Opinion - very successfull EA - $3000 account to $6300 in two weeks (could have been $9000)

That depends on your strategy, if you need a really low spread the results are pretty different.

Thats all i can say without any information, for me personally knowing the maximal drawdown is far more important the the maximum profit.

if you send me your email I will send you the summary ?

I know trading live is different, but what I want to know is in what way is it different and could this difference have an effect on my EA performance ? Very Different. Spreads ... Re-quotes ... Latency ... Broker Freeze ... Losing Connection ... Market Change. Market Change is your biggest enemy. Run your back-test from 2000-2011 and pm me the results.

AND how common is it to create a profitable EA. Very Easy actually. Gets harder the more trades it places, and longer the time life span.

2010, and the winner had a final account balance of @$77,000 from a $10,000 start. Yeah, have you ever seen a winner from a previous year win the following year?

my EA would have won that competition, getting to over £1,000,000 in 12 weeks. Would have...Should have...Could have now. Well it's being hosted again this year. Here's your big chance to rack in the easy 40k.

The reason I am asking is that it seems too good to be true and I am worried I have missed something. No... more likely you fell for the trap. Ask yourself this,

1) Did you use strategy optimizer on more than 10 percent of the back-test period?

2) Does your strategy trade in one direction for prolong periods of time?

3) Does the profit you take in a position out weigh the risk held or willing to hold?

4) Does your Real-Life Bankroll exceed the Max-Drawdown in $$$ vs Back-test Fake Money?

5) If answer to #4 is no. When reducing the lot-size so Bankroll is, are you happy with returns?

I would love to look at the summary send to > bayer234 at g m a i l thanks

I have become fairly sure that when you trade live the trade you put into the market can affect the market in the short term.

also very usful discussion here

1. I havent back tested it, Ive been running it on demo

2. it trades in both directions. Is trading in one direction like that a problem ?

3. the profit does outweigh the risk

4. I have still to check with a broker what the margins are etc and work out money management from there.

5. I dont mind the returns as long as they are positive, or give me a good foundation to improve from.

I couldnt enter the trading contest yet as the code is messy and incomplete, and while the EA enters trades for me and manages them, I have been supervising it, and doing extra while it is working, and as yet I have not been able to code this part, so it is not completely automatic.

I dont know how to work the back tester anyway, whenever I do all I get is that squeeky noise and nothing else, plus my EA isnt ready to work fully automatice yet, Ive only been learning this stuff a short while. Ive ran it successfully a couple of times with EA's I have downloaded, but I think it has worked by chance, and I dont understand the "25%" accuracy thing on it either.

I was surprised it had made so much (fake money) as I have read on forums and other places that the return from forex trading realistically would be much less than what I generated on demo.

1. I havent back tested it, Ive been running it on demo. Then it's not an EA, it's a semi-automated tool.

2. it trades in both directions. Is trading in one direction like that a problem ? EA's that trades in 1-direction does not adopt to change well IMO. They're usually lagging or get's caught thinking the market is still bull when its like 300pips going down. The problem usually becomes worse if these types of system is sitting on losses.

3. the profit does outweigh the risk. So then, whats the risk to reward ratios? or Maximum loss to profit. Whats the average time it takes to hit the profit point?

4. I have still to check with a broker what the margins. You can check that using the Market-Info proprieties. The money management is very important. That's the first thing we usually should do.

5. I dont mind the returns as long as they are positive, or give me a good foundation to improve from. That's a good attitude to have. The other day, I was looking at a trading magazine and the on the top-performers list those big time investors were showing a return of about 20-30% annually. But you projected 12875 % increase in 12 weeks. Like someone said on this forum once and I para-phrase "If you think you can make 100% per month constantly, you must also think everyone else in the business is dumb" something like that.

In Conclusion, don't get me wrong. I really don't care about the performance or strategy you're using nor am I asking for it. I also understand you're asking because you wanna learn and realize something must be off. I know better than to judge if what you're doing is going to work or not. If this semi-automated demo test is working for you, and continues working for you, you may have stumbled upon a great method of trading, or you could be a 1-in-million gifted manual trader.

Either way, if you wanna be non-subjective about your trading. Then write it down and follow it to the letter. IMO this is the advantage writing it into an EA has. Again, nothing wrong with being a subjective manual trader. But from your example above, "ps the reaon I say it could have been $9000 is that I missed £880 dollars while messing with the EA program and then today I turned off the MT4 to go to work and came bac k" the back-tester wouldn't have the luxury of making that mistake. And, if you were running this LIVE assuming it was a fully automated EA, you can replace the example above with a Power outage.

I welcome you to mql4 programming, the learning curve steep. You're learning to program and trade at the same time. Ps... here's my Holy-Grail when I was 1-month into this. I've fell for all the Traps at one point or another. And No, I don't have the perfect system which have all the properties which I outlined but I'm working toward it. Anything less, and I'm not confident going live with it.

I find this forum by trying to find programmers to program my sredegies

I am trading the markets for 25 years.

What i read in this forum is unbelieveble.

Traders that never trade before in they lifes suddenly they find the holly grails,

trading systems with accuracy 90%, programmers they try to fish a holly grail

from the novice traders to be reach up to the next week end.

well i get an idea if your system is so good as you think its not necessary to trade it your self

to be billioner just sell it to Goldman Sachs they are looking for holly grails, and i am sure

you will receive milions

Wake up Guys there are traders which are programmers as well like Ed Seykota who trade the markets for 1/2 centrury and stundent of the legend Richard Dennis (commodities trader)

the systems that he developes according an interview 2 years ago he give to "Stock and commodities" magasine get a max accuracy of 70%

You never going to make money from the markets if you try to fish somme one else system

even if it works simple because you dont know why it works

To get a succes in this industrie you must ask your self and find the answer your self

"WHAT IS THIS THAT MOVES THE MARKETS"??????

insted of spending your time try to find and adopte some novice Gurus trading system spent your

time on the charts and then you will see the picture more clear and then you will understand

the BIG FAT WHY!!

Manage your money, size your position accortincgly, look your charts and go

and Remember " what counts is not the entry but the exit " Van Tharp"

thanks sakis, Im not saying I have found the holy grail, in fact I am questioning that I have missed something as it seems too good. I may have made a mistake somewhere. I have respect for anyone in any industry or profession.

you assume a lot about me and what I think / believe and it is wrong, so please, if you cant answer my question constructively, without reading into it in erroneous ways, with respect, please dont answer at all.

thanks Ubzen

I have pasted the summary below. I half expect some shitty criticism now from other people, but I'm genuinely asking for advice as a newbie, and Im glad you realise that, it makes all the difference. I realise other people work in this industry and they are much more experienced than I will ever be, but I have also read that some people believe everything is encapsulated in the price anyway, so it has to move etc.

The EA is only semiautomated because Im still learning how to program, and to be honest finding a good source to learn from is difficult. I have the ebook and I use the online documentation, and the forum answers, but it is meaning and context that is missing for me. I would like to source some EA's which make use of many aspects of the MQL resource so I can hack and change as I wish, and learning would be quicker. I have spent days solving what would probably seem simple problems to experienced MQL programmers but it seems some people are resentful of helping directly. It slows me down a lot actually but I dont mind, I will rise to the challenge and achieve this, in fact I sort of understand this. I can easily spend 10-12 hours at this in a day and make little progress.

I appreciate your answer, and thanks for the welcome :-). Here is the summary.... I never thought just to paste it in here at first.

the drawdown could be better, but my test on this also included letting the EA run through the night and I lost some when closing and opening trades to test the EA and also I missed some highly profitable trades ( $880 )when I changed the code and the EA stopped working temporarily. This week, had my EA been working perfectly, I reckon the drawdown would have been less and maybe the Gross Profit would be greater by another £2000 or so.

the opening balance is $3000 as it is the lowest I can get on the demo, closest to what I will be using live.