) significant high and low. Look back in time and your eye will spot a huge high many candles ago. These represent vast levels of resistance to the rising market. Then look back at the low line and see how often this represented huge levels of support in competition to a falling market.

XAUUSDH1 with hilo.png

Here is the chart I have been trading recently:

XAUUSDH1.current with ea and tradespng.png

The sharp eyed amongst you will notice that my high line is lower than in the previous picture. Look at the previous pic and you will see that the Bid line is roughly where my current high line is. Look back along this line and see how often it acted as both support and resistance - and how I used it to go short so successfully last week. No doubt the EA drew the line a fair while after that previous head and shoulders and I chose to reposition it where I have done so.

The pic also shows how the chart should look once you have loaded the EA.

[pree876]

I have been playing around with the auto fibs for Peaky for some years now. And I have found some fibs numbers on the XAUUSD pair that help my manual trading

[SteveHopwood]

I have added a script to post 1. The explanation is:
The, "Delete buttons script"
The buttons often obscure the highs and make it hard to see where to place the high line. This script deletes all the buttons. You recover them by changing the chart time frame.

[SteveHopwood]

My results last week:

Last week.png

Last month from 27th July:

Last month.png

I experimented with USDJPY when I saw that UJ would rise when XAUUSD fell and vice versa. It did but far too slowly to be helpful.

I experimented with USDZAR after asking CoPilot to list the most volatile forex pairs and this one was second highest in the list. I found the chart confusing and so abandoned the experiment.

I have a couple of open sells taken out on Friday after the epic Rocket Rise later in the day. The market fell back a bit so both orders are in profit. I will be interested to see what happens overnight when Asia gets going.

Looking good so far.

[thomasmore]

Hi Steve,
A site I check often is www.mataf.net
Looking for fx volatility: https://www.mataf.net/en/forex/tools/volatility
Best regards,
Ludo

[SteveHopwood]

Thanks Ludo.

[TradingMastermind]

Hi

I was testing this and trying to use it with stop losses. It seemed that stop losses would be added to the buy orders OK, but when trying to sell, I kept getting "Invalid stop". I changed some of the code to enable sell stop losses.
Hope this is OK.

Code: Select all

double CalculateStopLoss(int type, double price)
{
   //Returns the stop loss for use in LookForTradingOpps and InsertMissingStopLoss
   double stop;

   RefreshRates();
   
   double pips = StarterTradeStopLoss;
   if (type == OP_BUYSTOP || type == OP_SELLSTOP)
      pips = gridTradeStopLoss;

   
    
   if (!CloseEnough(pips, 0) ) 
   {
      if (type == OP_BUY || type == OP_BUYSTOP)
         stop = price - (pips / factor);
      else if (type == OP_SELL || type == OP_SELLSTOP)
         stop = price + (pips / factor);
   }//if (!CloseEnough(pips, 0) ) 

   return(stop);
   
}//End double CalculateStopLoss(int type)

[SteveHopwood]

Hi

I was testing this and trying to use it with stop losses. It seemed that stop losses would be added to the buy orders OK, but when trying to sell, I kept getting "Invalid stop". I changed some of the code to enable sell stop losses.
Hope this is OK.

Code: Select all

double CalculateStopLoss(int type, double price)
{
   //Returns the stop loss for use in LookForTradingOpps and InsertMissingStopLoss
   double stop;

   RefreshRates();
   
   double pips = StarterTradeStopLoss;
   if (type == OP_BUYSTOP || type == OP_SELLSTOP)
      pips = gridTradeStopLoss;

   
    
   if (!CloseEnough(pips, 0) ) 
   {
      if (type == OP_BUY || type == OP_BUYSTOP)
         stop = price - (pips / factor);
      else if (type == OP_SELL || type == OP_SELLSTOP)
         stop = price + (pips / factor);
   }//if (!CloseEnough(pips, 0) ) 

   return(stop);
   
}//End double CalculateStopLoss(int type)

Thanks TM - much appreciated.

I had forgotten that I had not edited the stop loss calculation code. It never cropped up here as I do not use stop losses. I have replaced the function with your code and will post the update over the weekend.

[SteveHopwood]

A decent week in terms of closed trades:

Last week.png

Progress so far since the end of July:

Last month.png

The outcome is not so hot when open orders are taken into account: 8 open sells; -4453 pips; $ -1317. On the brighter side, XAUUSD sells attract excellent positive swap. I am hoping for a fall next week that matches the rise at the end of last week.

----------------------------------

I have uploaded an updated version of the EA with TM's editing of the stop loss calculation function. I have also added an extra button that hides all the buttons when they are obscuring the view. This means that we do not need the button deletion script. Not a big thingy but useful.