Rsmereka Trading Journal - Page 10 - Pip Cop

**rsmereka** · 2009-05-13, 04:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by pipdetector

So do you think about coming back to the mechanical system that you mentioned the other day?

I made a sum up of what happened on the account that I use to host FAPT at in the last 2 months and it seems that FAPT lost ca 18% of the equity and even my proprietary trades are better than using the ea...

On the other hand Megadroid is doing really well only one loss and 15 wins...

I am trading the GBPUSD mechanical system on my demo account. There has not been many trades in the last week or so.

Since December 2008, my live account with mostly FAP Turbo has lost about $70 and I consider myself fortunate.

As far as I know, MegaDroid has not lost one trade for me so far. Most of the trades, however, have been on my demo account.

I am still mulling over what I should do now. There has not been any Forex Ambush signal since May 12 at 05:48 (GMT+2).

Rick

**jerrycollie** · 2009-05-14, 08:55 PM

Hi Rick,
Megadroid hit a hard stop at -58 pips Tuesday night. I also had a small win of +5 pips at the same time. Megadroid has 2 strategies: conservative and aggressive and sometimes opens 2 trades in one night. However, my personal score card has Megadroid ahead by 109 pips won to 62 pips lost.

Please keep us posted on your results from Forex Ambush.

**rsmereka** · 2009-05-15, 01:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jerrycollie

Hi Rick,
Megadroid hit a hard stop at -58 pips Tuesday night. I also had a small win of +5 pips at the same time. Megadroid has 2 strategies: conservative and aggressive and sometimes opens 2 trades in one night. However, my personal score card has Megadroid ahead by 109 pips won to 62 pips lost.

Please keep us posted on your results from Forex Ambush.

Hi Jerry,

I have had 21 MegaDroid trades so far on my demo account and 10 trades on my live account. All trades have been winners. I am not trading MegaDroid on my live account anymore (I am only trading FA signals) but that is going to be changing.

As far as FA is concerned, I have had only one trade this week. I am still fuming over the close signal that arrived two hours late (received on two separate machines and email address within the same minute).

Rick

**rsmereka** · 2009-05-16, 12:04 PM

It was a losing week overall with Forex Ambush on my live account.

I have already spoke about the EURJPY loss on Tuesday with the close signal being two hours late in arriving.

The rest of the week was successful. There were two other trades. One on Thursday (also EURJPY) for a 20 pip gain and one on Friday with USDCHF. The market on Friday was fast-moving and by the time I placed my trade, I was 10 pips off from FA's entry. I decided to use the same TP

point

as FA which netted me only 10 pips instead of 20. The remarkable thing about the trade on Friday was that it closed with a 10 pip profit one minute before the closing bell

Week: -$336.15, -6.4%, -$67.23/day

I also tired an experiment with my demo account by adding the Master Mind 3 on the EURUSD M5 chart with a 3 pip TP

. At first, it looked like a real winner but it turned out that the EA with those settings gave back more than it gained so I removed the EA after only a couple of days running.

I am also testing (on a demo account) a modified version of the MACD Simple EA after reading the discussion here. I have two versions of it running. One on the EURUSD H1 chart and one on the GBPUSD H4 chart.

On top of that, downloaded and set up a copy of VForce Like EA V2.

I have been wanting to back test some of these EA's but every time I go to run the strategy tester, I just get blank results. I did a Google search for a strategy tester howto but found nothing except references to the fact that the strategy tester is difficult and quirky and some articles with very basic information.

Rick

**rsmereka** · 2009-05-16, 04:19 PM

Now that I have two weeks with Forex Ambush under my belt, I thought that I would lay some impressions on you.

I just posted a review of FA on ForexPeaceArmy giving them a failing grade at two stars (out of a possible five).

Rationale:
-FA is not 100% winning. As my experience this week proves, it is possible to have a losing trade.
-Their EA for MT4 blows. They do give you the source ('mq4' file). It is coded using OrdersTotal() and will only prompt to open a trade when the total of orders is less than one (this means that the EA will not trade when any other trades are open). It has no magic number. It uses the Windows API call MessageBox (the Windows API header WinUser32.mqh is 'include'd) to prompt.

There are three other major issues with their EA: As soon as the one open trade closes, the EA prompts, sometimes repeatedly. You are unable to close MT4 because the main window will not restore (if it was minimized) , and since MEssageBox is modal, you cannot interact with MT4 until the prompt window is closed. Their is no cancel in the prompt. You have to right-click on the MT4 entry in the task bar and close from there. The repeated MessageBox calls cause a memory leak and eventually will take over all of the VM

. Twice now, I have had to open a support ticket with my VPS supplier to get them to unlock my VPS after the FA EA caused all of my available memory to be consumed and my VPS supplier automatically locked me out for this violation. The EA is supposed to be a trailing stop EA but the strange thing is that the trailing stop is never used.

I modified the EA taking out its reference to OrdersTotal. I used the logic from the Orders Management - It's Simple article. I used the 'one position' type of order management. I also put a magic number into the EA. The rest of the logic for the trailing stop was left alone. Unfortunately, I cannot post the source code of my modification here because it is based on a commercial product.

I have been testing this modified version on my demo account for the last three trades. In two of these trades, the trade closed using a trailing stop. My live account is still using the original FA EA. The SL

on my live trades have never been set and that is how I know that the original FA EA does not activate a trailing stop.

Let me now discuss the FA technicals. Their setup strategy is to pick the top peak of the price. I do not know what they use to accomplish this. The signal is generated when FA figures that the upward move is exhausted. Most of the time they are very close but sometimes (2 out of 8 so far), the bull move continues. In one case, the pair moved about 250 pips against me before retreating.

Rick

**rsmereka** · 2009-05-20, 08:24 PM

I purchased the LMT Forex Formula yesterday and my first trade using this assisted mechanical system is well under way.

LMT is a medium to long term trading system that trades many pairs (the author suggests 10 in the manual). It trades using the D1 or H4 charts. The ads for this system are wrong when they say it takes only 15 minutes per day when using the H4 charts. These have to be checked every four hours for a signal.

Since any trading system where you have to check the charts six times a day is not for me, I have chosen to trade the daily charts. This also has a caveat. When trading the daily charts, you are after the big fish. My initial target (the point

that you move your SL

to your entry point

) for my current EURUSD trade is over 800 pips with an initial SL

of 1,600 pips. If successful, this trade may go on for months.

With the SL

so far away, money/risk management is crucial. The author recommends 1%, 2% max. I am using 2% on my current trade. This calculates to a very small (2 micros) lot size (equity * .02 / 1600).

LMT comes with an EA (does not actually place orders) and two indicators. The indicators on screen consist of a standard candle chart, a 10 MA and a trend

indicator

with the current SL

, initial target and whether alerts are on or off.

When a trade setup occurs, the EA sends an alert. It is up to me to calculate the lot size and place the order with the SL

.

Rick

**pipdetector** · 2009-05-21, 03:59 AM

I also fell for LMT FF :-)

I simply like the long term trend

following idea and I needed some sort of mechanical system for setting signals.

**rsmereka** · 2009-05-21, 11:06 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by pipdetector

I also fell for LMT FF :-)

I simply like the long term trend

following idea and I needed some sort of mechanical system for setting signals.

Are you going to trade the H4 or D1 charts?

My first LMT trade in my demo account on the EURUSD pair has done well so far at 133 pips profit as I write this. I am monitoring three pairs so far and I am adding one pair per day using the pairs that the author suggests in the manual.

Rick

**pipdetector** · 2009-05-21, 05:19 PM

I am considering H4 charts approach:
1. I can spare additional time for monitoring the trades
2. I prefer a bit narrower SLs. 1600 sounds a bit too much for me

Regarding EURUSD. It seems to me that the signal for LONG is when there is a green bar after three red bars in the trigger indicator

-- so the signal occured three days ago. Maybe with the daily time frame it doesn't really matter, but I'd rather jump on the trend

when it starts.

Right now I am on a standby and I will wait for a new signal.

**pipdetector** · 2009-05-22, 03:41 AM

I took the GBPJPY trade today. However I seem to have a problem -- I am using Alpari UK demo and it is a five digit system. I wonder if LMT takes this into account when calculating a stop loss.