I must humbly agree with shopster. He is right. It's just that I do not have enough monitors or time/patience enough to be glued to the screen for over 8 hours at a time (or more)...what a conundrum. I cannot put the time in needed to be successful at trading...and if I made the time I would need more capital than I have to trade correctly according to most. so there it is in a nutshell...I cannot quit my job that gives my family and I a six-figure income (I have invested too much in my job and my standing) and I love trading.... but not to be glued to the screen all day and half the night...I do not love it that much. EA's are my only hope. Automation must work for some. Please tell me it aint' so. ES
it is a hard business to learn and then run up the curve, not to mention the sacrifices to be made at the front end. your trading edge, once you have found it, must be flogged forever........ a bit of fine tuning is allowed, but no major adjustments are required. the temptation is always to look at what others are doing. do not. once trading becomes very boring and mechanical the extra zeros will pile up in your equity balance. find another outlet for your time and balance your life out. s
Which can be expressed in a logical, systematic approach, and then coded. This is of course subject to platform limitations, programmer limitations, etc. Almost exactly. I do not think it is boring to make money, though Testing will require "time" and investment of either your own time (money) or hiring a series of programmers to assist in reaching the end goal. Then once you have the basic system, testing is done in different settings for different periods in the market. but the fundamentals of market movement and the trading system(s) that you use would be understandable and would reduce screen time significantly. Just like your car or taking the train/airplane: much, much faster than walking.
to reduce screen time to zip, start to look at price patterns that work.... then use an assortment of custom indicators from a top drawer coder to alert these setups with your edge. the amount of heavy lifting required to write an EA that will not get you to the finish line is futile. i have one of the best coders on the planet his stuff is flawless. but the market does not know it....... simple just worxs. cheers, s
" Then once you have the basic system, testing is done in different settings for different periods in the market........" ......................................... yb, nope. a complete waste of time the cycles of the game go in and out of phase all depends on how the " big dogs piss in the tall grass " on a daily basis. read hurst, ehlers et al. once you learn to read the market signage offered up in live time you get to win. the banks reset the game and have a 5 day plan. they clear the board , blow out the stops and load up the retail pendings for the breakout guys at both ends of the channel box. then they move the price action out for the next 3 levels of rise / fall. while you sit there licking your wounds on your latest 25 tick stopped out trade. " stuffing a digitally coded sack of rules that have been curve fitted up against a chunk of historical price data " and then running it in a live market .......is a death spiral that will suck your equity dry. get your head wrapped around this........ the forex market news has absolutely nothing to do with the direction of the game. there is a 5 day plan that starts to execute on sunday nite open and runs for the entire week. DT and DB setups will trump everything else in forex.......catch these and you get to win. study this chart until your eyeballs fall out. i have not marked them all support and resistance rules this game. they test and retest the price to the " left side of the hard right edge..." if you cannot see these setups, you are doomed to fail....... back to the lion's den to snack on the next breakout trader. cheers, s
What I propose is quite different. I'm talking about a mechanical system that takes advantage of the price movement itself. It does not matter whether the movement is up or down, but it is important that the market is moving. My strategy specifically relies on the eventuality of market pullbacks and combines price action indicator with custom position sizing. level of aggression with position is fully customizable, and it is set to fully take advantage of compounding settings for maximum unattended profit runs. You can work out very close approximations on spreadsheet to know exactly how much your account can handle (very close = 99%. it cannot be exact with my spreadsheet only because in live trading you experience slippage, requotes, etc. With my strategy however, these things actually work out for the better 9/10 times Backtesting is only good for verifying that the code does what you are telling it to do, and is best done with historical tick data. Walk-forward testing is much better, especially live forward testing is my preferred approach. It wasn't uncommon for me in the early days to have 30 or so demos running on vps, testing different settings. I had a very basic form of EA, but the fundamentals of cost averaging were there. I am not suggesting any type of mysticism. This is why understanding the basics of how the system works is so important. Just like you understand the basics of how your car works. A systems approach encourages accountability and confirms objectivity of your entries and exits. Then you can focus more in optimal inputs.
I disagree. Wait. That didn't sound right. I mean, EA's are programmed with what's between the ears, so-to-speak. It's the same thinker that selects or designs an EA's...or trades without a filter between his perceptions and his interpretations. I heard that cruise ships are programmed to follow a designated path, and will sound alerts if the ship strays from that path. Recently, a captain of a Carnival Cruise ship thought that his brain was better than the designated, programmed path. His manual override didn't work out so well.
the amountof leverage people sue in fx trading is ridiculous....how about no leverage? 1,000:1 MAN play poker would be more fun! ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using leverage and how much you invest into a strategy or system is directly related and I feel it is very important. Some say 1:500 or 1:1000 is simply gambling. I do not agree completely.