Rio

Another update on pipsodog,
 
The EA can blow up too. I've seen it hit over 75% on one pair on 1% risk
Again, you need to run this thing on multiple pairs and spread the max risk (1%) out amongst all pairs.

There is no pipsodog previous to build 600 - so no decompile possible.
I do have earlier builds of Magelan - but that uses the older hedging strategy.
 
Looking at pipsodog, it is much like pyramid xe 5.2, except that it runs the grid and averaging in both directions. Pyramid only goes in one direction depending on which gets hit first.
I am thinking... if I merge the trading code from pyramid xe and the averging code from magelan - I could come up with something equally as good.
 
Pipsodog always has a buy and sell trade open. It opens both buy and sell as market orders with same lot size as soon as the robot starts up. Then it spreads a grid of buystop orders upwards (same lot size), and sell stop orders downwards (same lot size) about 200 pips away from price. Eventually price will hit one of the waiting stop orders, and open another pair of buy and sells. This time, depending on which stop gets hit (buy or sell, up or down), one of the new market orders on the side that was hit will have a larger lot size to offset the previous side that price did not reach. Then the Magelan style averaging kicks in on that side, and brings the averaging line closer to price. Then all the unhit stops are cancelled and the grid of stops are redrawn with new lot sizes to reflect the current state of drawdown, depending on side.
Of course, when the averaging line is hit at about +10 pip profit, profits are taken - a new pair of buy sell trades are initiated, stops redrawn and resized. Life goes on.
 
...at least that's how I *think* it works. I'm still confused by it.

I have started my account again and am running Pipsodog on it.
This is yet another evolution of Kalinka's hedging strategy, and it works in such a way that it increases lot sizes (much like the old Pyramid did) as price moves away from averaging. The end result is that drawdown is hedged and locked up, and the averaging close out lines are shifted to always be close to price, so a move that shakes up and down will most likely close all the trades out.
It is similar to martingale, except for the fact that the hedging works in both directions... so it would be very hard to kill. Your balance would shoot up like a rocket on a unidirectional move with no retracement.... to the point where the drawdown is still low because of massively increased balance..., and the close-out line is within easy reach of price... so no waiting 6 months for price to come back (only for your account to explode!)
 
It is making about 30% a month, which is seriously good.
 
I'm really upset that my previous live account exploded, otherwise this EA would be making crazy money now... It will take about 12 months, by my calculations, to get my money back with this EA. *sigh*
That should be long enough to test it, and consider continuing to run it however.

I have started my account again and am running Pipsodog on it.
This is yet another evolution of Kalinka's hedging strategy, and it works in such a way that it increases lot sizes (much like the old Pyramid did) as price moves away from averaging. The end result is that drawdown is hedged and locked up, and the averaging close out lines are shifted to always be close to price, so a move that shakes up and down will most likely close all the trades out.
It is similar to martingale, except for the fact that the hedging works in both directions... so it would be very hard to kill. Your balance would shoot up like a rocket on a unidirectional move with no retracement.... to the point where the drawdown is still low because of massively increased balance..., and the close-out line is within easy reach of price... so no waiting 6 months for price to come back (only for your account to explode!)
 
It is making about 30% a month, which is seriously good.
 
I'm really upset that my previous live account exploded, otherwise this EA would be making crazy money now... It will take about 12 months, by my calculations, to get my money back with this EA. *sigh*
That should be long enough to test it, and consider continuing to run it however.

I have started my account again and am running Pipsodog on it.
This is yet another evolution of Kalinka's hedging strategy, and it works in such a way that it increases lot sizes (much like the old Pyramid did) as price moves away from averaging. The end result is that drawdown is hedged and locked up, and the averaging close out lines are shifted to always be close to price, so a move that shakes up and down will most likely close all the trades out.
It is similar to martingale, except for the fact that the hedging works in both directions... so it would be very hard to kill. Your balance would shoot up like a rocket on a unidirectional move with no retracement.... to the point where the drawdown is still low because of massively increased balance..., and the close-out line is within easy reach of price... so no waiting 6 months for price to come back (only for your account to explode!)
 
It is making about 30% a month, which is seriously good.
 
I'm really upset that my previous live account exploded, otherwise this EA would be making crazy money now... It will take about 12 months, by my calculations, to get my money back with this EA. *sigh*
That should be long enough to test it, and consider continuing to run it however.

Just a quick update.
 
I had Magelan trades close out after staying open since November last year. That's a good 6 MONTHS.
So the hedging works, but you can fully expect some trades that are hedged to lock up trading for that long if you get unlucky.
 
It's important with Magelan to never use more than 1.0 risk total, because I had the USDCAD at 1.0 and on this 6 month odyssey it reached 60% drawdown at times and scared the **** out of me. On three pairs, 0.33 risk would obviously be safer... or just stick to the one pair.
 
Only problem with one pair is that, at least with the USDCAD trades, it was locked up in hedging for months and it wasn't able to make any good trades. On the flip side of that you could have multiple pairs going and racking up trades in the interim, but one of them would always likely be in drawdown, meaning that closing out the account and withdrawal could be a problem.
 
To that end, I am sticking with Tornado for now. The drawdown has stayed low on one pair (EU) at 1.0 risk.
Averaging per month it gets 7-8%. That's good enough for me. With any luck I can quit my job in 3 years in relative safety.

It's slow and steady....and not aggressive... and some testing reveals that it will survive pretty much anything thrown at it.
 
It will get you about 5% a month... which if you are talking about EAs, is quite good... although some of kalinkas other EAs will get you about 10% on average with a more advanced hedging and averaging technique.
 
With pyramid 8, You can see that it took a little over a year to double the account though.
 
Putting it into perspective... if you have $1000, can you wait 10 years? ;)
 
1. $2000
2. $4000
3. $8000
4. $16000
5. $32000
6. $64000
7. $128000
8. $256000
9. $512000
10. $1024000
 
or maybe if you start with $10,000
 
1. $20,000
2. $40,000
3. $80,000
4. $160,000
5. $320,000
 
..at which point you're making $160,000 a year which may be enough for you to quit your work.

By the way, I tested out Trend Raptor 1.41 for a little under a month and it made 5% on the account -- no drawdown as all trades closed in profit.
Definitely not making the crazy money they have in their videos, but 5% is quite good. Let's not knock that.
 
Given that most of their EAs average over 5% a month (even though they are slated to make more)... it may be best to look at Tornado FX. It makes almost as much as Magelan with considerably less risk. At it's price it is also a bargain....

Read it and weep:
 

http://www.scribd.com/doc/171255224/MetaTrader-4-MT4-Manager-User-Guide

Yep, Magelan can hold averaging trades for months. You would expect that with correct risk management that these trades eventually average out, and whatever successful balance gains that you make per month are kept.
 
The reason why I posed that 1% risk is best is because I ran the EA on three pairs with total of 3.0 risk and it very nearly blew my account up with over 75% drawdown.
That said, before that point, the EA was raking in 15%-23% monthly -- which by all standard of safe robot investing, was incredibly risky!... and the profits are only really good if the account DOESN'T BLOW UP!
 
Basically you can see in the charts that the GBPUSD and the USDCAD just went unidirectionally up with no retracement whatsoever. Even though I closed out my EURUSD trades to breakeven, those two pairs with 1.0 risk apiece were still capable of sinking my account. Neither of them could stay inside the 30% drawdown promised per 1% risk!
Additionally with more than one pair, the account was in constant drawdown. At some point it's nice to have balance and equity be the same (for cash withdrawal!)
So if I run Magelan again, I'm sticking to 1.0 risk on the EURUSD
 
....but I just don't like the way Magelan trades. I reverse engineered it, and it just chases rising and falling currency. It doesn't buy in dips and sell at peaks like you're supposed to, and often makes really silly buy/sell trades at weekly extreme highs and lows, for very few pips, and often getting trades trapped.
 
Also, I'm taking a look at Kalinka's other robots, and Tornado FX seems to be making more money with lower drawdown that Magelan at the moment:-

http://www.myfxbook.com/members/KalinkaCapitalEE/tornado-fx-1500-alpari-nz/766397
 
Then again I am thinking of hacking Magelan, keeping the averaging system, and teaching it to take better trade entries.

After using Magellan for a bit, it's safe to say that it works best with one pair with NO MORE than 1.0 risk
Beyond 1.0 risk is too risky... and EURUSD seems to be the best pair with least averaging drawdown.
Tried GBP and CAD but both exceeded 30% drawdown... not optimised!
 
Also, with one pair, eventually trades will all clear out and give you an opportunity to remove funds from the account.
With many pairs, you could be stuck in drawdown for a long time (months!)
 
With only one pair on 1.0 risk you can't really expect much more than 5% per month... but that's OK anyway.
 
I read that even professional EAs are lucky if they make 40% a YEAR. So 5% per month is still doing really good.

You're being sarcastic, right?
 
Sure they get paid from the spread, or commissions, but they also get paid when they margin your account out -- which is what they don't tell you.
 
Think about it... You give them a pile of money, which they can use to make money themselves... And since they know that most traders lose, they ket you play around on their system with nothing. Tanking your account is the entire business, and it means nothing to them.
 
Look for the MT4 dealer plugins manual. They can mess with the spread, redraw candles on the chart, and they can see where all the aggregate stops and orders are, so they know where to initiate monkey business in order to profit.

The only way around this is to
(a) hedge
(b) hide tp and sl from the dealer
© NEVER scalp
 
(d) ...and know how to trade by noticing where the dealer smashed everyone's stops on the chart and trade with him

They've changed their presets so that you have to set risk yourself (they've probably done this to cover their asses and to point the finger at other customers who overleverage).
To get it to work like 4.0 you have to set LOT_IS_FIXED to false.
1% risk per pair is about right. I would never use a total of more than 3.0 risk across all pairs, especially when averaging.
 
Anyways, I am reverse engineering the EA. Trying to rip out the averaging routines and the on-screen display... so that may I can rewrite large chunks of the EA and get it to trade a little bit like a proper trader.
It is taking a lot of time as it is a complex EA

Finished running a month demo of 4.11
Indeed, averaging makes more money, but you must tolerate drawdown. Stop loss trades didn't make as much, but no major drawdown.
Choosing which set to use is a decision of aggression vs safety IMHO. (I'm sticking with aggression!)
The EA seems to be able to pull about 15% per month consistently while averaging (although there is drawdown to content with).
Maybe a good strategy is to build you account up with averaging and then when it's big enough, go back to using stop losses so you can make withdrawals on a routine basis.
 
I also tried Hedge gate (Their latest EA), but it's a dud. I don't think it will be in profit after 30 days in which case I should be able to get a refund. What a shame. I had high hopes.

from the website:-
 
Recommended leverage: not below 1:200.
Recommended minimal deposit: 500 USD/cent for 0,01 (Insta Forex lot 0,10) for each currency pair.
Profitability: around 50% per month, or up to 850% per year with re-investment of gained profit.
 
Personally I would stick to the XE2.2 rules, and use $1500 minimum per pair.
Note that Pyramid 8 has settings for only the EU at 3% risk. No GBPUSD settings exist AFAIK
As I have not tested Pyramid 8 as much as I should, I can't really comment further. Do your own demoing.
 

 
I agree, that Pyramid XE is a little more "holistic" in the sense that it doesn't use much in the way of indicators, but currently Magelan v4 has kept it's promise of under 30% drawdown even recently as two pairs are getting smashed around by the USD weakening. This is less drawdown than I have ever seen from Pyramid XE, with more profit.
 
I do get a bit upset when I see some of the trades Magelan takes though. It's taken a recent USDCAD sell trade which has not closed out for ages, which for me would have been a BUY signal and paid out much quicker.

No, Pyramid 8 is not XE. Both have similar trading strategy, but Pyramid 8 is different enough to be safer and less profitable.

In Pyramid 8? Pyramid 8 is a rewrite of 5.2 (and XE essentially). You can't use the same set files. Reason is that Pyramid 8 uses MAs to place averaging orders and lock orders... so it is actually more reliant on indicators, and indeed the settings have more entries for this more fine grained control.
 
As was said, the only preset file that it comes with is one for the EURUSD. If you want to run it on two pairs, you need to somehow generate presets for GBPUSD by optimizing the settings on GBPUSD data and cut the risk on both pairs down to 1.5%
 
Otherwise Pyramid 8 uses a similar strategy to Pyramid 8. If you've toyed with XE for long enough, you'll recognise what it's doing more or less, as it is essentially the same but with more intelligent lock/averaging trading.
 
Also, Magellan v4 got an update recently. No new set files as far as I can tell, and they haven't bumped the version. I wonder what changed?

from the website:-
 
Recommended leverage: not below 1:200.
Recommended minimal deposit: 500 USD/cent for 0,01 (Insta Forex lot 0,10) for each currency pair.
Profitability: around 50% per month, or up to 850% per year with re-investment of gained profit.
 
Personally I would stick to the XE2.2 rules, and use $1500 minimum per pair.
Note that Pyramid 8 has settings for only the EU at 3% risk. No GBPUSD settings exist AFAIK
As I have not tested Pyramid 8 as much as I should, I can't really comment further. Do your own demoing.
 

 
I agree, that Pyramid XE is a little more "holistic" in the sense that it doesn't use much in the way of indicators, but currently Magelan v4 has kept it's promise of under 30% drawdown even recently as two pairs are getting smashed around by the USD weakening. This is less drawdown than I have ever seen from Pyramid XE, with more profit.
 
I do get a bit upset when I see some of the trades Magelan takes though. It's taken a recent USDCAD sell trade which has not closed out for ages, which for me would have been a BUY signal and paid out much quicker.

Up to you. I guess for safety's sake, use Pyramid 8... although I haven't tested that educated code much, so I would advise demoing it.
 

It won't compile without warnings... check the code out, they coded it in such a way to break the decompiler. There's one line that's expecting a number and there's a date in there.

Magelan is safer and more profitable per month. It's not a hard decision. Only thing I don't like about it is that it's trend following trade signals aren't that good. I'd like to hack it up and replace the trading signals with something I think would work better, while keeping the hedging strategy.
 
As for Pyramid 8... I ran it side by side with XE2.2, and XE2.2 came out more profitable. That said, Pyramid 8 uses less leverage and is much much safer and kinder on drawdown, at the cost of being less profitable.

I'm not testing Magelan v3, only v4.
 
Why don't some of you guys try optimising it's inputs on different pairs? I take it that it only needs a year worth of data to optimize over.
 
Maybe you can share your settings with me? I think I've shared quite a bit already.

Sorry, quick update on the instructions in the manual (removed some russian!)
 

http://www.4shared.com/zip/zvlms7T6/pyea801ma.html

Here it is, at last. I tested it for long enough and it seems to work just like v2.1, or at least I can't see any problems. There are no changes in the strategy. The code was simply fixed and cleaned up some more to compile on build 500 and above. Also I added a display for the leverage on the chart.
In fact if you want to study the code, it should be a lot easier now that the variables all make some sense.
 
If you're running XEv2.1 then you should be able to drop XEv2.2 in it's place and have it take over with all your trades. (Don't forget to apply your presets again!)
 
Don't forget to say thanks! This effort took a fair bit of work.
 
PS. The EA racked up over 10% this month on my live account. (Max drawdown was around 25%)
 

http://www.4shared.com/zip/IViBLvrH/pyxev22.html
 
A rather lengthy and detailed manual text file is contained in the package which goes into heavy detail about everything I know about the EA, how it works, and exactly how to use it. Please read and do sufficient testing in demo before running this EA live.
 
This EA is a hacked EA and of course, cannot come with any warranty if you lose money because you can't use it properly.
Of course, I cannot be held responsible if it makes you a boatload of money either. :P

Up to you. I guess for safety's sake, use Pyramid 8... although I haven't tested that educated code much, so I would advise demoing it.
 

It won't compile without warnings... check the code out, they coded it in such a way to break the decompiler. There's one line that's expecting a number and there's a date in there.