show us your best trending ea

hi guys,

i wonder if there's any great trending ea, meaning it avoids the ranging markets relatively well(other than specifying ranging timezone)

and also state whether is it capable of making high frequency trades daily(perhaps 5 or above?)

i think this would help people who wish to adopt it in their portfolio or education purpose. :-bd

Re: show us your best trending ea

@-) :-/ :o :-? I don't know what your talking about...

Re: show us your best trending ea

sorry for not being clear.. was looking for ea that execute trade by spotting and going with strong trend..

Re: show us your best trending ea

I haven't seen any profitable EAs that trade trends. I tried making one, but it pretty much gets raped in a sideways market and the only way to make it profitable is to curve fit it on past data. Basically, without an extremely solid exit strategy, it's useless. Not to mention that good exit strategies that worked in 2005-2007 no longer work at all in 2008-2009. In addition, I strongly doubt that you will find one that works in a timeframe lower than 1h (I mean one that does multiple trades per day) - in my experience, timeframes such as M15 are going to chop-chop your account to pieces if you try to trade their trends, be it manually or automatically. These being said, I'd really love to be proven wrong by a profitable trend-trading EA, even if it's using helper strategies for steady markets.

Re: show us your best trending ea

the woodie robot new in this forum is trend following one, uses on gbpjpy M15. the foxex slasher on gbpjpy H4 is good as well.

Re: show us your best trending ea

the woodie robot new in this forum is trend following one, uses on gbpjpy M15. the foxex slasher on gbpjpy H4 is good as well.

woodie... I'll give it a try in backtesting and get back with some results. First impression is that my trend EA is doing better than it (and I think my trend EA sucks).

as for forex slasher, it should've been named "forex account slasher"; it's crap in my opinion.

Re: show us your best trending ea

Trend following + Murrey levels is good for H1/M30/M15/M5. ;))

Re: show us your best trending ea

Trend following

That and "the trend is your friend" are two of the oldest sayings in the trading world. The question is "which trend exactly?". The long term trend? The medium term trend? The short term trend? All of them? You're saying it's good for lower timeframes and I beg to disagree, yet I'd be more than happy to take my words back if you could provide a link to a forward test using the methods you specified, even on a demo account, because spreads don't really matter that much when trading trends. So far, I haven't seen any trend trading system that is decently profitable on any forex timeframe (by "decently profitable" I understand over 20% profit per year with lower than 10% drawdown and a profit factor over 2, not necessarily on a single currency pair but perhaps overall, on a "basket" of pairs). Sure, trend trading works okish on other instruments, actually that's what experienced funds do, but I have yet to see a trend trading system that's constantly profitable on forex, be it manual or automatic.

Re: show us your best trending ea

That and "the trend is your friend" are two of the oldest sayings in the trading world. The question is "which trend exactly?". The long term trend? The medium term trend? The short term trend? All of them? You're saying it's good for lower timeframes and I beg to disagree, yet I'd be more than happy to take my words back if you could provide a link to a forward test using the methods you specified, even on a demo account, because spreads don't really matter that much when trading trends. So far, I haven't seen any trend trading system that is decently profitable on any forex timeframe (by "decently profitable" I understand over 20% profit per year with lower than 10% drawdown and a profit factor over 2, not necessarily on a single currency pair but perhaps overall, on a "basket" of pairs). Sure, trend trading works okish on other instruments, actually that's what experienced funds do, but I have yet to see a trend trading system that's constantly profitable on forex, be it manual or automatic.

Sorry I don't play demo accounts anymore, and I can't let you have a look at the live statements...

You can see quite a few people trading lower timeframes by purely traditional indicators and Murrey levels on TSD and FF, some of them even only look for price actions around the Murrey levels.

(Actually not specific to Murrey stuff, all kinds of pivots are telling similar stories.)

(I do agree that trading higher timeframes is safer for trending styles.)

Re: show us your best trending ea

the woodie robot new in this forum is trend following one, uses on gbpjpy M15.

I gave woodie a somewhat thorough backtest. The result wasn't bad, but with a 10k account size and a 0.1 fixed lot, it had almost 20% drawdown, which is not something I'd like to have on my live account. See http://www.indo-investasi.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=5188&p=48844#p48844

Re: show us your best trending ea

Have you had a look at the Fractals 4 EA? It uses the H4 timeframe. The strategy is volatility breakout, which is inherently trend-following.

You can see the official live forward test at:

http://fractals4.mt4live.com

Re: show us your best trending ea

I have an old EA that was not bad and I modified it (took me two months solid) to be safer by adding short term trend.

Medium Term trend 2 weeks determines the take profit and it changes each day

Short term trend works on percentage of market drop in the last two hours by volume of orders in the market.

It waits until there is x movement in the ATR before it buys. x is variable depending on last 4 hrs.

It seems to be pretty successful so far but I only got it finished a little while back.

It does have other things like drop protection incase the market takes a dive and it does not trade high impact news days or the 6th of the month.

it trades up to 5 times a day but it has a bunch of rules that say, if this equals that..then do not trade. The harder you tighten the rules, the less profit it makes.

Re: show us your best trending ea

Have you had a look at the Fractals 4 EA? It uses the H4 timeframe. The strategy is volatility breakout, which is inherently trend-following.

Fractals looks good, even though it's not really trend following - it's using a take profit target, which is not what a trend following strategy typically does. Still, it seems to be behaving rather nicely and I favor an EA that trades lots of pips at once instead of the abundance of scalping EAs out there. I remember taking a look at it in the past and dismissing it rather quickly, but I don't recall why.

I'm running some backtests for 2009 (which are painfully slow); I'll post the results in the fractals thread when finished.

Re: show us your best trending ea

Have you had a look at the Fractals 4 EA? It uses the H4 timeframe. The strategy is volatility breakout, which is inherently trend-following.

Fractals 4 does a lot of scalp-like trading. The so-called trend-trading part is just a very small fraction (a lot less than 10% of what it scalps) and if you remove the scalping, it seems to be a loser, at least on EURGBP. In fact, as I mentioned above, it's not even fully trading the trends, it's using a take profit limit.

Basically, it's a volatility breakout system with a fixed stoploss, a fixed breakeven point, a trailing stop and a fixed take profit target. What actually makes money in the Fractals 4 EA is the scalping system making 4-5 pips at a time.

Bottom line is, although it's not a bad EA, you can rule out Fractals 4 as a trend trading EA.

Re: show us your best trending ea

I'm running some backtests for 2009 (which are painfully slow); I'll post the results in the fractals thread when finished.

It wasn't programmed efficiently at all, so the code needs to be rewritten to be optimized for speed, and the indicator codes (3 indicators) should be written into the EA itself instead of calling iCustom(). Also, it modifies the (trailing) stop loss level on every tick I think, which is another factor that makes it slow. I think code could be written so that it only does the stop loss level calculations and modifications at each bar open; even at each M1 bar open would be much faster than on every single tick.

What actually makes money in the Fractals 4 EA is the scalping system making 4-5 pips at a time.

If you put the forward test results from fractals4.mt4live.com into a spreadsheet (now at 42 days and 263 closed trades), half of all trades closed at >= 40 pips profit, not 4 or 5 pips; and 203 out of 263 trades closed at >= 10 pips profit. The average pip profit of all profitable trades from this set of results is 85 pips.

It does a lot of modifying of the stop loss level, which is what a trending strategy normally does; scalping strategies rarely use a trailing stop loss because when the take profit level is so close there isn't much room to trail up.

Re: show us your best trending ea

If you put the forward test results from fractals4.mt4live.com into a spreadsheet (now at 42 days and 263 closed trades), half of all trades closed at >= 40 pips profit, not 4 or 5 pips; and 203 out of 263 trades closed at >= 10 pips profit. The average pip profit of all profitable trades from this set of results is 85 pips.

 

It does a lot of modifying of the stop loss level, which is what a trending strategy normally does; scalping strategies rarely use a trailing stop loss because when the take profit level is so close there isn't much room to trail up.

If you take a closer look, those are not pips but 1/10 pip fractions, because it's using a 5 digit broker. So what you see there as "over 40 pips" is actually "over 4.0 pips" and your calculated average would be 8.5 pips.

As I said, the majority of profits come from scalping. If you look closer, you will notice that all the "trend trades" are using 0.02-0.10 lots, while the scalping trades use 0.30-2.x lots. Also, if you look even closer, you will notice that the so-called "trend trades" use a fixed 300 pips take profit target... The fact that a trailing stop is used doesn't magically turn it into a trend strategy; if you made an EA that's supposed to trade trends, would you use a fixed take profit target? Actually, I guess in the end it does follow the trend indeed, but for a very short time.

These facts aside, it's basically a decent scalping EA with a trailing stop trading strategy that does a really great job of staying unprofitable yet not losing money.

Re: show us your best trending ea

If you take a closer look, those are not pips but 1/10 pip fractions, because it's using a 5 digit broker. So what you see there as "over 40 pips" is actually "over 4.0 pips" and your calculated average would be 8.5 pips.

Ah yes you are right, they are using a 5 digit broker, so we need to divide the value in the pips column by 10. The definition of "pip" has been messed up with the introduction of 5 digit brokers. This means from those results only 17 trades out of 263 have > 10 pip profit.

The strange thing though is that the EA actually needed to be modified to calculate values correctly on a 5 digit broker. I had to manually edit the PivotWizard indicator because it was using Point without any check of the Digits variable. So I wonder whether they are using their original version on a 5 digit broker.

Also Stormin Norman claims the EA doesn't work well on a 5 digit broker, yet their results trading live on a 5 digit broker looks excellent so far.

Their actual terminology of the two strategies are "High Volatility Breakout" and "Low Volatility Breakout".

High Volatility breakout trading systems can actually be considered another form of swing trading, (which is a style of short term trading designed to capture the

next immediate move). In other words, the trading system is not concerned with any long term forecast or analysis, only the immediate price action.

High Volatility breakout trading systems are based on the premise that if the market moves a certain percentage from a previous price level, the odds favor some continuation of the move.

This continuation might only last one day, or go just a little bit beyond the original entry price, but this is still enough of a profit to play for.

Low Volatility Breakout is based on an assumption that most currency pairs will complete the first stage of a movement (a currency pair will move in the desired direction for a brief time but where it goes from there is uncertain); some of the currency pair will cease to advance and others will continue.

A Low Volatility trader intends to take as many small profits as possible, not allowing them to evaporate. Such an approach is the opposite of the "let your profits run" mindset, which attempts to optimize positive trading results by increasing the size of winning trades while letting others reverse.

So it looks like the Low Volatility Breakout strategy is the scalping one, whereas the other is, as they call it, "another form of swing trading"

Nevertheless, they state that the strategy needs trending behavior for it to be successful:

Normally, Fractals-4 will have positive results on trending market or on high volatility time, and have poor results on whipsaw market or on low volatility time.

So given that the profits are small as I've now realized, I wouldn't call it a trend following EA in the traditional sense, even though it relies on and profits from short term trends.

Re: show us your best trending ea

Well, I'm running 3 backtests of it at the moment 2009.01.01 - now (EURUSD, EURGBP, GBPUSD), it's been running for well over 24 hours and it's barely around half. So far, it seems to be doing quite decent on a 5 digits broker without any modifications whatsoever. Sure, it has drawdowns, but I don't really trust an EA without drawdowns. This discussion belongs in the Fractals thread anyway - I'll post the results there when I'm done. I'm also running a backtest of a modified version where I disabled everything besides the breakout strategy; of course, I'll post these results as well, but so far, with the default money management, after 4 months it turned 10000 into 10200, with a couple of -100 drawdowns...