No Stoploss or Limit Orders for US brokers

I was a little bit shocked and surprised when a customer sent me an email earlier today regarding a new regulation that will be taking effect on July 31, 2009 that forbids the use of Stoploss and other limit orders on US forex broker accounts. After reading a lot more on the subject I realized that apparently only FXCM has issued a warning to their customers telling them that they will be unable to use these type of orders from July 31. What does the regulation exactly do and what can you do to protect yourself and your automated trading system ?

Well, as I said before the regulation prevents you from assigning any stoploss or takeprofit levels to your orders, that is, you cannot issue any pending orders with these values or place these values on existing trades. This means that in order to avoid risk, if you are manually trading, you are required to stay in front of the screen a longer amount of time. Expert advisors can also emulate the stoploss and take profit values simply by closing orders at predetermined price levels calculated by their logic but this is quiet risky and requires you to have an extremely reliable internet connection (that is, you need a very robust vps) because a failure to do so may leave your account opened to terrible loss levels and unmanaged risk.

What options do you have ? You can either migrate to a non-US broker and continue trading in the same fashion, you can simply use expert advisors to manage your stop loss and take profit levels (if you are manually trading) or you can modify your current expert advisors if you are auto trading so that they too can emulate and manage your orders according to the takeprofit and stoploss levels.

As retarted as this regulation may sound, it does provide a safer trading level for traders in that it absolutely prevents the ability of brokers to stop hunt trading positions and thus eliminates whatever influence brokers may be having in price, that is, it eliminates the artificial movements some brokers may be creating in order to make trades reach stop loss levels. This will probably make the market easier to trade on US brokers with the added pain of having to manage your risk in alternative fashions. Nonetheless, these brokers will lose a fairly good amount of their customers to off shore brokerages.

As far as my expert advisors go, I will modify the gods gift ATR to comply with the rule and use an internal mechanism to close orders according to stoploss and takeprofit values. Other expert advisor creators should do the same in order to maintain their systems at a good level. What do you think, will you adapt or migrate ?

If you would like to learn more about the gods gift ATR and other expert advisors 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 23.00 0 komentar

To Look or Not to Look Setting and Forgetting in Automated Trading

We all fear that moment when we open up our trading terminals to find out that some portion of our profits or even worse, our initial investment capital, has been wiped out. Looking into a trading account continuously is one of the hardest things to do when getting involved in automated trading and certainly the emotions and reactions that take place when we do so lead to many of the devastating consequences that make profitable automated trading a very hard thing to achieve for most new and inexperienced traders. For many people new to automatic trading execution the answer to this problem - in which looking into losing trades makes them lose control - is a simple "Id rather not look". On todays post I am going to discuss this issue a little bit and why you cannot expect to be successful just by "setting and forgetting" and "avoiding to look" when using algorithmic trading systems.

There is something very hard about looking into a losing account or an account with trades in open draw down that makes us want to forget about them or do something to make this stop. Definitely when people start to actively deal with their accounts they generally take very bad decisions that end up costing them far more capital. Inexperienced traders usually change systems upon draw downs, interfere with the trading of automated systems and get desperate and frustrated when things spend a lot of time going against them. However, given the knowledge that long term profitable systems are hard to trade because of this, many new traders simply decide to "forget" about the accounts and system to avoid intervening and dealing with the psychological aspects of trading.

This decision is absolutely logical and it is the easiest and most obvious answer to the above mentioned premise. If youre telling me that long term profitable systems are hard to trade because they have long and deep periods of draw down then Ill just trade the system and forget about it so that I do not interfere nor suffer from these draw down periods and their existence. Although this may sound good at first, this is a very dangerous road that often leads to as many losses as the first one.

In order to understand why this is the case we first need to see how people who are indeed successful with mechanical trading systems achieve this. Definitely it is not by not looking at the systems but my gathering knowledge, strength and confidence by doing the exact opposite. The difference between an experienced and an inexperienced trader is evident when you look at the ways in which they react to the exact same situation. While within a draw down an inexperienced trader would suffer from despair and fear (only avoidable by not looking at the account) the experienced trader can look into the account and see a temporary cycle which is just a pair of his or her regular business goals. If the account then goes onto a cycle which signals that it has become too risky to be traded the experienced trader will quickly realize this and eliminate the system from his or her portfolio while the other trader will trade the system to oblivion since he or she isnt even paying attention.

What I am trying to say here is therefore pretty simple : it is not about setting and forgetting and avoiding to look into your systems and accounts, it is about looking into them and understanding what they are doing and if what they are doing is part of what they are supposed to do. Certainly at first trading long term profitable systems will require a lot of self control and discipline from new traders but in the end this ability to look at the accounts, understand, expect and evaluate in a cold-headed manner is what distinguishes the few that do make it in this business from the big crowd of traders who fail at this endeavor.

My advice here is therefore quite straight, if you want to succeed at automated trading you should keep a close eye on all your live accounts and on their performance. When you feel emotions because of their profits/losses, turn them into understanding, learn all the ins and outs of your systems logic, its profit and draw down characteristics, what it is supposed to do and how it does it, only in this way will you be able to achieve success in this very hard business called automated forex trading.

If you would like to learn more about my experience with algorithmic trading strategies and how you too can receive a true education in automated trading please consider joining Asirikuy.com, a website filled with educational videos, trading systems, development and a sound, honest and transparent approach to trading systems. I hope you enjoyed this article ! :o)

Diposting oleh Unknown 22.46 0 komentar