Is It Even Possible to Create Something Profitable for the 5 Min Timeframe?
Hey mate yes it is totally possible to create a system that's profitable on 5 minutes chart.
In fact your "profitable" 1 hour chart strategy SHOULD work on 5 minutes chart too, just treat the 5 minutes chart as 1 hour chart, they look similar after all.
Reading your post, I find you have mentioned too many numbers, indicators, variables etc. To make money you need something simple.
Hey mate yes it is totally possible to create a system that's profitable on 5 minutes chart.
In fact your "profitable" 1 hour chart strategy SHOULD work on 5 minutes chart too, just treat the 5 minutes chart as 1 hour chart, they look similar after all.
Reading your post, I find you have mentioned too many numbers, indicators, variables etc. To make money you need something simple.
except that my 1 hour strategies don't work on 5 min because there is too much noise and too many trades. They don't even work on 15 min charts but get okay results on 30 min
What is sure is that you can't make a strategy that works exactly the same on all timeframes: they are all different and lower timeframes are more noisy than highers, it's quiet normal and obvious.
I think you should quit to think and shape your strategies strictly related to a specific timeframe only. In my personal opinion no one of them is profitable on its own, except rare case.
Usually, well done and profitable strategies uses multiple timeframes, generally speaking: higher timeframes for catching the market scenario, lower timeframes to make an accurate entry.
What is sure is that you can't make a strategy that works exactly the same on all timeframes: they are all different and lower timeframes are more noisy than highers, it's quiet normal and obvious.
I think you should quit to think and shape your strategies strictly related to a specific timeframe only. In my personal opinion no one of them is profitable on its own, except rare case.
Usually, well done and profitable strategies uses multiple timeframes, generally speaking: higher timeframes for catching the market scenario, lower timeframes to make an accurate entry.
It is possible, but your risk management has to be tailored to M5. The fact is that you will have many losses on M5, but it's ok if you lose less than you win (in scalping). Then long term trades are a different story, if you would look at the trend on higher timeframes and enter on the minute timeframes
It's possible but I'd have to ask: why do you care? If you can make a profit using any other time frame, then so be it. Go make your money. Why does this have to happen on a 5-minute chart?
Say I use a daily chart with a TP/SL of 100 pips and a 1 pip spread, while you use a 5 minute chart with a TP/SL of 5 pips and the same 1 pip spread. I'm spending 1% on fees while you spend 20% on fees.
I don't know about you, but I wouldn't be so concerned with working harder for less money.
But you might think "yeah but on the 5 minute I can catch all the up and down movements!" ... first, don't kid yourself, it's not going to happen like that. And even if it did, it's simpler to get more funding than it is to trade more. If I double my funding compared to you, it's not going to matter how many 5-minute trades you pull off. I'm still far more likely to end up with more money in my pocket when it's all said and done.
It's possible but I'd have to ask: why do you care? If you can make a profit using any other time frame, then so be it. Go make your money. Why does this have to happen on a 5-minute chart?
Say I use a daily chart with a TP/SL of 100 pips and a 1 pip spread, while you use a 5 minute chart with a TP/SL of 5 pips and the same 1 pip spread. I'm spending 1% on fees while you spend 20% on fees.
I don't know about you, but I wouldn't be so concerned with working harder for less money.
But you might think "yeah but on the 5 minute I can catch all the up and down movements!" ... first, don't kid yourself, it's not going to happen like that. And even if it did, it's simpler to get more funding than it is to trade more. If I double my funding compared to you, it's not going to matter how many 5-minute trades you pull off. I'm still far more likely to end up with more money in my pocket when it's all said and done.
Mainly coz I want a higher sample sizes of trades for optimization/back testing, but then again its basically all meaningless if its unprofitable anyway. Also things like swap etc still eat costs on the daily chart and since I set tp/sl based on a multiplier of the ATR I could always increase it to get the same effect. Idk I just want to make something profitable on the M5 but seem unable to do so.
Mainly coz I want a higher sample sizes of trades for optimization/back testing, but then again its basically all meaningless if its unprofitable anyway. Also things like swap etc still eat costs on the daily chart and since I set tp/sl based on a multiplier of the ATR I could always increase it to get the same effect. Idk I just want to make something profitable on the M5 but seem unable to do so.
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Title says it all. I've been through a lot with EA coding and can do multi symbol stuff, custom performance metrics (Calmar Ratio, Avg Weekly R multiple, etc), news filtering. Yet I have never been able to create any profitable system on the 5 min timeframe. The way I build EAs might be affecting this but I wanted to know everyone's thoughts/experience with building indicator based systems for the five min. I build EAs this way: 1. Determine premise (Trend following or mean reversion) 2. Select indicators based off this. I usually use custom indicators like KAMA, Aroon, any of John Ehlers's stuff 3. Copy and paste my multi symbol template in and modify it to work with the indicators. 4. Determine any additional rules like only trade once per trend or something similar 5. Walk forward optimize (3 parameters max & as many symbols as possible coz I watched the darwinex videos)
So far I have only ever been able to create stable and profitable trend following strategies on the 1 hour timeframe and I haven't been able to create any profitable mean reversion strategies that don't bite the dust in out of sample testing. Could it be because I set my TP and SL risk to reward based off the ATR? Usually I use a 2:2 RR and my most stable trend following strategies on the 1 hour gets a Calmar ratio of around 3.5 in sample but usually degrades to somewhere between 2.0-2.5 in out of sample testing (and so the win rate also decreases from around 55% to 52% normally).
Usually I have my EAs only trade once per trend with a fixed RR. Is this a bad choice? Should I upgrade to 4 parameters with a 3 or 4 RR instead of 2 and just consider them different systems entirely? I don't use trailing stops and I don't scale out trades because I don't want potentially want to overfit and I'm not sure how reliable my back testing data (dukascopy) is for trailing stops. I'm thinking for 5 min algos probably the best thing to do is have like a 5:5 RR and only limit it to 1-2 trades per day and have them scale out and do the intraday equity flow thing in the darwinex videos.
But anyway is it actually possible to build profitable algos on the 5 min based off indicator? Please if anybody has any advice to share at least advice is free lol.
EDIT: I should also note that I don't use exit indicators or anything similar besides and time filter to close out trades and news filters. Should it be easier to create 5 min timeframe algos or am I just missing something?