Aggressive Growth Trading Journal ($1,000 to $100,000)

[joeytrader]

In addition to ADR filter, there is sometimes another phenomenon that is specific to Mondays: you can sometimes find different brokers giving very different 60 periods Momentum and CCI numbers by the 6:15, 6:30 candles time. It is due largely to each broker has different practice of the ending hour for each week, and starting hour for each week.

 

So after the week-end, if one broker starts the data feed a few hours earlier than another broker, depending on the price movement during this period of time, it can affect the Mom. and CCI.

 

But this is usually the case if the trigger is very close to switching sides between going long or short, and it is true only for Monday.

 

Just my 2 cents.

[businessman9821]

Thxs for your 2 cents!

[joeytrader]

Thxs for your 2 cents!

 

You're welcome.

 

But to give credit where it is due, I did not discover this phenomenon on my own. Someone on the author's t2w thread first mentioned this a while back. So I learned about this one relatively recently myself too.

Edited February 17, 2011 by joeytrader

[kraven]

this thread appears to be dying a bit since Bill stopped posting daily.....I had a look at Bill's fxbook results and there a bit confusing to see how FMT would be performing by itself as he's running 2 EA's now. I noticed a few other indo forumers have joined Bill in the 'FMT aggressive trading style' so maybe someone else can keep post it's results as a stand-alone?

[hitescape]

Although I started TMT, I didn't go the "aggressive" route (a wimpy 1% risk) and trade is as apart of a collection of EAs. It is not doing as well as I had hoped and I will re-evaluate it next month. I already killed off Breakout Expert, a FMT knockoff, for poor performance. I suspect that the best information on FMT might come from JoeyTrader if he is still manually trading it.

[Zoki]

According my opinion the manual use of FMT could be more effective than the FMT EA (the manual trading was effective last months, exception is February for me).

During the manual trade FMT important point is additionally to analyse the Average Daily Range, round noumbers, resistances and support levels, possible news announcements.

One weak point of manual trading FMT is the following: many times the trade could be closed with less profit than possible.

Also the manual trading is not 100% repetable (some additional information could change the analysis result and the profit target).

[PipPip_Hurray]

Well, here is a new candidate for some aggressive growth:

 

http://indo-investasi.com/showthread.php/11825-REQ-Enigma-G12?highlight=enigma

 

:)

[joeytrader]

I notice that bill's mt4stats.com statement has not had a new trade since Monday the 21st. I hope it was simply a case of bill of wanting to take a short break, and not something ill has happened to him.

 

Talking about anything bad that can come to anyone unexpected, as an aside, my heart and best wish goes to anyone here who is from Christchurch NZ, or knows someone who is from there.

 

Anyway, back to this thread.

 

To answer hitescape's question about my tracking of manual FMT results. Except for the X'mas/New Years holiday period, I do trade FMT manually, but as I have recently mentioned on another thread, although I take all valid trades from FMT, I sometimes do get out of a trade earlier than the official method. So my actual results will not be very comparable to the official results.

 

And if anyone is interested in seeing how the manual FMT would have performed, I have found the author's official report of results relatively honest. Although there will be days of different results among different brokers, due to different broker's data feed, different spread, etc. But overall, you can get a sense of how the base FMT trading has been performing, by checking the author's update here:

 

http://www.forexmorningtrade.com/trading-journal/

 

(I hope I did not violate the black-list rule here, since this results page is not a password protected page, and anyone with good enough internet searching skill can probably find it anyway.)

[freddy]

Hi Joe,

You are right about MT4 stats which doesn't update (don't know why) but myfxbook does.

http://www.myfxbook.com/members/billcurry/fmt/76321

[rachdbl]

Well this site is about the support and resistance of tradestation MTF price. Support and resistance are two aspects of trading that may be difficult to understand and identify for novice trAaders.Support is shown when price is headed down and gets stopped and goes back up.Resistance is shown when price is headed up and gets stopped and goes back down.

 

<a href="http://www.customizedtrading.com/resources">tradestation trading</a>

[Bill Curry]

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.

Edited February 24, 2011 by Bill Curry

[businessman9821]

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.

[Bill Curry]

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.

[joeytrader]

FMT author has free gifts on how to use and back-test EAs

 

In case anyone is interested, the author recently sent out a monthly update to his FMT members. And he included a free gift inside. It is on how to use and test EAs.

 

As I trade only manually, I have not downloaded them myself. But it may be of some value to members here.

 

Also, as the gifts are free, and also not specific to FMT, I hope I am not violating the FMT black-list rule by posting them here.

 

The ebooks on EAs, and few words from the author:

 

The ebooks are:

Loading, Running & Troubleshooting an EA

Testing and Optimizing an EA

 

I believe especially newbies will be able to learn a lot of information on how

to correctly run EAs, and how to backtest & optimize them.

 

You can download these ebooks for free here:

http://www.forexmorningtrade.com/abc123/Loading_Running_Troubleshooting_EA.pdf

http://www.forexmorningtrade.com/abc123/Testing_Optimizing_EA.pdf

 

 

If you wish to read the entire monthly letter, because it is quite long, and I do not want to take up too much space of bill's thread, you can read it in post #290 in the II thread here:

http://indo-investasi.com/showthread.php/8789-Forex-Morning-Trade?p=136433#post136433

 

cheers

[Bill Curry]

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?

[kraven]

Joey thanks for the links on testing EA's. for some reason your thanks buttons missing.

 

Thanks too for the update Bill

[Bill Curry]

Finally back in the green with todays win. If I can get another win tomorrow it'll be the highest balance I've had since I started.

[Bill Curry]

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

Edited March 2, 2011 by Bill Curry

[Bill Curry]

Woke up again today around 3:30 to check on my trades. The market was ranging again so I decided to exit at BE. I've found that when the market is ranging like that for two hours then it's really a gamble to stay in the trade. Today actually would have been a win, but only because we lucked out with the bad PMI news. Had the news been positive it would have easily been a loss.

[kraven]

looking at the 'tracker' on page 1 it was another loosing week for this.

[Bill Curry]

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).

[Bill Curry]

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.

[hitescape]

Bill,

 

That was an educational observation about the Money Management aspect. Since I trade at low risk I never see that effect but after reading about your trades it becomes obvious at substantial risk levels.

[freddy]

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

[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.