deserteagle
Active member
- Messages
- 205
- Likes
- 1
Today, buy 1,59094 already closed at BE - Alpari UK
Congratulations on your sucess.
May I ask if this is a live account? The reason I ask is that the concept of FMT is far from new and is a short term break out strategy. the settings you guys have would seem to me that you are moving from a breakout to a trend following strategy, am I worng?
Agree that the strategy seems to have stalled, I am down this month as most are and last month was not good either.
Hopefully, that does not mean the strategy is flawed, hopefully not anyway.
For the time being I am sticking to the basic settings.
Of course, am very open to advice/suggestions to fine tune and return the account to profit.
Yes, am trading live.
Would be nice to see input from Mark to these latest developments....
Good luck to all
deserteagle
Active member
- Messages
- 205
- Likes
- 1
Yes, I'm using a live account, I use these parameters following the FMT signal only, in fact I use EA 4.1 and never do manual adjustments.
What I see most of the people follow the standard setting just because Mark recommendation, I'm no telling it is wrong, but now maybe the market has changed, and a new setting is required, therefore before thinking FMT is over, please make a lot of backtesting/optimization processes, I'm sure you can find a new profitable set for the new conditions. I think FMT strategy is a great opportunity to get some pips from the market, it is just we should find the right rules to do it.
Regards
I don't see why you would think this a short term break-out strategy. Highs, lows, and/or trends lines do not have anything to do with the system.
Sorry to be blunt, but if you think that this is a break-out strategy, please limit your trading to a demo account until you have a better understanding of the markets.
Alpari US long at 1.59094 closed at BE at Alpari. Counting the spread, looks like 35 TP setting missed by 1.6 pips.
Same with SLM (Smart Live Markets), came very close to hitting 35 pip target, but reversed and stopped at break-even
wiseambitions
Established member
- Messages
- 764
- Likes
- 7
Interesting, I've found the following to be the case:
Of the last 50 trades, (arising since end of October). At my own settings 28/40
The number of Longs won 15 lost 16
The number of Shorts won 12 lost 7
I know the last couple months have been disastrous, however in view of the above information, which indicates a bias towards the £ falling in the FMT trading time zone should we perhaps consider a lower TP for Long trades, or not even trade them?
(Even though I know today WAS a long trade and those who didn't get stopped at B/E would have taken profit up to 50 or more pips).
13.15GMT information updated:
Of the last 100 trades, 59 were signalled long, 37 won 22 Lost
41 were signalled short, 31 won, only 10 lost
Overall winning % 68%
longs won, 62.7%
shorts won 75.6%
Seems to confirm the hypothesis
Last edited:
Concerning all the talk about lower TP's: The earlier post about 7 TP and 20 SL intrigued me, so I did some simple backtesting of 2010, and, separately, 12/2010-today. I'm now using 20 TP and 20 SL, no BE. I've also increased risk to 5%. Today it worked for me, while others just missed the 35 TP, and hit BE. If conditions change I may go back to original 35TP/40SL/20BE+5. But for now, it's nice to see a profit for a change.:clap:
there is no basis for saying one year is the longest/best estimation of trading system profitability.
the real question is: When should you stop trading a system? most people stop trading a long-term profitable trading system much too early due to the psychological pressure of a streak of losses.
the answer to the real question is that you stop trading a system when it hits its worst case drawdown, and not before.
first you backtest with clean data nine or ten years back and do monte carlo simulations. this will provide much better information that a year of forward testing (don't trust any of the commercial $97 EAs just because they are forward testing on a live account and have good FPA reviews). then you check to see if your forward testing is congruent with your backtesting.
from your back test you determine the historical drawdown. then you check to see if average compounded return divided by drawdown is in the range of 1:2 to 2:1 (similar to barclayhedge funds). if so, you may have a long-term profitable strategy.
you keep trading until you reach the worst case drawdown which is twice the historical drawdown. otherwise you risk trading a losing strategy or stopping too soon the trading of a long-term profitable strategy.
FMT needs a ten-year back test which will cover the unprofitable years - this is the only way to answer the real question of "Has my strategy gone bad forever or will it come back any day now?"
as for china, that is one fundamental variable among many thousands. china (and the eurozone changes, and the us debt, and the weather, and peak oil, and 2012, and...) could possibly make FMT work better.
one just doesn't know, so the key (mentioned above) is to be diversified.
and the other key is to not give up too soon or keep trading too long.
I think going for a smaller TP or a higher SL. Though this idea entails a higher risk/reward ratio. But on the other hand, the SL's have taken all of the profits.
Have you backtested FMT yet? If so, what did you conclude?
Thanks wiseambitions for all the analysis and comments. So what we can conclude with your interesting test is that the optimal TP's for long (or short) are different. I was wondering whether you or someone else could possibly find these optimal short/long TP values with a backtest?
Not sure if this was discussed earlier - since 'start time' is such an important piece to this puzzle, how can we accommodate for this, as we need to factor in daylight savings? Also, the rules to calculate were changed recently, how can we include this fact in backtesting as well? It will be interesting. We probably have to chunk up time over various time periods etc over these years. So we simply can't say start-date equals 1/1/2000 and end date equal December 2010 and run 1 iteration. Any simpler way to do this?
wiseambitions
Established member
- Messages
- 764
- Likes
- 7
Me too, short opened at 06.30 GMT 1.5902
Glad I didn't start at 06.00 when it was 1.5887 as it went up a bit after my trade opened as well.
Good luck
Tenapenny
Experienced member
- Messages
- 1,005
- Likes
- 46
