Monday, July 31, 2006

Predator Update

Looking for an update on Predator? ok.

The two weeks after the first astonishing week did just about what i expected it to - buggar all :)

well, when i say buggar all in week 2 it lost 103 pips over the 6 pairs

in week 3 it won 132 pips

anyway, still thinking that there is something in this - even if it can do a few hundred pips a month on average then it's worth doing.

Well, i don't know about you but i'm about knackered with testing - sick to death of it so I needed an incentive.

What better incentive than to put some money into it?

Myself and Mike Keres have both put five grand each into a metatrader 4 account with Mig investments of Switzerland. The account is denominated in US dollars so we actually got $18,769 ish to play with. (which i thought was an excellent rate by the way)

so, while we got this up and running Trevor and me got to work on the trading robot that would drive this thing.

Trevor is a lot like me. People told him similar things like 'you'll never be anything whilst you've got a hole in your arse pal'.

Well, if they ever read this guess what, both Trevor and me still have holes in our arses and we both make more money than you ever dreamt of so shove that up your ring and suck on it. :)

anyway, i digress.

So, weve funded the account, perfected the robot to trade it and yesterday (Sunday) afternoon it was switched on ready for the new week to start.

It took it's first trade a little after 1am this morning and by the time i had got up it was 70 pips for the better.

so far so good, but one swallow doesnt make a summer.

This robot takes literally lots and lots of trades - around 50 - 100 a day across the six pairs we have tested so far. The settings for each pair are different and rely on two indicators specifically written for the job. No, they arent available in a moneytec lucky bag:)

So, the reason I and Mike have put money into this is that we just cannot be bothered anymore testing without something at risk.

Intially we are risking just 0.1 lot per pair per trade - one pairs where the usd is the second pair, such as EURUSD or AUDUSD then 0.1 lot = 1 dollar per pip - on the others such as usdjpy it's less like 0.78 per pip.

Ok, so we have many things to test.

For example does it make money? is it best to switch off during european trading? what are the real drawdowns like? what kind of staking plan can we use?

All of these i may or may not discuss on here in the next few weeks so if you are interested in seeing how a method of entry and exit changes into a proper system then check back now and again. Finding a method that makes money is only a fraction of the story in systems development, it's what you do with it after that which will make or break you.

It's important to say at this point that this might just turn to shit - the 10k we have put in there is fun money - i cant see this strategy losing the lot but then you never know - instead of seeing a trading system born you might see yet another one turn to complete shite :)

Ill publish the statement at the end of the month - maybe week


Saturday, July 15, 2006

Predator is born!

Hi all, thought i'd just make some comments - been a week or so since ive posted so i thought i'd let you know what i've been up to.

Over the past three months ive been refining and testing a new trading system. - it's purely mechanical which is suprising because it does use indicators and i always had the belief that it was virtually impossible to build a mechanical system which used indicators. even more so I didnt believe in automatic trading.

Anyway, to cut a long story short I fell onto this system by accident. Ive slowly been testing an indicator for a while now based on a single setting - it was looking good to produce prob 80-100 pips a week which is good in my eyes.

Just on a side note to tell you that with mechanical systems my nirvana is around 100 pips a week with a low drawdown. I thought if i could make that then it would be a great system to sit aside Grail.

Well, that nirvana i think was a limiting belief - i didnt think it was possible to build a mechanical system that did much more than that and i guess that may have held me back in the past.

That belief has now been not only broken, but smashed into pieces.

During my testing i thought it would be much easier in the interim to have an mt4 expert to backtest the system so i could do many calculations before hand testing. so, thanks to Fluty, Trevor and Myself the 'Predator 'expert was born.

After a few tests which looked ok i wondered just how many different parameters i could get the backtester to test - so into the code i went and placed code so that i could do just that.

when i ran this test the number of combinations was around 117,000. I have a fast pc but even then it was to take over 7 days to do the test.

Well, when the test completed i couldnt believe the results, they were amazing.

Now i know what you are thinking, ive seen many backtests which look great and turn to crap when you run them - ive seen them too.

I can remember an expert called AIP (alwaysinplay) that did millions in the backtest but when you ran it live crashed your account quicker than an israeli retalliation.

So, when i'd optimised this and put it on seven pairs on a demo account i believed it would crash and burn.

It didnt,

well, not yet anyway.

Ive only ran it for a week so this isnt a good enough sample size but get these results

account started at $10,000

186 trades taken

155 wins

31 losses

win percentage 81.87%

Overall Pips Gained 534

Cash gained $6133.41

Gain on account 61.3%


Now ths looks pretty damn good i'm sure you will agree but i guess time will tell. Nevertheless I am swiftly opening an MT4 account to trade this with some real money and i'll keep you updated with the results from the test until the live account is open.

ps, before anyone thinks this is some slick marketing - it's not for sale nor will it ever be.

keep tuned in :)