Friday, 29 January 2010

Bespoke Forex Automated Trading Software; the begining

At last! After about 18 months of pushing, shoving, paying out huge sums of money to contacts in other parts of the world, I've finally done it ! My preferred way of trading (manually) has now been fully automated...... And unlike most of the "open-market" automated trading systems (expert advisers) I've seen and used, my very own version trades on a positive risk/reward basis, meaning 1 winning trade is greater in value than 1 losing trade.

Anyone who's tried an automated forex trading system will no doubt, have seen that the usual effect of "the odd loss" has an uncanny way of wiping out several past profitable trades - and they're the GOOD ONE'S ! The not-so-good-one's I've seen take out 8 or 9 past profit trades due to stop-loss levels being placed at over 100 - 200 pips away....... WOW ! You've sure got to be confident that the trading strategy itself not only HAS a very high strike rate of winning, but more importantly, can KEEP IT !

I'll spare you the intricacies here, but you just wouldn't believe the job I had to convince the people I needed to help me produce my "bit-of-kit", that I was serious when I said that it MUST trade on a positive risk/reward........... You see, the vast majority of trading within The Forex Market - manual as well as automated - is conducted on the traditional negative risk/reward basis; ie to go for, say, 25 pips in the market, risk levels would typically be placed 50 to 75 pips the other side to give the market room to breathe. The fact is, The Forex Market is pretty random and does have a tendency to move at a very fast pace which is why this is a common trading methodology, particularly with "scalping" trading strategies.

During my earlier trading days, I had 2 accounts completely wiped out and remember being left that second time, scratching my head knowing on the one hand that serious money IS made in this market, but realising it was never going to come my way unless I changed something.

It was only when I looked at the maths BEHIND any strategy I cared to trade, did I realise that with certain strategies I could stack the odds well-and-truely in my favour. After all, with just a risk/reward ratio of 1:2, if I just got it right 50% of the time, I'd be up handsomely.

From those very next manual trades I adopted this methodology and do you know what ?.............. Hmm, I haven't had an account wiped out since, despite many losing trades I might add. And it was from here, when I learned of the brilliant concept of automated trading, I searched for something that would fit my trading style......... but there wasn't one out there; what a shame, I thought.

It turned out NOT to be a shame because it inspired me to go the distance and create my own system which would have my own methodology and favoured trading strategy, that is the "break out".

I particularly prefer this strategy because there aren't any indicators to look at nor be confused about. In my (humble) opinion, any indicator only lags the actual market price anyway, which can often lead to giving false signals for entering the market and as such, only to be stopped-out a little later (and yes, I've done my fair share of those kind of trades in the past, too. Not any more!)

Of the 3 currency pairs that have been tested, troubleshooted, tweaked and then re-tested, at the time of this post 2 of them are producing r/r ratios of 1:4 and the other at an acceptable 1:2.4. For me, this is great news because in real terms, my accuracy rates with this bespoke automated system need only be around 30% to be better than breakeven. Actual accuracy seems to fall around 55% to 65% over 6 to 12 month periods so there's plenty of room for error. And the only other thing that's needed of course - to let the law of averages do it's thing - is enough trading opportunities, which there are over any given year period (100+).

Anyway, I just wanted you to know where I am with this. My system will not be for sale but I do intend to let a small group of people share in it's profitability......... news of which will follow in later posts. (I'm just learning how to create video files which will help explain what I've accomplished and show the thing in action, so you'll see proof of the greatness that's here !)