Bill Curry

Hi Bill,

 

I follow your stats with interest and saw that you were doing pretty good since your last changes,.

But today, I am puzzled about your strategy.

 

Could you tell me few things (if you don't mind):

first, what made you change your mind to go from 0.4 lot(two days ago) to 1.8 lot today?

 

also today was UK bank hollyday (next monday also), maybe not a good time to trade. (low volume, spikes happen in either direction)

 

About Forex Gold Trader, it seems very good now because we are in uptrend and at an all time high, but do you know how it will handle the day(s) when gold will crash down, (I red somewhere the FGT trades only BUYs) ? (how about dd if it keeps buying)

 

These are not critics, just inquiries because of interest in your findings.

All the best to you.

TIA

freddy

This week I decided to start using hammy's settings (he's over at the trade2win forum) which spreads risk over three different times: 6:15, 6:30, and 6:45. The good thing about these settings is that days like today where all three times hit SL are very rare, so it's typically safer to use slightly higher risk. Today was just my bad judgement in letting the EA run on a bank holiday. I've learned my lesson and will be running TMT with very low risk settings on Monday.

So far Forex Gold Trader has been amazing and has been significantly more profitable/predictable than TMT. If it weren't for that EA then I would not have any profit at all. I haven't experienced a significant crash yet, but I think I could endure it. As long as you use low enough lots and have high enough leverage to avoid a margin call, the price will go back up eventually. The newer version of FGT does take short positions as well as long ones, but I personally have never seen it trade a short position and I wouldn't feel very comfortable if it did. My settings for this EA are very risky so far and much higher than what the author recommends.

April has been absolute hell for TMT, with almost all days being no trades or hitting the BE. There were only three days so far that did anything, and two were losses. I don't know why April has been so strange, but hopefully this strategy will pick back up next month. This EA hasn't preformed quite as well as I had expected, and for that reason I am lowering my risk to something more sane temporarily. If May's results start to look better then I will resume the high risk settings I had originally. I expect FGT to make me some nice profit in the meantime.

Hey everyone, just a quick update. So far the tweaks to my strategy have been very successful. I recovered nicely from a loss this week, something that would've taken forever to do had I been using the MM setting. I think we'll finally start to see the results we've all been waiting for. One interesting thing to note is that in the last 17 days my account has grown +147%!

Just to let you guys know, I'm going to be closing the account mentioned in the original post and transfer the funds over to a slightly larger account that I've been running TMT on since the beginning of March. Once this is done I'll post trackers to this new account so you all can track my progress. I'll also be running KangarooEA on EURUSD and AUDUSD on this account with extremely high risk settings. I have a lot of faith in KangarooEA and after running it for a few months I'd say it has been worth the money. Very talented and responsive coders/traders.

I recently bought Forex Gold Trader EA and I'll be running it on a demo account for the next month or so to see if it's worth putting on a live account. If it is, you'll start to see gold/silver trades on my tracker as well.

Sorry for the lack of updates guys, there just hasn't been anything new to report that you couldn't see from the tracker until now.

March is almost over and so far it has been an interesting month, and another month of learning. As you can see from the tracker in my original post, the results have been less than impressive to say the least. This week is looking good, but so far this strategy has been way too bumpy. What's interesting is that even though I'm still in the red, most weeks have actually yielded a positive pip count. What has been happening is that I will win two trades in a row, and then one losing trade will wipe out all the profits due to MM calculating a higher lot count. We would need a much higher win/loss ratio to make the current strategy work. That leads me to believe that the final puzzle piece to making this strategy profitable is to stop using MM and to start using a fixed lot count.

Starting in April (next week) I will be using a fixed lot count that I will calculate at the beginning of each week. Since it will be fixed and won't adjust to losses, I will lower my risk/trade from 33% to 20%. This will wipe out an account if there are five consecutive losing trades, so I will stop trading for the week if there have been three consecutive losing trades. Computing the risk/trade at the beginning of every week will take advantage of the positive pip count for the week and compounding interesting.

The goal for each week will be +17.5% growth (+35 pips) of the account. The monthly goal is a little trickier to predict, but ***uming there is +17.5% growth every week then the monthly goal will be ~+90% (due to compounding interest).

Got lucky today. I woke up around 3:30AM EST to check on my trades and saw that the price was ranging even after two hours, so I exited the trade with 4 pips profit. Good thing, because it would've hit my SL.

Tweaked my settings again. After looking at my/Marc's results, I decided to get rid of the second break even and take 100% profit at 35 pips. This basically makes it work exactly like FMT, with the added bonus of a couple filters that keep me out of bad trades.

SL at -40 pips

BE1 at +20 pips, adds +0 pips

BE2 not in use

TP1 at +35 pips, takes 100% of position

TP2 not in use

February was a month of learning and tweaking. I had several times where I hit my SL needlessly because of misconfigurations in my settings and terminal. Considering I started the month at $599, I still ended up in the black. I would've had about a +80% month if it weren't for the trade today, which could've been avoided if I had only been using 7:30 as my entry time. Overall though this month was a disappointment, but it was a good learning experience. I think with these new settings I will do well in March. Here are the settings I will be starting out with:

Entry time: 7:30 (no range)

SL -40 pips

BE1 at +20 pips, adds +0 pips

BE2 at +30 pips, adds +15 pips

TP1 at +30 pips, takes 50% of the position (triggered at the same time as BE2)

TP2 at +35 pips, takes 50% of the position

Risk/trade at 33%

My settings are slowly starting to look like the recommended settings from Marc. I guess I just had to learn the hard way :P I decided to lower the SL because I found through January/February that, although there were a couple, very few trades turned around after going -40 pips in, and with such a large SL it took ages to recover from a loss. Since the SL is closer, that will also mean that my gains will be higher because the MM will risk more lots.

Hopefully March will be a better month. How did everyone else do?

Hey Bill on TP2, i'm assuming the 50% of position your talking about the trailing stop, right? I don't see an option to take 50% at TP2.

Nope. There are two take profits, so it's assumed that since I'm taking 50% at the first TP that the remaining 50% will be taken at the second TP.

I assure you I am fine guys, I just haven't been updating this thread that's all :) I much prefer myfxbook to mt4stats, and when I switched to the new VPS I just neglected to setup mt4stats as my publisher. I'll do that now if it makes you all happy :p

I've decided to disregard some of my backtest findings and increase my risk/trade back to the 33% that I was using with FMT. I've also changed my settings a bit:

SL 50

BE1 20, +0 pips

BE2 30, +15 pips

TP1 30, 50% of position

TP2 35, 50% of position

EDIT: Also thought I should mention that I've been very impressed with the results I'm getting with KangarooEA, so I decided to take it off this account and have it run on its own dedicated live account. This should make it easier to see exactly how TMT is doing in my portfolio.

Loser today. Had a no trade on my demo account but went long on the live account. Not sure what went wrong.

I've decided not to update this thread daily unless there has been a change to my strategy or something else worth mentioning. To see my daily trade outcomes, just check my myfxbook.com portfolio in the OP.

I missed the trade :( Same, vps issues...sadly i missed the trade. Oh well hopefully next week will be good. I also funded my account so i'll be trading at 1k also. Quick question Bill, does your new backtest show 7:30 starting hour to be just as profitable as 7:15 starting hour? Or have you done a new one yet? Also i done a backtest with same set, broker, same modification, and 99% model quality, and i didn't get no where near your results? How do u upload a backtest i can show you my results

I just switched to Black Box VPS (bbvps.com), so hopefully they are more reliable.

In backtests I found that having a range from 7:15-7:45 did increase the profit at the end of the year compared to 7:30-7:45. Since my initial tests I haven't done any more backtesting with different start times, but I'd expect there to be slightly smaller profit, but smaller DD as well. I'll do some more testing tonight and let you know of my results.

Which results are you referring to? You can use rapidshare or megaupload to share your backtests.

Freddy is right, today was a winner!

Long trade entered at 7:15

First TP hit at +36 pips (75% of position, 36 * .75 = 27)

Second TP hit at +46 pips (25% of position, 46 * .25 = 11.5)

Total pips: +38.5

Total growth of account: +16.3%

Growth since beginning of month: +40.6%

This week was pretty frustrating. Fundamentals screwed up the trades almost every day. It started out great, then immediately went down hill, and now we're almost back to break-even for the week. One thing that I've learned this week is that entering early at 7:15 is not a great idea. It's better, especially on news days, to enter at 7:30 or 7:45. I've permanently set my entry time to this time range. If I had been entering at 7:30 I would have been back in the green this week, with the trade on Thursday being a win instead of hitting my SL. This was a profitable week for most FMT/TMT traders. Lesson learned.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that I had more down-time today with my VPS service. It was very dangerously close to the time FMT/TMT would be trading. That was the final straw for me, so I canceled my account and will be moving on to a more reliable host. I was using ThrustVPS, if you're wondering.

Obviously the news had a massive impact on the price today. TMT took a long trade, but the price immediately went south and didn't even get close to my BE or TP, hitting my SL for the second time this week. The news today came out much worse than expected, hence the drop.

Long trade entered at 7:15

Hit SL at -50 pips

Total growth of account: -17.5%

Growth since beginning of month: +20.9%

One thing I did notice is that entering today at 7:15 was very bad and actually cost me this loss. If I had entered at the recommended time, 7:30, I would've actually probably gone short and had a profit today. For these news days I think it's very important to enter at the proper time. There is more high-impact news coming out tomorrow, so I've changed my entry time from 7:15-7:45 to 7:30-7:45. Hopefully we can make a win out of tomorrow, otherwise this looks like it could be a losing week, heading dangerously close to my lowest balance in January. These fundamentals are screwing up everything this week.

KangarooEA seems to be doing well. Relative to my account size, it has slightly offset some of the losses I've had this week. It may just be for psychological benefit right now, but I'm happy with it so far.

Agree with jm2110, the official entry time for FMT is 6:30 London time, regardless of summer or winter time.

 

I can also confirm that Bill's timing is pretty much in-line with the official time. Because yesterday, I was tracking live both my FMT chart, and Bill's mt4stats.com updates. As soon as Bill's 7:15 trade (see his post #71) was triggered, I noticed my world clock was showing 6:15 London time. In other words, 7:30 on Bill's test will be the same as 6:30 London time. And from Bill stats on the mt4stats page, most of the trades have been placed either 6:15 or 6:30 in terms of London time.

 

I too am trading this live since late last week, but with a much more humble risk exposure per trade. Also I am manual trader, so I use a more basic 40 TP, 20 BE, 50 SL, and try to stay as close to 6:30 start time as I can. (Yes, slightly larger SL from the official method). But as a manual trader, I frequently deviate from the standard rules. For example, if I see prices are likely to begin to take off in FMT's direction (e.g. higher highs higher lows, in a long trade), I sometimes get in earlier by couple of minutes, and frequently save myself a few pips there. Then I sometimes also get out of trade earlier, especially if prices are struggling near any likely resistance/support.

 

Yesterday it was pure luck that I closed the trade at 12 pips profit, because I had to leave for some family errands.

 

But like Bill's prediction in post #69, I half expected a loss was coming up soon before yesterday's trade. And hopefully, another winning streak will now return again.

Thanks for clearing up the entry times for us, Joey.

Long trade entered at 7:15

First BE hit at +0

Total growth of account: +0%

Growth since beginning of month: +46.6%

Today the market just didn't have enough volume in either direction to really do anything. Better than a loss though.

I previously mentioned that I was going to use KangarooEA to offset some of my losses. I had temporarily shut it off and was planning on using it later in the year. After some backtesting and being impressed with the results I had decided yesterday to turn it back on. I have it running on AUDUSD and EURUSD, so don't be surprised if you see trades being opened on those pairs.

The modifications you posted on the 51st post. Page 5 or 6 i believe. The additional coding, or edited coding you implemented, i copied and pasted the same modifications. Compiled and did a backtest, 0 errors and good profit same as yours! And i am going to try a different time and i'm going to do it live! :) Don't worry Bill you have warned me. Any destruction to my account is my own fault. But indeed if i couldn't afford to lose this, i wouldn't. So we'll test side by side, that way we'll be absolutely sure about the GMT offset. Here is my account http://www.myfxbook.com/members/BusinessGuy09/graceland/84171, u can add it to your 1st post if you want.

I highly recommend you read the FMT manual before changing the entry time. According to the manual the time of 7:30AM is correct. If you like you can try running a backtest with Metaquote's historical data that will be using the same GMT offset as your broker (TDFX). It won't be completely accurate, but it should be enough to tell you what time you should be using. All of my backtests have shown 7:30 as the proper entry time.

I'll update my original post with your portfolio.

yes i'm using same settings, plus same modifications! :) And yes i will keep you updated...hm if u want i could be the test dummy, i'll use 6:15 to 6:45, then we could compare our results...

What modifications? This goes without saying, but if you want to try out different times do not do it on a live account.

Question Bill, (I just went live also, :), with a $500 dollar account though) Tadawulfx sever gmtoffset is GMT+1 correct? Well my broker is the same GMT+1, so since the best results on backtest were achieved in GMT+0 from 5:15 to 5:45, wouldn't this translate to 6:15 to 6:45 GMT+1 time? Instead of 7:15 to 7:45, i don't mean to contradict b/c apparently its working out for you. I'm just trying to make sure. offsetting always confuses me. Thanks for the reply.

Great! Are you using the same settings as me? Like I said to hitescape, it'd be great if you could keep us updated with your progress.

To be honest, this has been somewhat confusing to me as well. I tried backtests with different times and there were clearly some problems. I'm thinking this may have something to do with winter/summer time changes. The good news is that if you check the FMT manual Marc actually gives an example of a broker with GMT+1 and suggests 7:30 as the time to start. It would be awesome if Marc could implement something like they have in the KangarooEA, where it automatically sets your GMT offset for you.

I received this from the Kangaroo people:

 

"$AUDUSD: Takes a dive on the news that China has hiked its key interest rate amid fears a slowdown in Chinese growth will effect Aust. too"

Yup I got that e-mail too, and I think that could've been the problem. Does anyone know of a place to check when China is releasing their news? This is the second time I've been burned by news coming out of China and I don't see it listed on all the popular news calendars I follow.

Oh, I went live last night after watching the comeback. That also could be the reason. :)

Grats! It would be great if you could you keep this thread updated with your progress as well. Don't be discouraged by today's loss, we'll be in the green by the end of the month. Today would've been a win if the fundamentals hadn't gone and messed everything up ;) Are you using FMT or TMT?

As expected, TMT finally had a losing trade today and dipped below my initial deposit again.

Long trade entered at 7:15

Hit SL at -50 pips

Total growth of account: -22.5%

Growth since beginning of month: +46.6%

It almost hit what would've been my first BE at +20 pips (which it did on my demo account) but before it could it shot way, way down for 75 pips. With such an aggressive change in direction I'd think that there was some kind of news that I'm missing but I can't seem to find any at around that time. Regardless, I still expect this week to be a winner and that I'll end up in the green.

What a great way to start the week with an easy win that finally puts me back in the green!

Long trade entered at 7:15

First TP hit at +35 pips (75% of position, 35 * .75 = 26.25)

Second TP hit at +45 pips (25% of position, 47 * .25 = 11.25)

Total real pips: +37.5

Total growth of account: +15.7%

Growth since beginning of month: +84.2%

This is the forth consecutive win I’ve had with Turbo Morning Trade since the beginning of February and I’ve already made up for January’s losses, so I think it’s safe to say that I was correct in my prediction. With this many consecutive winning trades I’d expect to see a loss coming up soon, so don’t be surprised if that happens soon. I may fall below my initial deposit temporarily, but I think we’ll be seeing at least +200% account growth by the end of February.

Hi Bill, I looked at your strategy tester results and just have a question on trade entry time. I thought I was fairly sure your brokers (name listed on report) server time is gmt + 1 ? Therefore if you were following a standard FMT strategy (6.30 am London) because current London = gmt shouldn't your entry time with your brokers server be centered around 7.30 am ?

 

I may have misunderstood your server time or you may intentionally be entering an hour earlier than FMT which is great if it tests well but the question is really just so I can confirm that my interpretation of the entry time is correct?

 

Also in the strategy tester report it mentions a 2hr expiry of signal parameter, I presumed this meant that after this period of time the trade would close regardless of where the market was at the time but in the message above you said you were in a trade for many hours. Does this mean you aren't using this parameter in live or do I misunderstand what this parameter means?

Thanks

I use historical data from Dukascopy with my broker to achieve 99% modeling quality for my backtests. They use GMT+0 for their server time, which is why I have it set as so. My live account uses the time range 7:15-7:45AM.

Short trade

First TP hit at +36 pips (75% of position, 36 * .75 = 27)

Second TP hit at +47 pips (25% of position, 47 * .25 = 11.75)

Total real pips: +38.75

Total growth of account: +16%

Growth since beginning of month: +59.2%

Today's trade was a bit scary and probably should have been a no trade. Almost immediately the price started going in the opposite direction and didn't stop until around -40 pips, nearly hitting my SL of -45 pips! Right around then is when it started turning around and went all the way down to hit both of my TP's! This trade was abnormally long, lasting around 6.5 hours. This strategy usually hits the TP's within a few hours or it goes on forever and losses. Today's trade looked like it was going to be a loser, but I'm very glad it turned around. That said, today was a loser for this strategy in my book. The fact that the price turned around is chance and there is no way TMT could've predicted that.

This week has been a great way to start the month. All winners, no losers. By next week I should have completely recovered from January's losses. Hope everyone has a great weekend!

what was the problem Bill?

My VPS service notified me that my machine was "down" due to a DDoS attack on their servers. I wasn't able to access it from VNC, so I assumed this was true. I setup my local machine to trade in the meantime while I waited for my VPS service to return. Today I found out that my VPS machine was actually still on and actively trading, in addition to my local machine. In other words I was accidentally running this EA twice. Could have potentially been very bad.

In case you're wondering I'm using Thrust VPS, and I don't recommend them. My machine has crashed for no apparent reason at least twice, and their systems have had down time twice... all within one month. Very unreliable thus far.