Forex rebates on every trade - win or lose!

Interested in potential seminar, not a babe but probably still a forex babe

CC,

After I posted last night, I did some Googling as I'd assumed that the arrows did automatically pop up.

I managed to find a file on one of the forums which claimed to make arrows pop up when the MACD crossed through the zero line. Unfortunately though, this file is a *.ex4 file and I haven't got a clue what to do with it so it's still sat on my desktop.

After that I Googled some more and managed to find a *.mq4 file which made arrows pop up automatically when two ma's crossed over (MACD through zero line crossover is essentially 2 ema's anyway). I fiddled about with it for a bit last night and it seemed pretty good.

This is all I can tell you Hilary. When you load the .mq4 into the indicators directory mt4 automatically creates a .ex4 file to go with it. Don't know why it does this.

But some of the .ex4 files are not indicators they are expert advisors. Now expert advisors are great as they allow you to backtest the signal produced through the strategy tester to see whether the signal is profitable. I believe they can also be used to let mt4 just trade away on its own. The expert advisors go into the experts folder.
Edit: and some of the .mq4 files aren't indicators but they are experts - in any event if you try to load an indicator wrongly as an expert or vice versa mt4 will tell you to go away.

The best places to find all these indicators and gadgets is www.tsd-forex and www.forexfactory but as I said before you need to check their validity as some of the people who have written the code make mistakes.

You can look at the code yourself if you hit f4 and choose the indicator or expert from a list. As you will be able to see some of the code is not that difficult to understand but other parts are just well way way beyond my understanding.

Now the other day when you suggested just trading one pair with one signal i had decided to trade the macd on the cross (histogram changes from -ve to +ve on the 3 line histogram) before you changed it to signal line through the zero line.
I went and ran the strategy runner on a expert i found based on the ma cross. This took me ages to sort cos obviously this sort of strategy is hopeless based on a 24 hour period cos of the chop a the dead times of night when the signal line is just flat lining +/- noise.
Eventually i managed to restrict it running to only running from 07:00 to 18:00 and i got mixed results and even then i needed to alter the output data.
The most fascniating result was that this did indeed prove that on eurjpy the chocopops macd does beat the standard macd settings.

Anyway i'm starting to ramble. I think mt4 is the most fantastic tool but I shan't be investing any more time in trying to understand it.

this is my favourite chart. All the macd's for all time periods on one chart. I really really felt I should have been able to make successful trades out of this but it just another idea that didn't work. Technically fantastic but any use for trading - well it didn't work for me which is the whole point.

CC,

Using the Chocopops MACD settings on EUR/JPY M1 yesterday would have made you money for sure had you acted on every signal. There were certainly a number of losing trades, but these were more than offset by a small number of larger winners.

There are two points that I feel should be learned from this that I hope to get across. Firstly, I believe it's important to bang away a trade at every signal regardless of whether it's a duffer. It's part of the age old thing of discipline, seeing and thinking. Let's face it, 90% of the Essex boys in the city are straight out of comprehensive schools and aren't really the brightest. But they simply do as they've been told without giving it a second thought.

The second point is that the standard indicator settings that come with these charts aren't the best and will never make you money. A lot of them were designed for daily stock charts and their cycles are totally out of sync for the sort of timeframes that we're using here. It's necessary to think outside of the box as to what they do and how they do it so as to adjust the settings better.

For now though, I think you should keep banging away at EUR/JPY M1 for the next week or two to see how you get on, keeping it nice and simple along the way. Then we can look at ways of making it work a bit better.

Regarding MT4, I've only been using it for a couple of months but I'm really impressed with it. I started with Interbank FX's version, but their server was struggling to keep up. I've more recently switched to ODL and that seems a lot better. I'll probably open a live account with them soon.

Choc

I would be very interested in a FX brainstorming session. As long the hotel has a good food and booze facilities.

Do you have any dates in mind so I can pencil them in on my wife's calendar.

Bob

Look up the Britannia on Tripadvisor - not pretty reading :o(

CC, you have mail.

FXers, Choccie hasn't been posting today as her PC is hors de combat. We're trying to get her sorted out but, in the meantime, keep those postings and emails about the Forex get-together coming. The more interest there is, the better the chance of getting some good speakers as well as all the usual trader schmoozing.

Choccie, I would be happy to head down South (!) for a get-together - great idea!

I'll let you know if I need the bridal suite later ;-)

Good luck getting the PC back into action..

CC

I noticed your post re responses from others on the thread. I used to share your frustration, but eventually accepted that people will post when they want to and often disappear for days or weeks on end. My own experience is that I post when it's going well and not when it isn't. As a rule when Meggers appears it livens up :)

I listed some rules a little while ago, which I was supposed to stick to and found myself once more breaking most if not all. It's not a system I need, stick to the rules the rest will follow, but discipline. Having taken a break for a few weeks and with encouragement from a fellow FXer I re-entered the fray yesterday on the Eur/Jpy pair and have managed to harvest 200 pips. To be honest I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing right all of a sudden; however, through lack of confidence I'm wondering if it may be that the pair is going nowhere at the moment and if the entry isn't too bad it comes back to you, therefore hard to get it entirely wrong!

I have never been into systems, back testing and all that jazz, I don't have the patience, but I'm following Hils' advice (amongst others) and keeping it simple - trend lines, MA crossovers and the MACD. As always when to exit a trade is the thorny issue (whether winning or losing) but if it's a loser and I'm not sure, I cut, if I think my entry was slightly mistimed I'll add. If I think I have closed a winner too early, after some reflection I'll have another go.

Must admit, early days once more, but those 200 pips were anything from a 1 pip trade to the largest at 62. No daily targets, just trying to take it when it's there.

One other rule I have put in place is to reduce my stake, it's far less stressful and frees up the margin for adding if necessary. Stake size is relative to one's wealth of course, but whilst building confidence again less stress and worry is paramount.

If I can keep this up I'll start posting some trades and reasons again.

Just a load of old waffle really, but your post deserved a response. Good luck.

pth

Delboy,

Do you have MT4 installed on a machine anywhere? If so, I wonder if you could spend a few minutes looking at a little problem for me please.

Sorry, Hil, I don't have it installed. But, for you I could :) What's your problem?

I sent you over an email over the weekend explaining the problem, MM.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I thought I'd paste this chart up to demonstrate how MT4 can be set up to strip all emotion out of trading. Aside from the 2 ma's, I've removed all other indicators and instead have set the chart up to display different types of arrows to represent different ma crossovers. The thick red and blue arrows represent the centreline MACD crossover for Chocopops settings.

I'm not saying that this is necessarily the most successful trading strategy (although it will certainly make money), but I am using it to demonstrate how emotionless trading should be, as this idea removes any prospect of thinking about which way to trade.

Morning all. I got my broadband back today which is a blessing. You don't realise how much you need it until you don't have it.

I am still banging away trading the signal line cross of the zero line Hilary.
Apart from the points you make about removing the emotion i've noticed the following.

1. In the last couple of minutes before you approach the zero line the momentum traders kick in trying to anticapte the cross. Another load of people come in just as it crosses.
2. There is a level of nervousness around the cross enhanced if the signal line does not have momentum heading for zero. I would guess that the scalpers who come in in anticipation of the cross when realising it might not cross close thereby creating added tension.
3. so sometimes the signal line goes straight through, sometimes it has a bash, fails but then comes back for a second attempt 5-15 minutes later and succeeds and sometimes it reverses very close to the zero line. I don't think it's easy to look at the chart and on every attempt at the zero line anticipate what's happening so that's why just trading a signal regardless is a good idea


Clearly the point of this excercise isn't to overanalyse the signal itself but to understand that if your signals make money on average then that in itself is enough just to trade the signal whatever your brain is telling you at the time (well excepting nfp and some other news perhaps)

thurs - some nice price volatility after interest rate decision 3 trades +15, +37,
+7. Total +59
Fri - market stuck in a 90 pip range but the trends were choppy. 12 trades.
-2,-15,-15,-15,-10,-20,-8,+4,-20,-2,+4,+18. -81 pips

After 2 days the loss is -22. my mt4 demo has a 3 pip spread on this pair so that would be reduced in the real market. 1.5 days data isn't a proper sample.


Anyway the interesting part is that after looking at the results I am persuaded that my gut feel for what the results would be is quite a bit different from reality in that the mind tends to focus too much on all the losers rather than giving a good estimate of how the system is actually doing.
Turtle power. Just trade the rules like the turtles and stop thinking. Thinking is only for building the system beforehand.


I'm not sure what to do now as between signals there is lots of time for me to play around with setttings and backtest. Not entirely sure where to put my energies though and not entirely sure i'm trying to run before i can walk again.

I wasn't up early enough this morning to catch the initial drop on Eur/Jpy but jumped on the short bandwagon eventually for +24, reversing at 160.20 and 159.99 for +33 on the long tack. Looking for another possible short entry now in the region of 160.60 (Fib level and earlier morning support (praps now Res)).

So, what are the chocopops magic numbers?

I'm glad to see that you're banging away those trades, CC, as it's the discipline thingie that I feel needs to be instilled ahead of anything else.

There's nothing wrong, however, in moving towards the next step. I feel that the next step should be an analysis of all of your trades to work out a way of getting rid of the losers yet keeping the winners.

The only way of analysing the trades is through having a sufficiently representative sample for it to mean anything. I guess you'll therefore need to carry on banging away at the signals for a bit longer yet.

Probably the best way of getting rid of many of the losing trades is to only trade those signals which are in the direction of the trend. This would cut out around half of your trades and will almost certainly involve looking at charts with a different timeframe.

I don't want to confuse matters until the discipline thing is sorted out, but using today as an example, the trend on the 15-minute chart has been down from between 7am and 12:45. It would have made sense therefore to have only traded the market on the sell signals between these times and to have used the buy signals simply to close out and not to reverse. To complicate matters further, the 5-minute chart suggested an uptrend between 9:45am and 11:25. As this was contrary to the trend of the 15-minute chart, it would make further sense to have not traded any of the signals between these times and to have sat on your hands instead.

If you are still keen to try running whilst still mastering the walking phase, can I suggest that you spend some time looking at oscillating indicators on the 5- and 15-minute charts in an attempt to identify trends. Note that these indicators are purely to identify the trends - the entry and exit signals will still come from the 1-minute charts. As I suggested in a post above, you will also need to "think out of the box" as the bog standard indicators will need their settings adjusting if they are to be of any use.

6, 11, 15, 18, 34 and 45 were pretty magic for somebody on Saturday night, Jeffie.

:o)

Took my short for +5, not really sure at the moment, so sitting out for a bit.

Actually that was the second of two 'shorts', it was only when opening the platform to place the second trade I realised the first was a long - oops :) Closed it for +15 anyway.

Waiting for the US to get going: M15 tells me this might be a long, M5 possibly the same M1 isn't doing much at all and it's sat right on a Fib level. Oh and M30 might be showing signs of long as well. Guess that all means it's a short then :)