Targetting the JPY Crosses Why it is so Hard to Develop Long Term Profitable Systems for These Instruments

If you have been interested in system development and you have been following my achievements for a while you would have certainly noticed that I have never developed a system to target any JPY crosses. The reason why I havent done so is not because I havent tried but because the development of long term profitable systems for them has proved to be extremely hard. On todays post I want to share with you my experience with these instruments and why I have had a very hard time attempting to develop strategies that profit from these very volatile forex trading instruments. I will explain to you why price action based strategies simply do not seem to work for these pairs and what other alternative solutions I have put in practice to develop a long term profitable system that is able to diversify our trading with these JPY beasts.

The JPY crosses are a series of instruments in the forex market that pair the Japanese Yen with a non-USD currency. These instruments are most commonly EUR/JPY, GBP/JPY and CHF/JPY but other more exotic pairs like NZD/JPY and AUD/JPY are also available. These pairs have some very notable characteristics which set them apart from regular forex pairs like the EUR/USD and the GBP/USD. What makes them so special is the extremely large daily volatility and their overall lack of liquidity (when compared to major pairs). Developing a system for these babies is no easy ride and I will just show you why this is the case.

System development is based on the finding of exploitable market inefficiencies. Price behaves in a certain way that allows you to enter a trade with a high probability of success under very diverse market conditions. Lack of liquidity introduces a blur to this image and therefore it becomes very hard to find inefficiencies because price is "all over the place" so to speak. Lack of liquidity makes different price patterns appear on very different market situations signaling many different things taking your mathematical expectancy away from positive territory. So if you try to trade a given candlestick pattern you find that the pattern sometimes leads to where you want to go and sometimes it doesnt - like it always happens - but the lack of liquidity increases the number of times it leads to where you dont want to go significantly, to the point where you lose all the edge you would have gained from it.

For this very reason, the development of price based strategies on the JPY crosses is often not a good idea since you are very vulnerable to the "blur" introduced by the general lack of liquidity of these instruments. Systems that have success on very varied currency pairs - like Teyacanani - simply fail to profit on JPY crosses due to the fact that their signals simply dont lead anywhere. After analyzing 10 years of price data for the EUR/JPY I have found that price action is extremely hard to predict due to the fact that lack of liquidity makes it follow a very random walk in the short and perhaps medium term. This is the exact effect you would expect from lack of liquidity since crowd behavior becomes less representative and more individual human behavior - which is just random - starts to show through the charts.

What is the solution then ? Since price action based strategies seemed to fail to bring positive results on these currency pairs for me, I decided to change into indicator based strategies that allowed me to remove the "noise" from the market more effectively. The idea here is that JPY crosses do follow crowd behavior in the long term so introducing a strategy that averages data and gives me an idea of where things are going would most likely prove more effective. This is in fact the case and indicator based strategies do show positive mathematical expectancy values with less effort. However, the fact that the currency pairs lack liquidity makes the eventual profitability of these strategies much lower than what can be achieved on the regular USD paired instruments.

In the end it becomes obvious that lack of liquidity complicates any mechanical profitability to a large extent since market inefficiencies become far more scarce and difficult to capture. Lack of liquidity makes the effect of smaller parties larger and therefore the movements are just more random overall. Crowd behavior becomes less significant and therefore we lose a significant edge that we are able to use on major currency pairs. Many of you may think that this "randomness" constitutes an inefficiency on its own but the fact is that it does not since you arent able to predict when it will appear with a statistical advantage. If you assume that JPY crosses are random and attempt to profit from their volatility you will fail when they trend and vice versa. The problem is not the character of the instruments but the fact that lack of liquidity does not allow us to have a positive statistical edge on most strategies.

Does this mean that we wont have any mechanical JPY-cross trading strategy ? No, it just means that it will be much harder to develop and probably profit and risk targets wont be as good as for regular systems based on more liquid currency pairs. As a matter of fact I am currently developing some strategies to address these JPY crosses. Hopefully I will be able to tackle this beast and - in the end - we will have some likely long term profitable systems for our JPY trading friends :o)

If you would like to learn more about automated trading and how you too can learn to design and develop your own trading systems with sound trading tactics please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or joining Asirikuy to receive all ebook purchase benefits, weekly updates, check the live accounts I am running with several expert advisors and get in the road towards long term success in the forex market using automated trading systems. I hope you enjoyed the article !

Diposting oleh Unknown 21.45 0 komentar

Why There is An Expert Advisor That Works

For the past six months I have been very intrigued by who and what drives the prices up and down in the forex market. It is quiet obvious that retail traders hold just a small portion of the cake while funds, banks, exporters, importers and the like hold a much bigger chunk.

I have also asked myself if this people drive prices in a mechanical way. Is it predictable ? One of the most important questions for retail traders. Can we predict the direction of the market ? Or more specifically, can we consistently predict the direction of the market ? The answer - I think - is a shade of yes.

Even though we all have different opinions on the technicals and fundamentals of currency pairs, we all know what we all expect. I mean, for example in the case of a non farm payrolls release, we all think it will be say 100k, then it is 70k, there will unmistakably be a hike in the EUR/USD pair. It is all not because 70k is "good" or "bad" for the economy - although this may be aligned in some cases - it is because the market goes either with or against main trader expectations. This drives the market and people react predictably to this news events.

In the case of more technical situations I think the same may apply. People are psychologically predisposed to certain patterns on charts. This makes their appearance constant. People are used to feeling certain emotions once they see certain changes in price on a currency, then they react the same way they have always done. They will always see trends, retracements, breakout patterns and similar graphical figures.

Although I may not demonstrate conclusively that prices are predictable by means of repeating market behavior I may speculate that the fact that the same people are trading the same currencies on the same charts creates some sort of very complex pattern inside their conduct. People who grasp this pattern are successful retail traders. People who dont, well, they are the other 90% if you know what I mean.

My analysis so far, predicts that there may be an expert advisor that works on all market conditions. This is because an expert may - unless psychological factors in trading change substantially because of an event - trade based on the "pattern" given by currencies through human behavior.

And even though I have no way to know the nature of this pattern or implement it mechanically I know it is there, hidden amongst the price. Waiting to be discovered. Not all experts are doomed to failure, some may get the key to our psychology .

Diposting oleh Unknown 20.00 0 komentar

Why There is No Universal System Differences Between Currency Pairs

Can we build a system that trades successfully on all forex currency pairs ? This has often been a question of the automated trading system world that simply asks if there is a universal inefficiency, an inefficiency that is so common that it can be found an exploited on all different currency pairs. Up until now, the answer to this question has been a resounding and unequivocal NO. To the best of my knowledge no system has ever been developed to work on all currency pairs despite the claims of many system sellers who tell you that you can use their systems on all of them. But why has it been impossible to build such a system ? Why does trading all currency pairs seems like such a big challenge ? The answer lies within the very fabric of the market and the way in which the different currency pairs trade and react. Within the following paragraphs I will explain to you some of the basic aspects of these currency pair differences and why it makes the creation of any universal system extremely hard if not impossible.

You may have been told that inefficiencies in the market arise due to crowd behavior- which is a human characteristic- and that all currency pairs in forex show it to some degree. When you hear this it becomes easy to think that if a system "really works" then it is bound to work on absolutely all the instruments available in the currency market. After all, every instrument is bought and sold by humans and this would make them inherently inefficient.

Certainly if all instruments traded with the exact same number of people and with the exact same objectives we would be able to easily find a universal inefficiency but the matter of fact is that this is not the case. The first dramatic difference between instruments is the number of participants and the inherent liquidity of each currency pair. Some pairs like the EUR/USD are very liquid while others like the GBP/CHF dont have 1/10th of the liquidity of the former so their price action is dramatically different and the inefficiencies within it become dramatically different. The less people who trade a given pair, the more efficient it becomes since crowd behavior becomes less pronounced and individual decisions start to play important roles.

Then we have other differences that also make the movements of currency pairs different. For example if you are trading the USD/JPY and there is a negative trade balance against Japan then there will be a given fixed amount of money each month that will pull the USD against the JPY just merely because of business transactions that have nothing to do with speculation. The volume of these transactions is very significant and the time in which they are processed and their magnitude will have an impact on the way in which a pair moves.

Many other factors such as central bank intervention and even cultural differences play an important role in the way in which a pair moves when compared to another and all of these factors help to explain why the finding of universal inefficiencies is so hard. However when you look at higher time frames (daily and beyond) there seems to be some coherence and this is the reason why some systems that target month or year long trends manage to exploit the same inefficiency on several different currency pairs. However the success of these systems along the whole portfolio is never total and more often than not there are very strong differences between the profitability of different currency pairs and several pairs where the systems simply do not work.

So will we ever find a global and total inefficiency ? I would have to say that probably no, but if there is a chance it will take a lot more liquidity on all instruments and a lot more market participants to make this the case. Certainly in the future if the market volume on the illiquid currency pairs increases enough we might be able to have - even though not a truly universal system - at least systems that will have better success along different currency pairs.

If you would like to learn more about system development and how you too can build your own likely long term profitable systems based on sound trading tactics please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or joining Asirikuy to receive all ebook purchase benefits, weekly updates, check the live accounts I am running with several expert advisors and get in the road towards long term success in the forex market using automated trading systems. I hope you enjoyed the article !

Diposting oleh Unknown 13.30 0 komentar

The PID SP4 SP5 expert advisor a review Why I never bought this ea

A small while ago there was a lot of hype about this new expert advisor called P.I.D SP4. People were getting mass returns on this expert advisor and so many more people began to converge on this ea and start to trade their capital using the expert.

I have to say, I warned them ! Expert advisors that offer mass returns on some months are very or more exactly extremely prone to lose all their money and even more. As I have said on an earlier post, in my experience, profitable consistent expert advisors seem to have at least a 30-40% draw down of every 10% consistent profit they get on the account. This is simply the balance demanded by the market and the reason why top fund managers almost never get more than 20% profits a year, they are extremely conservative because they know the inherent risk that comes with high profitability.

I never traded P.I.D myself but saw it trading on many friends accounts. The results were just like I expected, this correlation based ea found a point of divergence and the whole account got wiped out. Then, a second version, P.I.D SP5 was released, which although promised to be much more stable than the ea before it, wiped the entire authors demo account less than a month after its release. I dont think the author realized how dangerous and prone to catastrophe his strategy is by design and I dont think he purposefully deceived people into buying something he knew would fail. I think this was just a consequence of a lack of understanding of what the market demands for what the market gives. A consequence of trying to find a holy grail. If you would like to read more about profitable expert advisor, how to find them, etc, please buy my automated trading ebook or subscribe to my weekly newsletter were I analyze current experts I am testing each week (you also get investor access to live and demo accounts).

Diposting oleh Unknown 09.00 0 komentar

Too Good to Be True Why it is Never True

Yesterday while I was searching some forums and reading the comments of the posters I came across a conversation about the very traditional saying "if it is too good to be true, it probably is". As I read more I saw some very interesting aspects about the way in which the conversation was being carried out, specially the opinion of one of the debaters who was against the hypothesis claiming that is was nothing but mediocre and destructive to a person with an "achieving" personality. Today I want to write a post about my opinion about this "too good to be true" issue and how I feel it is a very valuable piece of common knowledge based on hundreds - or even thousands - of years of human experience. In particular I will discuss its relationship with automated trading and why it is extremely importance in this field
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First of all, we need to understand the nature of this timeless phrase. Why does it exactly mean and what is the power behind it ? What do people mean by "too good to be true" ? Generally this sentence speaks about the overall human experience in the sense that it reflects the expectations of the general public. When someone tells you that a certain endevour sounds "too good to be true" it means that you may be drastically underestimating the efforts or the actual real possibilities of doing what you are intending to do.

As a clear example, imagine that you lived in the 19th century and you told someone "I will be building a machine to fly in one week". They would tell you that it sounds too good to be true and the actual truth is that you would have found the endevour much more time consuming and difficult than what you originally thought. It is worth noting that the saying does not necessarily limit the possibilities of what can be done but generally the manner in which things can be carried out meaning that if something that was "too good to be true" could be done in that way, you wouldnt be the first person doing it and it wouldnt be too good to be true after all, because it would be true.

So how does this all apply to automated trading ? It applies in a very simple way. If it was possible and so simple to turn 500 USD into 1 million in 5 years, then it would have already been done and it wouldnt be considered too good to be true. However, since achieving this extremely high capital returns isnt something which is being done by the worlds top traders or trading organizations (or anybody else for that matter... if you have an example in automated trading I would absolutely love to hear it) then it simply falls within this category with very good reason.
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Is living from automated trading too good to be true ? The fact is that if you are thinking about placing a robot on a trading platform and letting it to work like an ATM for you then it certainly is too good to be true. Othewise dont you think that the thousands of people who have learned about automated trading would be living from it right now? The reality is that most of these people are actually not making any income from automate trading but they are losing money trying to achieve the situation which is just "too good". However - as I implied before - this does not mean that living from automated trading is impossible, it merely signals that the way most people are following is just wrong. Living from automated trading is possible but the truth is that it will require a LOT of study, a LOT of work and MUCH more capital that what you have been told and - not surprisingly - it is not something everybody can do; it is a long journey filled with frustration and hard work which - alike most non-luck based roads towards wealth- is simply not travelled by the vast majority of people.

In my mind, I dont think that the "too good to be true" saying is intended to be discouraging, mediocre or destructive - on the contrary - I think that it is meant to be protective as it certainly points out that the roads towards wealth exist but they are not short and they are not easily travelled. In the end there is nothing special about you or about me and if the easy ways to achieve massive riches in automated trading were really a reality, we would have both achieved that goal without any effort a long time ago (and therefore it wouldnt be too good to be true either !). In reality the best thing you can do for yourself is to find out what can be realistically achieved and put all your hard work into. Forex automated trading - as I have said several times - is not a gold mine for you to avoid work and sit on a beach to drink Margaritas all day. The journey is far harsher and demanding than your average 9 to 5 job, but so is the end much more rewarding.

If you would like to learn more about my perspective in automated trading and how you too can build systems with realistic profit and risk targets which use sound trading tactics to profit from the market please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or joining Asirikuy to receive all ebook purchase benefits, weekly updates, check the live accounts I am running with several expert advisors and get in the road towards long term success in the forex market using automated trading systems. I hope you enjoyed the article !

Diposting oleh Unknown 03.46 0 komentar