Automated Systems -any hope? :(((

[desperate]

Well Aleph, I've tested grid as well. at least some versions of it. And I would never trade it live unless with very small contract sizes. The balance actualy is increasing steadily and all the time, but equity... man I would not bet my life on it :/

[Aleph]

Originally Posted by desperate

Well Aleph, I've tested grid as well. at least some versions of it. And I would never trade it live unless with very small contract sizes. The balance actualy is increasing steadily and all the time, but equity... man I would not bet my life on it :/

well, I wouldn't either... but in theory (or backtesting ) it works just fine. The problem as you say is the contract size which would have to be just too small if you're never going to close any losing trades.

And what about a sort of hedged-Grid-Trading? I never though about that, but could be worth to invest some time. I mean gridtrading with eurusd and usdchf at the same time? adjusting contract sizes to mach each others pip value and here we go...

Aleph

[desperate]

Aleph, hedging the grid with inverted pair would be great solution if you had profitable transaction on one pair and losers on the onther - this way you would balance equity and have constant gain, problem is you will have losing transaction on both pairs, so you double lose.
And grid theory has one big minus - you can never get rid of the losing opened positions. Never. Only thing you can do is pray, that price stays in defined range forever (say 0.8 - 1.5 for E/U), you've got reasonable grid and you trade for 20 years. Then, after 20 years you can close everything and have some profit. But what if price drops to 0.3 in next couple of years and then riches 4-5? Man, there's no force on earth that could make me trade with this system. Unless there is

[AltosTrader]

Hi Desperate - There are heaps of systems.
The forum at Strategybuilderfx has at least a dozen seemingly profitable systems under discussion. The forum at forex-tsd likewise. Tsd also has an "Elite Section" you can join for I think US$28 / month. In that forum there is plenty discussion and testing of systems. The best system under test at present is up around 850 pips for April.

Most all of these discussions are based on using MetaTrader MQ4.

In the last eight days of testing (on demo only) I am up US$ ~ 3500, trading mostly 50k blocks. I am in proccess of funding accounts at IBFX in the US and MIG in Switzerland. When FXDD complete their switch to MQ4 I will be funding an account there also or maybe another in Europe. The reason I split them up is that results vary a little from broker to broker. For instance, yesterday I was stopped out of EUR/CHF at 1.5585 at IFX but the same trade I had at FXCM missed being stopped out by some 4 or 5 pips (this was manual trading) and the same happens with the same EA's on the MQ4 platform at different brokers.

Spreading my accounts lets me average things and if one broker begins to consistantly look better I will have to examine why. Another reason is these systems require your system running all the time. If one broker has a major problem it only affects one third of my accounts. I can trade a broker each from 3 x laptops (or get a very big UPS for a PC) and if one laptop goes down , again it is only one of three accounts. Not EVERYTHING.

Have a look at these other forums and see if they help.
Cheers,
Altos

[MadisonFX]

Originally Posted by desperate

Hi,
I've been trading FX for about 1 year now. Both live and demo. I've read hundreds of books, dozens of forum, I've tried plenty of strategies - breakouts, crosses, oscilators, intermarket indicators, volatility based, trend following and counter trend, everything and - nothing works....
I mean there are a lot of strategies you can use when you trade manualy and you can really take a pip or two out of them but the problem is I cannot afford manual trading - I simply have no time. I have problems in my relationship because I spend all my free time for developing another worthless systems. And if the systems were making huge loses I would be so happy - I could just reverse signals, but no - they will produce very small gain or small loss, so inverting signals leads just to a greater loss (because of spread).
I really invested a lot of time and efford in it and I would love to know that this investment is working for me, not against.
I just want to run a automated system on my pc, put it in some corner of my house and have my life back.
So please, tell me - are there any automated systems that can produce a steady gain? That maybe not guarantee you 1000% a year but this small, yat attractive 2-5% monthly?
Just tell me I haven't wasted a year of my life and show me what mistake do I make :/

desperate

Hello,

My firm runs a limited amount of highly profitable automated systems. Your best bet is if you can't create your own, invest in someone elses.

MadFX

[initialsBB]

In the book "Building winning trading systems with TradeStation" there are several mechanical systems that are applied to daily charts, and backtested on approximately 20 years of data (I think it was 1989-2002, but not sure) and they are profitable. But the author also mentions that the system may produce losses for years. So theoretically there are profitable systems, if you are patient enough to wait 1-2 years for profit that is. I was also playing around with neural networks, and i had examples of networks that are consistent losers and consistent winners. I don't know why, but I also tend to be more inclined towards consistent losers, as there are greater chances that good system will become bad than the other way around (bad to become good)

[desperate]

AltosTrader - I've tried almost every single system from strategybuilder and even though some of them are really good for manual trading, they are either bad or extremely bad for automated traiding. I've done really a lot of testing and not on MT4 (which is really poor in backtesting) but using database with excel. Even if they are profitable, equity looks really nasty and the have huge drawdowns. I don;t know about elite section on tsd, maybe I'll try it.

MadisonFX - if I only knew some good systems writen by someone with proven performance I would not hesitate to invest.

initialsBB - I haven't read this book, I admit. But look at daily bars - you don't need any wise gurus, book or advanced systems to be profitable - just aply EMA, let's say 100 on daily bars + trailing stop. Impresive? try to make it more impresive - try a little bit optimising. More impresing? Sure, the best thing we can do now is publish a book . maybe it is some kind of solution (bothh book and EMA on daily bars). Just no guarantee that it will work. But maybe...

[Forex618]

Originally Posted by desperate

MadisonFX - if I only knew some good systems writen by someone with proven performance I would not hesitate to invest..

This is the cry of many traders, even investment banks. I have personal trading experience with a fairly significant European bank, who employed me as a prop. trader. They had also bought a very expensive system which had been running for a well known pension fund (apparently) succesfully for a number of years. After buying it for several million dollars (the right to the signals, not the system!), the first several months they ran this system on their own (huge sums of) money (black box, weekly trades) it was down by 10%. This is fact - they showed me the signals and results. To say the least, that was pretty uncomfortable for them, considering my own trading for them was at 0.5% leverage, with a 2% drawdown tolerance. My point is that "robot" trading systems are rarely, if ever, profitable for more than a relatively short time. The market changes too often and too significantly for a computer in the corner to churn out money year in and year out. If trading was that simple, there would be tens of thousands of mathematicians and computer programmers retiring at the age of 25. I have advanced degrees in math, stats and engineering myself, and came to that conclusion a long time ago. Having said that, discretionary trading has its own serious pitfalls as well. I know all too well about that. The best approach to the markets is with a sensibly structured system, with a discretionary edge. This means no computer sitting in the corner, beating the market year in and year out, but doing a bit of old fashioned hard work.

Hope this helps