Forex Expert Advisors and Market Volatility Gods Gift

On an earlier post I had described the use of the ATR indicator as a means to control the stop loss and take profit values of forex expert advisors. I became very aware of this fact yesterday when I started to back test and optimize the Gods Gift expert advisor using its regular stop loss, take profit and trailing stop features.

I realized that the expert advisor made profits consistently using fixed stop loss and take profit values but starts to fail to do so at mid-late 2008. In forward testing this was confirmed as the expert made a good amount of profit from the beginning of 2008 up until the tests ended in mid October. After that, a live account was started to test the ea, account which has experienced more draw down than this same expert last year.

As you can see on the GBP/USD weekly charts displaying the ATR indicator, (shown below) volatility has increased expotentially during the past 6 months. This seems to be a consequence of market uncertainty and a general increase in volume across the forex market. Indeed, the market has been almost doubling its trading volume every year.
--
Now, expert advisors that use a set of fixed stop loss and take profit are bound to fail because they cannot adjust to these ever changing market conditions. As a matter of fact, market conditions can just be expressed as a measure of volatility since human psychology remains the same, the only thing that changes is volume (of course, on the long run, human psychology should change as we should be able to learn from our previous mistakes, etc).

What I discovered, in the case of Gods Gift, is that there is a defined set of parameters that work well from 2004 to 2008 and a completely different set of parameters that works very well from mid 2008 to present. The main difference is that SL and TP values have to be widened enormously to take into account changing market volatility. This led me to program an ATR based stop and take profit on the Gods Gift expert advisor, this of course, allowed me to find a set of conditions that worked perfectly from 2004 to present.

If you would like to learn more about the exact results obtained with Gods Gift both in demo and life accounts as well as getting the new Gods Gift with ATR adjustable SL and TP please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or subscribing to my weekly newsletter to receive updates and check the live and demo accounts I am running with several expert advisors. I hope you enjoyed the article !

Diposting oleh Unknown 00.32 0 komentar

Free Profitable Expert Advisor Gods Gift 7c

For those of you who have not read previous posts about Gods Gift, it is a free expert advisor coded by Matt Edmonds which I have been testing from January 2008. I stopped publishing results on this website since the ea is a very infrequent trader and it took it several months to accumulate a good amount of trades. Now I will show you my results for this free, profitable, expert advisor.

-
-
As you can see on the graph, the ea has performed very well for the past 9 months as it has been predicted by its backtesting. The expert has very good market entries. With about only one entry per week, this ea enters the market only on high probability trades. I have to say, I thought this ea would blow up the account by June but it has indeed surprised me by banking profits as expected. Up until now, the ea has a profit of about 50% with a maximum draw down not exceeding 10%. The ea uses a fixed stop loss and it seems to have a low risk trading style. This is the type of ea you would like to use for consistent, long term profits.

Even though the amount of time is significant (9 months) and enough to say this ea is extremely likely profitable (has survived drastic changes in market conditions), I have to tell you that, as with any automated trading system, you should trade it with care and at your own risk. If you wish to get the settings and the expert advisor from me you can either buy my automated trading ebook (which contains information about many commercial experts) , subscribe to my weekly newsletter (which comes with investor passwords for live and demo accounts) or simply buy me a cup of coffee using the link on left bottom side of my webpage and Ill be glad to send you this information to your email ! (this is to support the vps in which the ea is run and keep me awake :) ) Thanks in advance for your purchases and donations !

Diposting oleh Unknown 22.45 0 komentar

The Gods Gift ATR Challenge Testing by Third Parties

One of the great challenges of any automated trading system out there is to be robust, reliable and profitable. Since I want the gods gift ATR expert advisor to become the most well documented expert advisor out there I have decided to take several steps to make this automated trading systems characteristics very well documented, examined and tested. For me, an expert advisor that is truly long term profitable should fulfill a small set of characteristics that demonstrate its capacities :

• Trading Platform Independence
• Broker Independence
• Extensive Live Testing (1 year at least)
• Third Party Live testing

Since up until now all tests on this ea have been done by me (one year of forward testing of the main strategy plus 4 months of live testing on 4 different live accounts) I have decided to ask some of my newsletter subscribers to participate in what I have called "the gods gift ATR challenge". What I seek with this challenge is to have third parties test the expert advisor on live accounts under agreed conditions that guarantee that the ea testing is well done and comparable to my personal tests. The use of different brokers, different vps providers and money amounts should provide us with a wide amount of information about this experts profitability. The people participating on this challenge are aware that past performance does not guarantee future results and they do this testing under their own free will with no promise of profitability. They run the ea on personal live accounts to which I only have read-only passwords. However the people running the tests must fulfill some conditions :

• Expert advisor must be run 24/7 on a reliable vps provider
  
• Expert must be run alone on a live account with a minimum of 100 USD (10,000 contract) or 1000 USD (100,000 contract)
• A read-only investor password MUST be provided
• The ea must be run for at least 2 years, regardless of performance (people must agree to do this or their testing will not be taken into account)
• Settings, currency pairs and timeframe are to be provided by me and cannot in anyway be changed by the third party if results are to be comparable

If you are participating on the Gods Gift ATR challenge please make sure you fulfill the above requirements and then send me an email. Please include your read-only password as well as the contract size of the account you are running, broker, account size and one of this three risk levels : Conservative, Moderate or Agressive. I will then send you settings as well as metatrader publisher instructions so that your results can be updated live to my ftp so that we can all share the test results.

Up until now more than 5 people have expressed a strong interest in doing this testing so if everything goes as planned, in a year from now we will have extensive reliable testing about this expert advisor and we will learn a lot about how it trades, how robust it is against market conditions changing and how we can improve it.

If you would like to learn more about this and other expert advisors I have tested and reviewed please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or subscribing to my weekly newsletter to receive updates and check the live and demo accounts I am running with several expert advisors. I hope you enjoyed the article

Diposting oleh Unknown 04.00 0 komentar

Gods Gift v 7c A Free Likely Profitable Expert Advisor

For the past two weeks I have searched relentlessly for a profitable free expert advisor to fill the void left by the free expert advisor portfolio I stopped trading.

As you may know, finding free profitable expert advisors is very difficult given the fact that they are many of them, with limited information on their workings and objective. At the end, I think I found a light at the end of the tunnel.

This expert advisor I found named Gods Gift v7c coded by Matt Edmonds seems to be the answer to my prayers. The way I discriminated this expert from the rest was by back testing. And yes, we all feel the same way about it (does not work very good, I know it) but it is nevertheless a tool to separate possibly profitable experts from unprofitable ones, not to say that every expert resulting profitable in back testing would be in forward testing.

The back testing results are very good. After optimizing some of the parameters associated with this expert, I managed to get, using Alpari data and 90% modelling quality, a maximum draw down below 10% with a relative draw down below 15%. All of this with a 50% yearly profit, back tested from December 2004 to January 2008. This I have to say, is exactly what I am looking for. The strategy tester report can be seen here.

The expert advisor finds its entries with the help of the Waddah Attar Explosion indicator coupled with Keltner Channels. You can see this in the image at the end of this post. The expert advisor seems to perform very well on the GBP/USD pair with the time frame making apparently no difference although the back testing report was done using the one hour time frame.

I like everything about this expert advisor. Fixed stop loss, trailing stop and apparently a low draw down with a modest profit on average each month. I have started to forward test it today and see how it does in the real market. Everything points out to this expert being profitable, let us hope it lives up to its back testing results ! Wish me luck !

Diposting oleh Unknown 03.30 0 komentar

Gods Gift EA 2 months finally A loss !

First of all let me apologize for the diminished amount of posts I have published for the past month. I have been very busy with other projects so I havent taken much time to write articles, on the other hand, I dont have many experts to review as I currently have only 2 in forward testing.

Now to the Gods Gift expert advisor results... I have to say, I like this expert advisor a little bit more every day that I see it trade. It caught twelve profitable trades in a row, over a little bit less than two months. It has shown great accuracy with its trades, only risking a moderate amount of pips (70) on each trade.

The ea attained its first loss yesterday when it hit a stoploss on the GBP/USD after taking a dramatically wrong sell order just before 5 consecutive positive hours for the pound. I have to say, I am in part relieved by the expert starting to take some loses, I really want to see if the expert can live up to its back testing results and provide a maximum draw down smaller than 15%. Currently, maximum draw down is 3.9%.

Well, I will review this expert again the following month when I hope we will have a better idea on the amount of draw down. If it exceeds 15% I will stop the expert advisor, if it does not, I will continue forward testing it until it does or until we have 2 years of forward testing. Best luck to you all on your trading !

Diposting oleh Unknown 08.16 0 komentar