MasterMartingale v1 --- a multi-strategy EA - page 3

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Hi, good work, I think I can see how strategy two is working on the ea, but I have a problem.

The ea is not actually opening any positions for me. It seems to be drawing the bands and doubling the values etc without actually opening any positions.

I'd love to be able to keep track of the pips it is taking, am I doing something wrong?

 
PS. I optimized the V1[1].04 version for the EURUSD (TP=45, SL=60) and USDJPY (TP=50, SL=10) last night for the preceding 2 months, and they've been running for about 8 hours now. Trading mini-lots, I'm up approximately $30 (or 30 pips). Personally, I would be ECSTATIC if I could continually make a 10-20 pip gain per day, on average. That would be amazing!

The strategy is basically "pick a profit" and each time the system successfully cycles through, you win that much money. The ultimate limit on how much you can make each day is based on how much you can loose. If you trade 0.1 lots, and you have a 4 phase system, then you loose 0.1 0.2 and 0.4 lots in order to make your 0.1 lots and recoup losses on the 4th phase. Eventually, you will loose this 4th phase. If you start off with an even money bet (you have even odds) then the odds of you loosing that money are 1 out of 2^4 or 1:16. The broker has "house odds" with the spread. What tends to happen is that you win a lot over the short term, and then you loose a huge chunk.

Long term, you win or loose equal to the statistical advantage including spread. Martingale based strategies are a great way of turning over a ton of lots and turning a 51% advantage into a consistent money maker, with a few bad days here and there. The only way you can win with Martingale and under 50% advantage is to walk out of the casino when you are ahead.

 
stevenmclachlan:
Hi, good work, I think I can see how strategy two is working on the ea, but I have a problem.

The ea is not actually opening any positions for me. It seems to be drawing the bands and doubling the values etc without actually opening any positions.

I'd love to be able to keep track of the pips it is taking, am I doing something wrong?

Assuming that you've got the EA set up correctly and you're seeing a smiley face in the upper right corner, it may be an issue with the lot sizing. By default, MasterMartingale has Lots set to 0.01, and that works fine for brokers Spencer, who accept trades that small. If you're using NorthFinance, though, you need to set Lots to at least 0.1, or your trades will simply be ignored. Bottom line: make sure that the trade sizes you're using are acceptable by your broker.

 
dcraig:
With respect to the other new option, of allowing losing trades to be kept open as with Terminator, I personally don't think that's something that should be used. My rationale is that keeping a losing trade open simply reducing the profit of the alternate trade that has been opened. After all, the "losing" trade is losing, therefore there is no sense to allow it to continue to lose money. If the market direction changes again, then the market order will change and double again (or some other multiple now that we have that option)....

The benefit of multiple trade mode is that it can significantly increase your profits. With Strategy 1, if you use a TP of 40 and a SL of 20 (like the defaults in Terminator), then your two largest trades will close in profits, the third largest will break even and you'll only lose on the smaller trades. Here's how it breaks down:

If you're buying into a downtrend and you go six levels deep (TP=40, SL=20), then you're sixth trade reaches TP, look at the comparison..

___________Single trade___________Multi trade

1st trade_____-20____________________-60

2nd trade_____-40____________________-80

3rd trade_____-80____________________-80

4th trade_____-160___________________0

5th trade_____-320___________________+320

6th trade_____+1280__________________+1280

Total_________+660___________________+1380

So you see there's more than twice the profit when Multi trade mode is used, though there's also twice the margin used, and so the risk is significantly greater.

 

One quick note on Strategy 2: I've noticed by using Multi trade mode that it's not placing the progressive orders where I'd intended it to. Instead of the buy orders all being at one spot and the sell orders all being at another spot (by default, 10 pips below the buys), it's often missing the desired spot by as many as five pips...

should be -10, +10, -10, +10

instead it's -9, +5, -7, +9

There's no pattern to the price misses, so it may just be slippage (though slippage is set to maximum 3...) but so far it's in profit, so I just wanted to mention this as something to be aware of...

 
daraknor:
The strategy is basically "pick a profit" and each time the system successfully cycles through, you win that much money. The ultimate limit on how much you can make each day is based on how much you can loose. If you trade 0.1 lots, and you have a 4 phase system, then you loose 0.1 0.2 and 0.4 lots in order to make your 0.1 lots and recoup losses on the 4th phase. Eventually, you will loose this 4th phase. If you start off with an even money bet (you have even odds) then the odds of you loosing that money are 1 out of 2^4 or 1:16. The broker has "house odds" with the spread. What tends to happen is that you win a lot over the short term, and then you loose a huge chunk. Long term, you win or loose equal to the statistical advantage including spread. Martingale based strategies are a great way of turning over a ton of lots and turning a 51% advantage into a consistent money maker, with a few bad days here and there. The only way you can win with Martingale and under 50% advantage is to walk out of the casino when you are ahead.

So are you basically saying that this type of EA is a bad idea over the long term? Or are you saying that one can win long-term only IF you can increase your "advantage" to greater than 50%? (Not exactly sure what you mean by 'advantage'). If the latter, do you think that an appropriate indicator, used in conjunction with mode 3 in this EA, would increase the odds such that the EA could be a winner long-term?

Please clarify.

Thanks.

Doug

 

Yep, you were right Ztrader. Alapari doesn't allow you to use lots of size .01

 

Hi Ztrader, I am testing the strategy 2 with multiple trades and I also am getting subsequent trades over a range of prices.

I dont think it is slippage, I have been watching the price averaging around 3 to 4 pips below where it should have taken a sell trade and it has been around that price for a couple of hours.

Any thoughts?

 

Well, I've been forward testing in strategy 2. The ea has had a lot of oppurtunities to profit, and has been trading a lot. But overall my account is down quite a bit.

I noticed it doesn't seem to keep doubling, I think it stops at about level 5. Sometimes it seems to stop for no real reason (or none that I can see).

There are some bugs here....

I think this is a potential winner, I'll try to figure out exactly what is causing these errors (if I can) and will post here.

 
waltini:
Hi Ztrader, I am testing the strategy 2 with multiple trades and I also am getting subsequent trades over a range of prices.

I dont think it is slippage, I have been watching the price averaging around 3 to 4 pips below where it should have taken a sell trade and it has been around that price for a couple of hours.

Any thoughts?

No, I'm not sure what could cause this other than slippage. The Target and Bailout values don't change during a progression, and since those are what determine the trade points, they should all be the same. I'll have to look more closely at the code and see if I can find any cause for this anomaly. Oh, for the comprehensive debugging ability of VB....

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