How many people here use price action instead of indicators in their EAs? - page 2

I will see if I have that much data. If I optimized a year I could have the same results. I think forward testing or any period that the EA hasn't been optimized with is a real test for an EA.

If I optimized a year I could have the same results. Why would anyone wanna see more curve fitted results?

I think forward testing or any period that the EA hasn't been optimized with is a real test for an EA. Yea, so if you really wanna show something, show a back-test of non-optimized periods. Or Live results of 3+ months will do as well. Otherwise its just another eye-candy equity curve :)

ubzen!!!!!!! Thank you so much for the Bollinger Bounce program back in April! I've been dissecting and reconstructing it with every new strategy I devise. You were the biggest help ever. I have concluded that strategy is good for channels and it's true what you said: Needed a way to find trends. So I coupled a 24 period bollinger band with a 144 period moving average on H1 charts and guess what?

The excel spreadsheet I did up last night yielded about the same metrics as the test results posted in this thread. Off by about 6%...

Basically, I'm looking at the hourly prices against a daily average AND a weekly average. When the daily and weekly trends are up, I go long until one of them turns down. When the opposite is true, I go short until one of them turns up. If the weekly movement does not exceed 20 points per hour, I treat it as a channel and do a modified bollinger bounce thing similar to the ARDAM program you sent me, but I only go long if the bollinger bands are below the weekly average or short if they are above it.

It yielded about +$220 per trade lot and I found 15 trades in two months. This method also seems to be very good at finding BIG trends. If I factor in the massive $4,000 gain I pulled out of August's charts for USDCAD, it's more like $650 per trade, but I highly doubt that happens every two months so I average-skewed that one result to be conservative.

Any ways - just came out to check the boards before I go to work programming this thing. Got excited by this guy's results because they're almost exactly like mine, but faster. Wouldn't mind getting my hands on THAT code...

@ubzen - I can confirm that the strategy works as I use it to trade on my live account. If I were to post a back tested chart with results showing that it is making money that would not prove anything either - as I could have "fixed" the chart. Really I don't feel compelled to bullshit here as it has no value to me to do so. I just want to hear what everyone has to say about the strategy.

I can honestly say I have made a lot more money trading with forex using my EAs that I have written but they all have one fundamental floor - none so far have been able to cope eloquently with market change. Maybe it's because I should be looking for some kind of confirmation bar sequence - I am not sure yet.

@trivates: I'm really happy that you have something working for you :)

@mbirrell: Your results are incredible. If you're getting results like that in your manual trading then good for ya and I hope it continue. I basically responded with what I think about the strategy. I pointed out the drawbacks of such a result and potential pitfalls. Forward testing Live could be time consuming and expensive (if real account), while some of these questions you can answer by just downloading more data.

As for the ever elusive Market Change breaking EA, I think I'll start a thread to test different technique's against market changes and maybe we could finally lay this one to rest.

Nial Fuller preaches price action trading constantly. He goes further to say that computerized trading teaches us only one fundamental lesson:

It is best to trade without emotion. Trouble is, computers cannot interpret emotion due to their emotionless nature and humans are prone to making emotional decisions. Marrying the two benefits seems to be the most difficult task any trader can expect to undertake.

I'm going to try one last indicator-based strategy in an EA before I give up on indicators altogether and study price action more closely. If there is truth to price action as a viable method of trading then there are mathematics therein that can be taught to a computer. The only question is "how"?

There are enough experienced coders out here to make it possible, I'm sure.

Indicators? What are indicators? Ive tried them, and I always get high DDs. Most the the systems Ive found that work/have potential are bar based comparisons. If you want to call that "price action" ok be my guest. In the end theres no difference only categories. I can represent any Price Action model in an Indicator. What youre talking about is A BIAS. Just develop a Price Action Indi and give it a clever name and you have a new "Technical Indicator" for the world to marvel at.

When I first encountered the term Price Action, the person using the term found it surprising that I've been learning forex for about a year and didn't know what price action was. Anyways, then he tried to explain that Price Action is not using Indicators. He said like Support & Resistance, I said I know what that is. He said Candle-Sticks, I said I know what that is, I know em as Japanese candlesticks. He said stuff like Divergence and Convergence, again I had the I'm familiar response. He said Heads-&-Shoulders, Triangles, Flags, Pendants and I said I know those so I guess I know Price Action then :).

Then I said wait a second, how do you spot Divergence without the use of a Indicator? I cant remember if he answered the question good enough for me. Anyways, I'm not a big fan of subjective approaches within EA's. One mans support and resistance, trend line, head-and-shoulders, doji is different for every trader. However most indicators return a number. If someone wants to make an argument for manual trading because of it's subjective nature, go ahead, I'm not gonna touch that subject again within this thread.

One price action I've used within an EA is counting the number of Bull vs Bears Bars. Imo: Support and Resistance are easy to code, but trend-lines can be more challenging. Head-&-Shoulders and Combinations of Jp CandleSticks can be even more challenging for novice codes to implement within an EA. But this is mostly due to the fact that Price-Action is Subjective.

BTW any indicator/oscillator or whatever is based on price action

I don't program my EA to use Bar patterns, the EA discovers them when I optimize it. Once the EA has finished searching for patterns I put those patterns into the EA to use in trade mode. The main problem with this approach is that patterns change so you are stuck with optimizing on a very regular basis.