Forex Leader

Articles 1 to 17

2011-05-17T16:17:00.001-04:00

March 21, 2009

Hello and welcome to the Forex Leader trading strategy on Blogspot.com,

For starters, I just want to point out that this isn’t a blog per se, since blogs are presented with the latest information first and go backwards in time, and because I’m an ol’ lady (well not THAT old!) I’m used to the other way around and it bugs me to have to search backwards to find the “beginning” of the story. So my own blog is constructed the old fashioned way, but feel free to go directly to the latest postings using the links.

Trading forex is easy if you have a guide. But forex trading is extremely difficult (and costly) if you don’t have one – and I should know because I started alone about 3 years ago. Yuppers, I lost money, which other traders call “tuition fee”, and which I call, well, lost money. But my account didn’t go all the way to zero. I halted the whole thing at some draw-down point and took some time to reflect on the situation.

I’m happy to say that I am now a successful trader and this “blog” was created with the intention of helping other traders not make my mistakes. I’m here as a teacher, which is my real life profession, amongst others.

What is the Forex Leader trading strategy? Well, simply put, all you need to do is to follow the leader because it shows you the way. The system is based on 2 things:

1 - Identifying if markets are Ranging or Trending based on 2 observation platforms

2 - Taking trades accordingly based on the one that’s leading

Before I continue, if you’re asking yourself “What’s Forex, anyway?”, you won’t understand the rest. Go to Babypips first and click on the School link. You’ll get all the basics there.

You will need to get informed and do your basic work – I’ve got 3 years behind me of trading, studying, observing, testing, calculating, optimizing, etc. many systems and countless intensive hours of work related to trading. And I don’t want to get into the details of how one gets started, but rather focus of how to successfully have a source of revenue from this wonderful but rather difficultly grasped world of currency trading.

In conclusion, I arranged my “blogging” into short articles which have a theme and are sorted by date. So you can read by interest or in a chronological fashion (from beginning to end) or backwards or go directly to the latest post. But I strongly suggest you at least read the first three articles as they outline how I trade. Not doing so will result in you not understanding what I’m talking about in later posts.

I do my very best to answer all emails, but sometimes it might take a while as it can be overwhelming.

Ok, so now what? Well, let’s make some money!

Go to Article 2 (this blog is imported from somewhere else, hence the strange format)

Article 2 - March 22, 2009

Before I get into details, a picture is worth……. So here’s what my screen looks like upon markets opening on Sunday evening at 18:00 tonight (EST, summer time). My broker is in Europe so the times you see are +5 hours. .

First thing I’d like you to look at: gaps. Again, we’ve got major gaps and this has been going on for several months now. Question to ask yourself – should you close your trades on Fridays when markets close or not? Will the gaps be in your favour on Sunday or not? Will the gaps fill (they seem to on a regular basis, but who knows?)

Second thing I want you to notice is I trade 10 pairs. Why these 10? I’ll explain later.

Third, I trade mini lots (10,000 units or 0.1 lots). So pips are worth about 1$. For example, EURUSD has made over 900 pips since March 11 (8 trading days ago). And all pairs except GBPCHF are positive. Question for you: do you think the markets are currently trending or ranging?

Go to article 3

Article 3

I will summarize 3 years of hair pulling, rashes, frustration with these 2 words I hate but have to live with: Trending, Ranging.

Here’s why I hate them. Because upon developing and refining my ranging systems,for instance, there would always be a “period” following excellent profit when things went completely crazy and major drawdown occurred with me staring at my screen “telling” the pairs, “You can’t go down anymore!(or up, depending). You just can’t” only to find they kept doing what they were doing. Or other periods (when I would develop a trending system based on current conditions) and the pairs would disobey the trending rules and range and range and hit my stoplosses.

I then once came upon a post in a forum that gave me a half AHA moment. The guy said: when markets are trending, use moving averages and when markets are ranging, use oscillators.

OK so I now understood what I had been doing. When developing different systems, I looked at the market behaviour and saw price action patterns that I would optimize. But the problem is the behaviour of the markets change. So I needed a Super Indicator which would tell me WHEN markets were TRENDING and when they were RANGING.

But I never found it.

However, I did find the next best thing, and it’s a simple, almost stupid thing.

Go to article 4

Article 4

We’re almost done with the introductory articles. To make a long story short, before I understood why I was having good periods followed by draw-down, I hadn’t understood the (now totally obvious) fact that markets change from one state to the other. Now I do. And now I need to know when to switch. I have 2 excellent systems for both behaviours and need to know when to trade one or the other. The moment I found it was when I started to be consistently profitable. In a nutshell:

1) Set up the 2 systems on 2 separate MT4 platforms and observe what the pairs are doing on both systems. Decide if markets are currently ranging or trending after a bit of observation and fire off which-ever system is in the right direction on your “real” account (demo is preferable in the beginning to get a feel).

2) From experience (it’s only been 3 years, so beware, or do some visual back-tests) some months tend to trend more, others to range more. So, generally speaking keep this in mind and be on your toes for when the pairs give you the cue:

Ranging months and Trending months

Alright, the general stuff is explained. Now for the details.

Go to article 5

Article 5

Look at the pic in the first post and you’ll see the 10 pairs I trade. Download a (free) version of MT4 (which is a trading platform), and install two instances on your computer (2 different directories). Load a graph of each of the pairs, set them to 1H time frame (TF). Download the Expert Advisor along with the instructions and save them where appropriate (all is explained in detail in the instructions file). Also available are the settings (optimizations) for each pair with their appropriate templates and set files (I explain what these are in detail) but basically they’ll make your life easier because all you need to do is to copy the files in the right places and start up MT4 and you’ll be ready to trade the 10 pairs with everything you need in front of you and each EA set to the optimized parameters for each pair, for the 2 systems. Here are the available files:

MACrossEA - The Expert Advisor
Set-up instructions - All the instructions in detail

ForexLeaderOpti.zip
- Contains: Templates (.tpl) for the 10 pairs and Optimized parameters (.set) for Trending and Ranging

So within half an hour, you’ll be ready to trade. But before, read on a bit.

The EA is based on 2 moving averages crossing. You could basically use any EA that has these functions, and there are many floating around in cyberspace. I personally like this one because it has a lot of parameters which can be optimized.

I have put much work into optimizing these parameters – months and months. Keep in mind you’ll be trading 10 different pairs, each with different MA settings, Stop Losses, TPs etc. If you don’t want to use my optimizations, don’t. You can still trade the system using the EA and follow the blog of course. And do the testing (with the Strategy Tester) yourself. But be warned, these take huge amounts of machine-time and be ready to cross-test each parameter which will take at least 2-3 months if you’re an experienced tester. I tested 28 different pairs and present here the 10 with the best results.

Back to the graphs, as I’m writing this, the gap thing is still working (gaps are currently filling) and this could be an interesting path to follow as a scalping method, as I’ve observed they almost always do lately. But that’s for another blog. Let’s see what happens when the Asian session opens in 30 minutes (20:00 EST summer time). That’s the next article.

Go to article 6

Article 6

It’s currently 4 hours since markets opened and 2 hours since Asian session opened. Look at the pic to see where the trades are in relation to where they were.

I guess there would have been (again) good gap scalping opportunities for those trading manually. But I prefer automatic trading because it takes out my emotions from the equation, which is an excellent thing. All pairs are doing great as you can see, so I’ll be off to enjoy life with my husband and dog and let the EAs manage my trades until tomorrow morning. See you then!

Go to article 7

Article 7 - March 23, 2009

Things are looking quite good. We have 2 closed trades since yesterday:

And here is what things look like this evening at 9pm, an hour after Asian session started:

So if you were wondering if you got the right answer to the previous question, well YES we are currently in a trending market and the screenshot you’re looking at is my “trending” version of the system (this is March right?). Things are looking quite good but we need to focus on the upcoming weeks to secure this capital.

Here’s what I intend to do next Friday (March 27) and why:

Go to article 8

Article 8 - March 24, 2009

End of March - Traditionally (at least for the last 3 years) we have seen April, May and June as ranging months. Doesn’t mean it’ll be the same this year of course. There are no guarantees in forex trading. And especially now, times are really peculiar, even weird at times in terms of the financial CRISIS and whatnot. But I’ll be sticking to my plan. On Friday, I’ll close all trades which emerged from the trending system and have a “wait and see” week between Sunday March 29 and Friday April 1st. Sometimes you need to be on the sidelines. I’ll continue my observations in demo-mode on both of my observation accounts, but will not take any live trades. My hunch is that week will show stabilization and will further my confidence in starting April in ranging mode. Let’s see how it plays out.

For the time being, I’ll keep you posted on this week’s progress every day. See you tomorrow!

Go to article 9

Article 9 - March 25, 2009

Yesterday was a great trading day. Hope you followed along and were part of it. I just love getting up in the morning and, coffee in hand, eyes barely open, click to shake my screensaver off and see the results. Nothing like it, I’ll tell you. I just love EAs.

Our GBPAUD trade (our hero for the week) finally crossed up and brought in a nice and even +900. This trade was taken late in the day on March 6 so it trended during 12 trading days. Here is the full screen just before it closed at 5pm.

We also had a small EURUSD loss of -42 pips but another trade was immediately entered and it’s currently + 116 as you can see below.

These are the open trades for the moment. Let’s see how things unfold.

Go to article 10

Article 10 - March 26, 2009

Again, another nice trading day for which we got 10 closed trades (see below) for a total p/l of $1,089.25 CAD (the numbers you see are in Canadian dollars because that’s the currency I trade in and I am unable to show the pip value (like in the open trades screenshots you see) because I simply don’t know how in MT4 or even if it’s possible. But anyway, you get a rough idea of the pipeage as some are worth a bit less than 1 and some a bit more.

And here is where things stood at 5pm in terms of open trades with about +175 pips up.

And today was a good one as well. I’m not sure about the direction for next week, as I mentioned, my hunch is things are going to calm down a bit and start ranging, but who knows, I might be wrong (!) and we could have another glorious trending week, anything is possible in Forex, I’m sure you’ll agree. But experience (and head banging on the wall) has shown me that it’s better safe than sorry and not being in a trade because you chose to be prudent is not LOSING. Get that into your head. I hear so many people either not taking a trade (based on their system) or taking some profit “early” and then crying over the lost pips they’re not getting because they got out. They are not lost ok? What is a real loss is a closed trade you took and which got stopped out or that you manually terminated at a loss. Take some small profit (profit is profit) early and put that into your pocket, if you’re trading manually. Whatever happens afterwards doesn’t matter. What I like about EAs is that I don’t need to make a decision when to exit a trade, it’s done automatically. The amount I get is the potential it had when it entered. If it gives 10 pips, fine. 100 even better. Minus 60, it’s part of the game. As long as it consistently has a profit factor above 1, you’re making money.

Today (Thursday) is almost over and tomorrow is Friday. I won’t be live trading next week, but I will follow my ranging system and show you how it’s going. If it’s going bad, well that means March still had 1 week of trending left and I was wrong. Anyway, we’ll see. Before I started this blog, February was ranging and made excellent pips. So don’t think that a ranging market means small profits, it doesn’t and you’ll see - I hope April and May are similar. And I hope you get a part of the action.

One last thing about the two systems I thought I’d mention here for those who haven’t downloaded the optimizations. The trending system is the primary system. It has values for MAs optimized for each pair and a stop loss optimized for each pair and trades are taken after a cross occurs (on the next bar). The “opposite” system or ranging system is exactly the same, except that trades are taken in the opposite direction AND each pair also has a TP. So, primary system has no TP – we let the trades run as much as their destiny wants them. The secondary system has TPs which tend to coincide with their maximal capacity before they reverse.

Good. I wanted this to be clear so that you understand the difference in the two systems.

Tomorrow I’ll be wrapping up this first week and hope you’ll drop by to see the final results.

Go to article 11

Article 11 - March 27, 2009

Well, it’s now a few minutes after markets closed. As anticipated, some of the pairs are starting to show they’re losing steam in terms of trending. Since yesterday, we’ve had some losses which, fortunately, are small in comparison to the gains:

As you can see, EURGBP, for instance (4th trade and last two) is definitely not in a trending mode anymore. So the pairs are showing us the direction forward, in a way. I’ll admit it took me a long time to realize that market behaviour changes from period to period, as I was always focussed on just one direction and failed to adapt when things turned around. That’s when the profits would melt and I would have a shocking look on my face as I stared at the pairs on my screen.

The trick is to have an edge, you see, and with this system, we get a warning signal that the trending seems to be over. What we need to do, then, is switch the brain to the other way of thinking and switch to the ranging system.

As I said, I think next week won’t move much, but the week after that should see nice ranges in almost all pairs. Experience has shown that my good friend, GBPJPY is not a good ranger, however. The best way to trade that pair is to let it do its thing in trending markets and put it to sleep in ranging times. So if we get confirmation next week that ranging mode is now ON, I’ll switch to the second system but will not include GBPJPY in my live trades. I’ll keep it for observation purposes and hope to show you the extent to which it doesn’t tend to range well. This pair is a hero trender.

As for now, I closed all my live trades, as mentioned earlier and shall be on the sidelines next week. But I kept the observation account alive and here is what the trades look like after market close:

The open trades are up at +1090 pips (I closed out at a bit under this at 1004 pips in my live account). You can see that the only negative trade is, again, EURGBP at -23.

So for the month, we have a positive p/l which definitely feels good. I’ll compile my numbers and post a graph later on. For now, manage your profits wisely and don’t get greedy. Transfer the money where it’s safe and makes a bit of interest (or whatever you like). Don’t start thinking you’ll increase the lots. We won’t be doing this at this time. It all depends on your capital, of course, but I’ll be sticking to 0.1 lots because that what makes sense in my case for the time being.

Go to article 12

Article 12 - March 28, 2009 – Saturday morning

I’ve compiled my numbers since the beginning of March and I’m posting the results below. From March 1 to 11th, I was using the ranging system because although we were at the beginning of March, the pairs showed no indication of trending just yet, so I stuck with my February approach and continued on until the middle of the second week (March 11) when the trending took off. At this point, I was just a bit over $1000 in profit. You can see I had some draw-down after the midpoint because I closed out all trades still open on the ranging system and switched to the trending one.

After I closed out all trades yesterday, as planned, the account is just a bit over 5K in profit. I won’t be increasing the lot size nor will I add more pairs. I’ll be transferring the profit to my bank account and restart with my same balance and set-up in a week’s time.

I’ll be following both systems and posting the results but won’t take any live trades as this will be a transition period and until it’s settled it’s best to watch and learn. There is no need to always be in the markets. Be patient!

Alright, so I wish everyone a great week-end and be sure to join us at market open on Sunday evening!

Go to article 13

Article 13 - March 29, 2009 - Market wakes up gapping!

Well we’re seeing gaps again for most pairs at market open like last week. Here’s a close-up of AUDUSD:

I’m tempted to play the gap game, as I have been for many weeks because although I haven’t extensively researched the phenomenon, it seems that gaps fill more often than. But I want to stick with my automated system, so I’ll just observe what happens this week again. I’m sure if you go to major forex forums, you’ll find a thread somewhere which details the gap approach if you’re interested. Anyway, I’ll post a pic of what happened to the gaps this time around in a few hours.

Alright, here’s AUDUSD after about 4 hours later. You guessed it, the gap has filled:

And it’s basically the same for all pairs. You’ll hear some traders say (I was one of them at some point) that they exit their trades on Friday BECAUSE of the gapping. Well, what I’m seeing is that there is absolutely no need to exit for that reason, simply because they USUALLY fill. It is true that last July/August things went completely crazy and mega gaps didn’t fill. But what we’re seeing now is calming down of everything, gaps included. So I wouldn’t recommend exiting (good) trades on Fridays just for the sake of Sunday gapping.

Go to article 14

Article 14 - March 30, 2009

Well it’s been a trending day once again, so I guess I was wrong about the “back to ranging” behaviour, at least not for today. We’ll see how it plays out.

Go to article 15

Article 15 - March 31, 2009 - Tuesday ranging

Today was my confirmation day. Ranged all day. Results are ok, not spectacular, but doing well at +156 since Sunday.

Based on the ranging system, for Monday, we’ve got 3 closed trades with a small loss of -$54 and today 6 closed trades totalling +$210.

Current live trades are at +$243 about a minute before 6pm (EST) as you can see below. Ooops, I just heard the alert bell and we’re in for an new trade for GBPCHF, let me go take another pic.

If you’re a fine observer (I’m not), you can see that Europe has now changed their times to Daylight Savings Time (last week I think) so the last trade which was just taken at 6 pm my time (EST) shows up as 00:00 Europe time (+6). When we changed here in North America at the beginning of March (first time it’s so early) Europe hadn’t changed and I was getting mixed up with the times. I’m happy things are back to normal. I’ll tell you, one thing that’ll get you all mixed up are the times, especially in the beginning. I’ll talk about that in my next post and post a few gadgets that can help.

Go to article 16

Article 16 - April 1, 2009 - Forex Market Hours

My account just hit 1 million dollars, whooooooo hooooooooo!

Yup, that was an April’s fool joke (unfortunately hehehe).

Alright let’s speak about TIME.

About 10 years ago (time flies!) I what chatting on some IRC site (very old technology, you would only see command lines, don’t know it they’re still alive). And at some point, I start chatting with someone from Asia and realized that it was 6:15 pm here and 7:15 AM over there, so he was like tomorrow morning for me, having breakfast or whatever and I hadn’t even had dinner yet, however we were both chatting NOW at the same time. I dunno, I found that fantastic and weird at that time. Now, well, it’s nothing to impress anyone anymore, it’s so common.

This year, we changed to Daylight Savings Time about three weeks earlier than in the past (at the beginning of March). Now, don’t laugh at me ok? on the day we did this, I looked outside around 6pm and it was still daylight and even sunny, where yesterday it had been dark. And I told my husband, looking at the snow banks in front of the house, I said “I wonder if the snow’s going to melt more quickly this year since we’ve got an extra hour of sunlight in the evenings earlier this year” only to realize the foolishness of this statement as I uttered the last word. Doh! (but think about it). Might as well do this 1 hour earlier every year, and there won’t even BE any snow anymore (which I would be extremely happy about, I live in a place where we’re practically snowed in 3 months of the year).

Forex is open 24 hours, as you know, and traded around the world. Time can become quite confusing, and I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you go on a forum and see some guy say he’s just taken a trade. OK you’re reading this NOW but he posted this at …….. then you look at the time and date of the post, right? But, in what flippin’ time zone is the forum? And he also posts a screen shot of his platform, which you enlarge and look at the time. But in what time zone is HE? Or actually his broker? And is this time zone in regular or Daylight Savings Time? You finally figure everything out, and then check your own platform, which in my case I use a European broker with, so you need to calculate the guy’s time with respect to your time with respect to your broker’s time. On top of that, depending on the broker, you’ll get differences in prices, because not all brokers have the exact same prices. And to makes matters even more frustrating, any time frame above 1 hour will render different results depending on where your broker is. So the 4H candles, the daily candles, etc. will all be different, since they “start” at a different time depending on the time zone your broker is in. Keep this in mind if ever you start getting interested in candlestick patterns. 1H and less is fine, because we all get the same candle formations, so yeah, there might be something to it (I don’t really believe in them, but I don’t say it isn’t a good way of approaching trading). But anything above 1H, there just isn’t any relevance anymore.

I made myself a little gismo that I’ll put in the download area (made with Excel) to get the various time zones quickly. Simply print it, fold the piece of paper first in half, unfold, then fold again both ends to the mid-point. Bring one of the folds under the other to form a kind of triangle similar to the name tags found in front of people on conference room tables. Staple the bottom. Put in front of your screen and you can now quickly see what time it is in the locations of your choice.

I’ll also upload a kind of “clock” made by a trader, which I got off a forum. It doesn’t adjust to Daylight Savings Time, but it’s still a handy little gadget which shows the market opening and closing times. You can see when markets overlap, etc. It’s nice to get a feeling of what markets are open with respect to what time it is where you are. For instance, here it’s currently 6:38 pm, so I know that Sidney just opened (at 5pm I think, don’t know about DST over there) and that Japan will open in 20 minutes, etc. Some traders trade only at certain market times, for various reasons (there’s an option for this in the EA). But since I trade using robots, they’re an tireless little bunch and can stay on 24/24 and they don’t even argue about it! In my next bit, I’ll speak about what happens to our friends the bots when we reboot (or Windows decides to rebook FOR YOU) or you lose power.

Go to article 17

Article 17 - April 3, 2009 - A week to stay on the sidelines

Monday, the pairs kept trending, so I thought to myself “My predictions were wrong”. Then Tuesday saw a ranging day, so I thought “There we go, ranging mode confirmed”. Then Wednesday and Thursday, it was back to trending, but not all that clearly. You see, by Thursday, both accounts were suffering losses, although the trending one was a bit better off. Then today, some pairs were still trending, but with less vigour and others were ranging. My decision to wait and see for this week is paying off, in a sense, because my systems were showing me that there isn’t a clear direction for now.

Here’s a summary of the week:

The trending system had a total of 25 trades and the ranging one 23. You can see the trending one seeming to bounce back at the end, but that’s me closing out the open trades (which were in profit). The ranging one finished with a loss of –810 and the trending one finished at +207. This +207 profit is FAR from what we’ve seen in real trending weeks, so it’s an indication that we’re in a transition period, and best to wait for confirmation.

Of course, the hard part is to “hop in” at the right moment. But experience shows that waiting a bit for confirmation once we’re seeing a pattern develop is the best solution. A bit means a few days, not 2 weeks, by the way. This waiting will have you think to yourself “Argh, I’m losing all this potential, why don’t I just wake the bots up right now”. But get on board too early a few times, and you’ll understand what I’m talking about when I say “Wait for confirmation”.

Next time I’ll will speak about how the EAs behave when your computer reboots or crashes

Go to article 18

xr86yp295m Trading Forex Ranging versus trending trading Ranging vs trending investing investment trading forex trading forex indicators technical indicators trading forex finance financial money trading currency trading currencies gbpjpy usdjpy gbpusd audusd eurusd usdchf eurgbp gbpaud usdcad gbpjpy usdjpy minimal drawdown trading multiple pairs forex expert advisor EA automated trading robot trading Forex guide forex profitable trade profitable trading consistent profit revenues from trading consistent basis day trading trading for a living profit live trade how to make money how to trade profitably foex forx orex fore how do I how to trade successfully how to trade trading successful trading forex strategy forex trading strategy forex trading approach forex system trading strategy trading system moving average macross

Articles 18 to 21

2011-05-16T16:41:00.002-04:00

Article 18 - April 4 Computer crashing and robots

There are countless EAs out there and I tried and tested many. They don’t all have the same behaviour when it comes to :

1) Computer crashing
2) Computer reboot (normal)
3) Shutting down your MT4 platform (voluntarily or by accident)
4) Losing power

Some will completely “forget” the trades they took when one of the above happens. It all depends on how they were programmed (and other factors, I suppose, I am not a programmer).

But with respect to the EA we’re using here, I can state a few things. In cases 1, 2, and 3, the robots will continue their work as if nothing happened. But in the case of 4, they will not remember some of the trades if you lose power. I have experienced this twice. You will see that the little triangle it puts to show entries has vanished. This is your cue that you now need to manage these open trades manually. However, the robots still work fine and will re-enter new trades. They just won’t close the open ones. Oh, and they won’t forget “all” open trades. They will remember some (the older ones, I think). My husband is a programmer and his take is that the EA temporarily stores some info in memory and when you shut down your MT4 platform, it transfers the temporary info into some sort of more permanent memory table. So when you reboot or restart your MT4 platform, it links to this memory and continues doing its thing.

But if power is lost, the EA kind of “didn’t have the time to” do it’s memory back-up thing for some of the trades, hence the lost info.

On a related note, I noticed something last week that might be useful for you. It has to do with controlling the bots. I’ll talk about that next time.

Go to article 19

Article 19 - April 5, 2009 - Incredible gapping!

I don’t understand what’s going on my friends, and I’ve seen some “terrible” gapping before, but take look at this:

Look at this!

Here’s a close-up of gbpjpy:

That’s an over 900 pip GAP! Now, as you can see, we’re not in any trade (unfortunately) in this pic because it’s a new account I opened this afternoon because both of my observation accounts show “no connection” for some weird reason – and I also don’t have a feed on the site I rely on when this happens (http://www.forex-markets.com/quotes.htm) and ALL their pairs are N/A at the moment, so this is freaking me out a bit.

Come to think of it, this crazy volatility is probably why I don’t have a connection, probably brokers are protecting themselves or something. Anyway, wow, we’ll see how it all plays out.

April 5 – later

Phew! I went to check out some forums to see what others were saying, but no one was speaking of any gigantic gaps ?!?!? So I logged in to my real (live) account, and guess what? No gaps! Here is the same pair as above (gbpjpy) but in my real account:

I feel a bit stupid and thought I’d delete my “gap panicking” post but I’m leaving it here so if anything like this happens to you, you’ll know what to expect. What happened is that over the week-end I had no connection and probably my broker was doing some major maintenance and the server my demos were linked to were literally trashed. So some data was “lost” and this is what caused the “gaps”. I still can’t connect to that server, so I assume it’s really dead. I lost my account balances info (can’t access anything) but fortunately I had generated statements and copied/analysed the numbers over the week-end. Still, it’s quite frustrating because my demos weren’t supposed to expire for another month or so. Ah the joys of brokers!

So now, I need to do what I explain to you in the instructions file, that is, open new demo accounts, and do the set-up thing. Fortunately, with the set files and templates, it’ll all be done in a jiffy. I’ll be back once I’m done.

Go to article 20

Article 20 - April 7, 2009 - The joys of broker games

Since I reinstalled everything on Sunday, not one single trade was taken. Today is Tuesday, and nothing has happened. I keep getting this strange error message:

I contacted a programmer about this. In the meantime, I need to find another broker.

Go to article 21

Article 21 - April 8, 2009 - Strong trending and strong ranging

I just finished setting everything up with my new broker. I’m not seeing any clear direction yet, as my “new” platforms have only been up and running for a few hours, but we can see that the group isn’t agreeing on the overall direction. I took 2 pics to illustrate. The first is eurgbp which clearly still shows strong trending. Now, had this trade been taken, it would have generated if closed right now, about 500$ (remember that eurgbp’s pips are worth about 1.75$).

Isn’t this a beautiful curve? (I feel like a man, saying this…).

On the other hand, look at usdchf for the same period:

This one is doing some perfect ranging. Our TP would have been met on the first down move, another trade would have been taken on the up cross and TP met some time close to the long green wick there, I don’t know if you can see it clearly. So 160 + 160 = 320 pips in 5 days.

Of course the reflex is to say, trade eurgbp with the trending approach and usdchf with the ranging one. But that’s not how the system works (but nothing stops you from doing just that). What we’re observing right now is that our systems are showing us that we don’t have a clear go ahead for either approach. I know it’s totally frustrating, but I don’t decide what the forex markets will do, I can only observe and be prudent at times like this. That’s why I call this approach Forex Leader. And I’ll repeat it again: patience is probably one of the hardest things in forex, but it’s also the one you need to cultivate because it’s the one thing that will preserve your account.

So in the meantime we’ll see if I get the error message again with my new broker. If not, well it would mean that it’s my old broker’s fault. I’ll see if I decide to switch brokers or what at that time. The one I chose is FX Open (they got a good score on the broker rating site) but I’ll let you know if they’re any good or not. By the way, they’re based in Mauritius – I consider myself pretty knowledgeable in terms of geography, but I haven’t got the slightest clue where this place is. Of course, like we all do now, I’ll Google it and let you know. Can you guess where Mauritius is? Off the bat, I’d say in Greece or maybe Italy or something.

Go to article 22

Articles 22 to 29

2011-05-15T16:12:00.001-04:00

Article 22 - April 8, 2009 - Where is Mauritius?

I was a bit (tiny bit) off about Mauritius. It’s actually (citing Wiki here) “an island nation off the coast of the African continent in the southwest Indian Ocean, about 900 kilometres (560 mi) east of Madagascar” (not exactly Greece…). Here’s a map:

See the little “A” there, well that’s where it is. Seems a bit “lost” and a bit small too. Don’t know if I’d trust them with my real money…

Here’s a zoomed out map:

Really seems to be almost in the middle of nowhere. But look a this:

Looks nice and quiet and relaxing and well, maybe when my account reaches some target number at some point I’ll go visit ;-)).

In the meantime, let’s get back to trading!

Go to article 23

Article 23 - April 9, 2009 - It’s a broker thing

My trades on FX Open have no error message whatsoever. On other account, I still get the zero error thing PLUS a new message in the journal, which this time, instead of [too many requests] says [common error].

In the meantime, here’s what happened today in our ranging account (I’ve had some technical problems with the trending one, only two trades were taken, then nothing, so I shut down and restarted a few hours ago, and things seem to be OK now).

Closed trades for today:

As you can see, 2 trades hit their stop losses and the rest (7 trades) retraced nicely for a total profit for today of $485 US. I forgot to switch the profit column to pips, so I’ll do it right now so you can get a clearer idea of the pipeage and not the $ worth next time.

Go to article 24

Article 24 - April 12, 2009 - Happy Easter

I though my broker would be closed this Sunday evening, but they’re open. I think they’ll close at midnight (my time) and re-open Monday at midnight, at least that’s what my other brokoer used to do. I’ll wait and see what people in Mauritius will do. Come to think of it, they’re probably part of the Australian “market” which for me, opens at 5pm EST.

Anyway, here’s what markets look like a half hour after opening. And I DID check to make sure I wasn’t seeing mega imaginary gaps this time – these are real. Look at AUDUSD:

The 2 worst cases of gapping are AUDUSD and GBPAUD. What’s strange (or might be the reason?) is that Australian markets are technically closed (so why is my broker open hmmm?). Anyway, here’s the current calendar from Forex Factory:

As you can see, it’s Easter ! So not much trading until Tuesday. When I started trading, I was so angry at this, I remember. I had a COMPLETE day off to trade because of the holiday, only to realize that markets were closed. Some brokers still stay open, but as you’ll see, not much happens because (I’m told) of poor liquidity. But still, tiny retail traders like us manage to move things “a little” ;-)

Alright, so I’ll be monitoring the markets up until Tuesday without expecting much to happen but with Forex, who knows what can happen?

Go to article 25

Article 25 - April 17, 2009 - Busy, busy, busy!

I was overly busy for the rest of the week with a contract I got with a (more than) tight deadline. I’m not finished yet – expect to work over the week-end as the delivery date is Monday. Markets were fairly quiet (by that I mean both systems were fairly equal) so no trading for me this week (again, yes I know, but PATIENCE).

But had I decided to go ahead with a clear setup, I could have worked AND traded – that’s the beauty of the robots.

There’s an indicator I’ve been meaning to share with you for the ranging system, I hope to get a minute during the week-end to show you this quite beautiful (yes beautiful!) indicator. I baptized it “Serenity” when I put it up on a graph the first time, you’ll see why.

Go to article 26

Article 26 - April 20, 2009 - Centre of Gravity

What a week-end! I didn’t stop.

Anyway, I mentioned a “beautiful” indicator in my last article which I had baptized “serenity” the first time I placed it on a graph. After having tried so many indicators/systems with a gazillion bells and whistles, this one was for me. I used it on the dailies at the beginning of last year and it worked like a charm for months. Then came the mega trending period starting in July-August and because I was so “married” to this indicator, I omitted to keep my eyes open and SEE what was happening (the pairs were breaking the indicator’s rules, so to speak and I kept telling the pairs they couldn’t be doing this).

But it is a great break-out indicator as well as range indicator. With some hindsight, I think we could integrate it to the current systems I never used it on the hourlies, only the dailies, but I suppose it should give us a good indication on the 1H and will simply be an added security or filter, if you like, or better, a “second opinion”. But you don’t have to use it if you don’t want. It’s just another “edge”.

Alright, so it’s called Centre of Gravity. There are a few versions out there, don’t know if they’re all programmed the same, but this is the authentic one. I’ve got an explanation somewhere on what exactly it calculates (its algorithms). I’ll try to find it in my zillion sub-directories and upload it to the file download link. But for now, here’s what one of my chart looked like last year (it’s current data, but with my old set-up):

Isn’t this beautiful? And serene? Quiet, even. Remember these are the dailies and the COG covers 7 months, from about the beginning of September 2008. I was using a line graph instead of candles or bars because it made things clearer and simpler. Now, the white line in the middle acts as a pivot and the price tends to revert back to it. The green and yellow lines act as support and resistance. These are the critical areas for ranging.

I don’t have an image example, but when the ranging turns into trending, the price “goes out of its way” either past the supports or resistances kind of ignoring the boundaries (while you go WTF? or at least I did). I wish I still had my pix from back when this happened last year. All the AUD pairs were particularly frightening to look at. Anyway, that’s our cue that things are getting out of hand, or in other words, that the regular ranging is turning into mega bear or mega bull, so we adjust our trading accordingly. You can adjust the setting to the back number of bars you wish. I find that about 7-8 months worth gives a good idea (on the dailies).

Notice also the curve almost reminds us of a rainbow. Well, when the rainbow vanishes, you’ll see that the lines become more and more parallel. And once they’re really parallel, it’s your cue to start taking the retracements and ride the wave. If I remember correctly, the NZD pairs were real easy to trade as they were like parallel AND almost vertical. Too bad I can’t find those pics grrrrr.
So anyway, if you want to use this indi, just remember that curves mean ranging and parralel (I never could spell that word) mean trending.

Go to article 27

Article 27 - April 21, 2009 - Example using the Centre of Gravity

Here’s a EURGBP trade taken a few hours ago:

What I love about this is that the MAs crossed PLUS the price was in the critical area (the lower green line) of the Centre of Gravity, PLUS we’re in an uptrend and we entered long, so in principle we’ve got triple chances that this will retrace nicely back up to meet the pivot. I took this trade manually in my real account and if you don’t want to use the robots, of course you can do this. Just use the system to show you where there’s a good set-up and enter manually. Now if this thing keeps going down, it’ll mean that it decided to start trending in my face (which is possible of course) so I’ve got my stop loss in place. I’ll keep you updated on the progress. In the meantime, I’ll go search for the explanation file on the algorithm behind the COG.

Go to article 28

Article 28 - April 22, 2009 – Result for EURGBP

Here’s what happened to EURGBP……………..

Go to article 29

Article 29 - April 24, 2009 - Friday Close

Yet another week comes to a close. For me it was a good one, with +155 pips.

I'll upload the explanation on the Centre of Gravity so you can get it on the DOWNLOAD link. Hope this helps you understand how this indicator can be used as a “filter”.

OK, I’m off now, and I wish everyone a great week-end. See you at Sunday open!!!

Go to article 30

Articles 30 to 34

2011-05-14T16:13:00.001-04:00

Article 30 - April 26, 2009 - Sunday Open

Well, the observation systems were showing slight ranging last week and that’s the direction I took with my live trades, but with some caution, as we’re slowly getting out of a trending period, so all is not crystal clear, but we’re getting there.

Tonight, we’ve got some slight gapping, nothing serious though. Since the observation platforms show signs of continuing ranging, I took 2 trades a bit earlier which are still babies: eurusd and eurjpy long. This is Sunday evening and my Japanese friends haven’t even arrived yet, so we’ll take it easy and watch what happens next.

Go to article 31

Article 31 - Friday May 1, 2009 – Flu Week

Well what happened next is I got sick all week with the flu, fever and all. Since all over TV it’s “ Swine Flu”, it kinda makes me feel even sicker. Anyway, I’ll be short. This week was average, I’m finishing with –61 because of 2 consecutive bad trades with EURGBP both of which wiped out what was a nice profit earlier. But this happens. I feel that next week we’ll see some action, so have a great week-end and see you at market open.

Go to article 32

Article 32 - Monday May 4, 2009 – Trending resumes

Well, since yesterday’s open, the trending observation is doing pretty well as you can see:

Except for EUGBP (again) all trades are extremely positive. The GBPCHF one was taken about an hour ago but it’s not “cooperating” lol as it immediately turned around, look:

And it’s about to recross… but look at GBPJPY and USDJPY – they’re both down so we might not get a recross after all. Wait and see.

Go to article 33

Article 33 - May 13, 2009 – Trending Continues

I’ve been so busy with various projects lately! I’m putting up another web site (on a completely different subject – art) so I haven’t been around much in the last few days. But anyway, here’s a pic of how things are doing exactly right now. This is the Trending observation platform. Can you guess what markets are doing right now?? The total is well over 1,000 pips…

And here are the graphs:

Go to article 34

Article 34 - May 18, 2009 – Victoria Day

This is a holiday Monday over here. I was busy this week migrating this blog to my new “home” at blogspot.com. I hope to transfer everything by tomorrow if all goes well (but although I’ve put up a few pretty elaborate web sites in the past (like over 10 years ago)) I’m finding I’m a total idiot with the new technology and java and all that, so I’m not real proud of how the blog looks but well, we’ll have to live with it until I figure everything out.

For now, here is what things look like at 18:22 this evening as for open trades:

Almost 500 pips and apart from gbpaud, all in positive territory.

Back later!

(how do I get that stupid link to actually LINK ?!?!?!)

Much later........ Here's how lol ! Click here

I'm still here!

2010-03-28T16:55:00.004-04:00

March 28, 2010

Just to answer the numerous emails I've been getting - don't worry, I'm still around! I just thought I was repeating myself over and over again, saying the same thing all the time (which is that the system works) and didn't want to bog down the blog (bog a blog lol!) since it was beginning to get pretty long.

So, yeah things are still moving. Last week was a very even one, either way. It's now about an hour before markets open although it's 5 minutes till 17:00 EST because Europe hasn't changed the time to Daylight Saving Yet (remember my broker is in Europe).

Here's a nice screenshot of EURUSD behaving itself perfectly last week. Notice first the short, then profit taking, then entering the long which is also in profit. Let's see how the next week turns out.

Happy trading!

From Forex Leader

Error messages

2010-02-05T18:02:00.003-05:00

February 5, 2009

As a follow-up to a few posts I posted about error messages, and more specifically this one:

http://forexleader-forexleader.blogspot.com/2009/10/new-version-of-ea-error-messages.html

I thought I had written this back in October, but I realized I had actually emailed this explanation to a user instead of posting it. So here it goes:

After using the EA for a couple of days, I could then see that the error was "Invalid Price" (instead of “error no error”). So I emailed the programmer, and here is his reply:

------------
Invalid price usually occurs when the price is too far from the current priceYour change is fairly simple : before determining any Ask or Bid price in the codeFor example : at line 612 of your ea starts a

int subOpenOrder(int type, int stoploss, int takeprofit) function, and it continues like this :
int
ticket = 0,
err = 0,
c = 0;
double
aStopLoss = 0,
aTakeProfit = 0,
bStopLoss = 0,
bTakeProfit = 0;
RefreshRates();
if(stoploss!=0)
{ aStopLoss = NormalizeDouble(Ask-stoploss*Point,4);
bStopLoss = NormalizeDouble(Bid+stoploss*Point,4); }
if(takeprofit!=0)
{ aTakeProfit = NormalizeDouble(Ask+takeprofit*Point,4);
bTakeProfit = NormalizeDouble(Bid-takeprofit*Point,4);
}

With red I marked you a "good position" for refresh rates (since right after that Ask and Bid are used to determine stop loss and take profit - without it it might hold "old" values). Also, in the continuation, you have a following code :

if(type==OP_BUY)
for(c=0;c NumberOfTries;c++)
{ RefreshRates();
ticket=OrderSend(Symbol),OP_BUY,Lots,Ask,Slippage,aStopLoss,aTakeProfit,TicketComment,MagicNumber,0,Green); err=GetLastError();
if(err==0)
{ if(ticket>0) break;
} else
{ if(err==0 err==4 err==136 err==137 err==138 err==146)

//Busy errors { Sleep(5000); continue;
} else //normal error { if(ticket>0) break;
} } } }

Critical point is the Sleep(5000) which means that in the case of an error EA should wait 5 seconds and then retry. The problem is obvious : in 5 seconds the prices could change a lot, so better to place Refresh rates within the loop too (marked it pink this time :))Metaquotes claims that refresh rates should be used after any lengthy operation in order to update values to the current ones. Even then you are going to have situations (like in periods of high volatility, when you are "on hold") that will cause that same error but if you place refresh rates at points like the above point, those errors are going to be rare.

regards

mladen

--------------------------

So I made the modifications in the EA’s code, compiled, and everything was FINALLY fixed. I uploaded the latest version of the EA on my site on December 5, so if you still have either “no error” or “invalid price”, then go get the latest version and follow the instructions in my original post (link at top).

Back from vacation

2010-02-03T13:09:00.003-05:00

Hello all!

I'm just back from vacation.

I see there are many new followers, so welcome to you all.

As for the emails, I promise I will respond to each and every email between now and the end of the week.

Happy trading !

Great December start

2009-12-05T14:28:00.004-05:00

December 5, 2009

Excellent week again, the first one of December - we had NFP yesterday which shook things a bit but all in all here's how we closed on Friday:

Have a great week-end all and see you at market open as usual !

Friday close

2009-11-28T13:57:00.002-05:00

November 28, 2009

See what I mean? Only trades taken since Tuesday and again we ended the week at + 1,000 pips...

Friday close

2009-11-22T14:10:00.001-05:00

November 22, 2009

A few hours before markets open. I haven’t been on here as much lately because I’ve been involved in something else (The Settlers – Rise of an Empire VI , which I’m about to finish, all the 35 levels, love that game) all the while keeping an eye on my platforms, of course. Also, I feel a bit awkward repeating the same thing over and over again, that is, that this system works quite well, so I don’t have much to add except that, well, things are still going very well. Here’s how things ended at Friday’s close:

You can see 5 trades taken Wednesday, 1 Thursday and 2 Friday. I guess by now, if you’ve read up to here, you can see the results of this system and I truly feel my entries are beginning to be a bit redundant. I’ll still keep you posted on a regular basis but I think in the future I’ll try to write entries on how I went about optimizing the various parameters so you can get an idea of the work involved if you’re interested in doing the same thing either with other pairs or on other time frames. I’ll start this week with an introductory post on the basics of using the Strategy Tester.

Alright, less than 3 hours to go – to your screens, my friends, and have a great trading week !

MT4 tip

2009-11-06T17:55:00.000-05:00

November 6, 2009

Trading week just ended – it was a good one except for the beginning which was rather mixed but then on Wednesday things stabilized in the trending zone where we’re still seeing some nice regular pips.

I thought I’d share a tip which one of the users asked me about. If you use this system AND also trade manually based on another system (dailies, for instance, or a bit of scalping here and there) and you want to distinguish between trades taken by the EAs and trades you took manually (we don’t always remember which is which), here is what you simply need to do: anywhere in the terminal window, right-click and select “comments”. You’ll get an additional column which identifies MA-GBPCHF-60, for example, which tells you this trade was taken by your EA and “nothing” for the ones you took manually. A simple but useful trick.

Have a great one all and be sure to be up and ready for Sunday open !

Just amazing

2009-10-28T13:39:00.002-04:00

October 28, 2009

Just got up, look at this. This is only since Monday, 3 days worth of trading, mini lots....... what can I say ?

Broker glitch

2009-10-25T13:39:00.001-04:00

October 25, 2009

The week started out great and then all of a sudden, on Wednesday, Oct 21st at 13:00 EST, a mysterious technical glitch with my broker created some major spikes in 6 of the 10 pairs as you can see below:

Pairs affected: audusd, eurjpy, eurusd, gbpaud, gbpchf & gbpusd. These caused both my trending and ranging platform accounts to go to negative balances, so I had to restart with fresh accounts. But before I could do that, I needed to correct the situation because the MAs were, of course, all mixed up because of the erroneous data.

So if this ever happens to you, simply reload each pairs’s historic data (Tools menu, then History Center, then select pair) and close and reload MT4. If that doesn’t correct all pairs, then go to the 1H data and simply delete the hour with the erroneous data and things should get back to normal.

As you can see below, we’ve got 4 new fresh trades (the gbp family) all taken on Friday and all positive:

Friday close

2009-10-16T17:09:00.001-04:00

October 16, 2009

Well here's how our week ended about 10 minutes ago at 17:00 EST. Remember that eurgbp should be about +120 more than what is showing:

Alright, another week-end coming up, hope it's nice where you are, we've been having rainy weather all week !

Have a great WEEK-END !!!

Nice week again

2009-10-15T17:46:00.001-04:00

October 15, 2009

Here are this week’s trades so far :

The EURGBP should actually be about + 120, not 4 – this is due to a double technical glitch I had with this one (invalid price).

As you can see below, there was a sell on oct 8 followed by a cross up but my trade didn’t exit. If things went ok on your side, you should have taken the first long for some nice profit then re-entered short at about 93.03 and would currently be about + 120 pips (don’t forget, eurgpb’s pips are currently worth $1.63 US, so you need to multiply).

We’ll see how the week unwinds tomorrow

MT4 error messages and descriptions

2009-10-10T17:05:00.000-04:00

There are 2 files for which you have access in your MT4 platform which are related to error messages. The 2 files are located here:

1. C:\Program files\Your_MT4_Directory\Experts\Include\stderror.mqh
2. C:\Program files\Your_MT4_Directory\Experts\Librairies\stdlib.mq4

First, you’ve got a list of codes returned from the trade server, followed by MQL4 errors. You can see the number of the error and the code description – see below:

//+------------------------------------------------------------------+
// return error description
//+------------------------------------------------------------------+

//---- codes returned from trade server
case 0:
case 1: error_string="no error";
case 2: error_string="common error";
case 3: error_string="invalid trade parameters";
case 4: error_string="trade server is busy";
case 5: error_string="old version of the client terminal";
case 6: error_string="no connection with trade server";
case 7: error_string="not enough rights";
case 8: error_string="too frequent requests";
case 9: error_string="malfunctional trade operation (never returned error)";
case 64: error_string="account disabled";
case 65: error_string="invalid account";
case 128: error_string="trade timeout";
case 129: error_string="invalid price";
case 130: error_string="invalid stops";
case 131: error_string="invalid trade volume";
case 132: error_string="market is closed";
case 133: error_string="trade is disabled";
case 134: error_string="not enough money";
case 135: error_string="price changed";
case 136: error_string="off quotes";
case 137: error_string="broker is busy (never returned error)";
case 138: error_string="requote";
case 139: error_string="order is locked";
case 140: error_string="long positions only allowed";
case 141: error_string="too many requests";
case 145: error_string="modification denied because order too close to market";
case 146: error_string="trade context is busy";
case 147: error_string="expirations are denied by broker";
case 148: error_string="amount of open and pending orders has reached the limit";

//---- mql4 errors

case 4000: error_string="no error (never generated code)";
case 4001: error_string="wrong function pointer";
case 4002: error_string="array index is out of range";
case 4003: error_string="no memory for function call stack";
case 4004: error_string="recursive stack overflow";
case 4005: error_string="not enough stack for parameter";
case 4006: error_string="no memory for parameter string";
case 4007: error_string="no memory for temp string";
case 4008: error_string="not initialized string";
case 4009: error_string="not initialized string in array";
case 4010: error_string="no memory for array\' string";
case 4011: error_string="too long string";
case 4012: error_string="remainder from zero divide";
case 4013: error_string="zero divide";
case 4014: error_string="unknown command";
case 4015: error_string="wrong jump (never generated error)";
case 4016: error_string="not initialized array";
case 4017: error_string="dll calls are not allowed";
case 4018: error_string="cannot load library";
case 4019: error_string="cannot call function";
case 4020: error_string="expert function calls are not allowed";
case 4021: error_string="not enough memory for temp string returned from function";
case 4022: error_string="system is busy (never generated error)";
case 4050: error_string="invalid function parameters count";
case 4051: error_string="invalid function parameter value";
case 4052: error_string="string function internal error";
case 4053: error_string="some array error";
case 4054: error_string="incorrect series array using";
case 4055: error_string="custom indicator error";
case 4056: error_string="arrays are incompatible";
case 4057: error_string="global variables processing error";
case 4058: error_string="global variable not found";
case 4059: error_string="function is not allowed in testing mode";
case 4060: error_string="function is not confirmed";
case 4061: error_string="send mail error";
case 4062: error_string="string parameter expected";
case 4063: error_string="integer parameter expected";
case 4064: error_string="double parameter expected";
case 4065: error_string="array as parameter expected";
case 4066: error_string="requested history data in update state";
case 4099: error_string="end of file";
case 4100: error_string="some file error";
case 4101: error_string="wrong file name";
case 4102: error_string="too many opened files";
case 4103: error_string="cannot open file";
case 4104: error_string="incompatible access to a file";
case 4105: error_string="no order selected";
case 4106: error_string="unknown symbol";
case 4107: error_string="invalid price parameter for trade function";
case 4108: error_string="invalid ticket";
case 4109: error_string="trade is not allowed in the expert properties";
case 4110: error_string="longs are not allowed in the expert properties";
case 4111: error_string="shorts are not allowed in the expert properties";
case 4200: error_string="object is already exist";
case 4201: error_string="unknown object property";
case 4202: error_string="object is not exist";
case 4203: error_string="unknown object type";
case 4204: error_string="no object name";
case 4205: error_string="object coordinates error";
case 4206: error_string="no specified subwindow";
default: error_string="unknown error";

New version of EA - Error Messages

2009-10-10T16:54:00.003-04:00

New version of EA – Error messages

You might remember I wrote a while back about an error message I have been getting from time to time for which (1) I don’t know the cause and (2) can’t find a solution because of (1). So I just live with it. That error is “(0) No Error”. Now what this does is after there is a valid cross and an alert is sent, the open trade order is sent but then this No Error shows up and no trade is taken. You can see in the example below exactly what shows up in your lower Experts folder. This happened last Monday with GBPAUD (you have to read from bottom to top).

As you can see, you’ve got first “Alert: Moving Average Cross Down” followed by the closing of the previous Buy then it says the stdlib was loaded successfully (more on that later) then instead of getting a normal message which would say “Open Sell”, the Error Message appeared “Error Opening Sell order: (0) no error” and no trade was taken. Let me show you what happened to GBPAUD after that:

You can see the closing of the previous Buy (red triangle) and also the crossing of the MAs and also that no Sell order was taken – this would appear as a small red arrow. You can also see that this trade would currently be approx. +700 pips.

Well the problem is now partially solved ! I finally got a very good and friendly programmer, Mladen, to help me out with this. As far as I can understand his explanation, this is kind of a “false” error in the sense that all errors are supposed to have a number + a description (see next post with all the errors listed). This one is due to a programming glitch which results in the correct “error” not being shown which shows up as a (0) error. What the programmer did is fix things so next time the error occurs, it will return the RIGHT number and description and I’ll finally be able to figure out what the problem is – maybe it’s because of a special parameter in the EA or it’s broker related or something else, but at least I’ll know what it is and then be able to figure out a way to correct it, if it’s possible. It might not be – remember sometimes we get the “Trade Context Busy” error for which we can’t do anything because it’s broker related and we just have to accept it as part of our trading life. But maybe it’ll be something else which can be fixed. So I’m totally grateful to Mladen for his help and next week I’ll be watching closely to see what was hiding behind that (0) error. I uploaded the new version of the EA on my transfer site, so feel free to go get it and replace it, if you’ve been getting those error messages (some people do, some don’t, it’s really a mystery case, that one).

Now if you do get the new version, you’ll need to do a few things. First make a back-up copy of your old version and save it somewhere with a new file name, just in case. The new EA has EXACTLY the same filename as the old one to ensure that no problem occurs so you don’t need to worry about anything. Simply copy the new EA in the Experts directory and that should do the trick (shut down and re-launch your MT4 platforms). If you’ve got any open trades, I thought you’d need to manage them manually, of course, because the new EA can’t “remember” what it hasn’t taken. But I just did a test myself, and by golly! The new EA remembers the old trades! Fascinating. But still, I’ll keep a close eye to make sure. I’ll test things out when markets open and confirm here if that’s all you need to do and that things worked out smoothly (or not) so if you’re unsure, wait a bit before downloading the new EA.

My next entry will be dedicated to the various Error Messages which you can get and what they mean.

UPDATE: A FOLLOW-UP TO THIS POST CAN BE FOUND HERE:

http://forexleader-forexleader.blogspot.com/2010/02/error-messages.html

Moving along nicely

2009-10-06T16:53:00.004-04:00

October 6, 2009

Here is the situation just a bit before 17:00 EST:

As you can see, apart from an "old" trade, taken last Wednesday and 3 trades taken on Friday, the others are all since Sunday open. We opened on Sunday at approx. +220 and have just barely reached +1k.

What is NFP?

2009-10-03T15:22:00.002-04:00

October 3, 2009

Another week has gone by ! We didn’t reach 3k at the beginning of the week, but came pretty close.

This week was a good one as well, not as spectacular as last week, but still very good. Yesterday was the 1st Friday of the month and as such, the Non-Farm Employment Change in the US (or Non-Farm Payrolls or NFP) came out and this event is considered one of the most important “news” as it can move markets with a vengeance. We did have some movement yesterday, but not as much as some other months.

Here’s what the NFP covers (quote from Forex Factory Calendar section):

Source: Bureau of labor statistics

Measures: Change in the number of employed people during the previous month, excluding the farming industry;

Usual Effect: Actual > Forecast = Good for currency (Note: While this is the 'usual' effect, under current market conditions the reverse tends to be true against some currencies, as bad data has been triggering the purchase of US bonds);

Frequency: Released monthly, usually on the first Friday after the month ends;

Next Release: Nov 6, 2009

FF Notes: This is vital economic data released shortly after the month ends. The combination of importance and earliness makes for hefty market impacts;

Why Traders Care: Job creation is an important leading indicator of consumer spending, which accounts for a majority of overall economic activity;

Also Called: Non-Farm Payrolls, NFP, Employment Change;

Have a great week-end once again !

Sunday open

2009-09-27T19:51:00.003-04:00

September 27, 2009

We opened at 17:00 EST @ approx. + 2k. Here is the situation at 5 minz before 20:00 EST:

Will we reach 3k tonight ??? SUSPENSE ! This is amazing.......

Friday close

2009-09-25T18:19:00.003-04:00

September 25, 2009

Another great week comes to an end and markets have now gone to sleep. We closed at over +2k as you can see below with all but one trade on the positive side of the spectrum:

nb: I made some mistakes with my screenshots yesterday, as you might have noticed, my MT4 terminal window wasn't open high enough so the 2 first trades weren't showing (gbpjpy and eurjpy). Sorry about that !

OK so have a great week-end all and hope you have fun and relax and be there at market open !

It continues

2009-09-24T22:05:00.004-04:00

September 24, 2009

Hehehehhhhe you wanna have some fun? Geeze, I love trading, look at this, couple hours later ;-)

Amazing

2009-09-24T20:01:00.001-04:00

September 24, 2009

Just a few minutes later...... No comment required:

Up to 1k again and again

2009-09-24T19:46:00.004-04:00

September 24, 2009

A few hours later.... Did I mention earlier that things were going great? Look at this, all new fresh trades just taken today (look at the time column all taken on the 24th)

False signals avoided by parameter setting

2009-09-24T18:02:00.001-04:00

September 24, 2009

Good ! Things are going great @ approx. +800 pips at the moment. Yesterday was a « shake & bake » kinda day with the interest rate announcement for the US (which remains at 0.25%) and despite the fact that it stayed the same and WAS ANTICIPATED to stay the same, the markets rocked at 14 :00 EST – One day I’ll try to understand this news trading stuff.

But for now, I want to clarify a technical detail which some of you have asked about. I think I’ve covered this, but I’m not sure. The EA has a parameter which is set (for all pairs) to enter on the NEXT bar after a cross, not right away. I tested both settings on all the pairs, and this is the optimized setting. What this does is it will act as a kind of filter, as you can see in the example below. That’s AUDUSD yesterday afternoon on the 15:00 bar. You can see that the 14:00 bar ended up an almost doji and on that bar, the MA had crossed. Then it uncrossed, and as you can see, on the 15:00 bar, the MAs have NOT crossed because the price went back down. So that’s an example where having this setting prevents “false signals” to be taken, because the next bar acts as a confirmation of a cross.

My forward tests with my three scalpers are going better than expected. I’ve been at this (forward testing) since August 6 and won’t release them until I’m completely satisfied. The backtests gave excellent results, but I want to forward test for a length of time with which I am satisfied. Can’t remember if I mentioned this, but I “baptized” them Papa Scalper (slower TF but less DD), Mama Scalper (higher TF, bit more DD, more profit) and Baby Scalper (fastest TF, more DD, more profit).

OK so 1.5 days left of this trading week, I’ll tell you 2 week-end days off followed by 2 week days OFF just drove me almost crazy !