The Bleeding Edge
Happy New Year all. Still up to my neck in bot projects, but in the unusual situation of being heavily reliant on other people to make progress, so am having to show unaccustomed levels of patience. A recent recruit to the Amoeba userbase, after it was released as freeware, informs me that he is having great success with a system he is trying out, so I wait with bated breath for further news. Mr Steve from Tagadab has stepped up to the plate and set his engineers on the problem of using bots under Hyper-V, and Matt from Super-Roulette has helped with trial versions of his bot. So, rather than let the grass grow under my feet, I have conducted some analysis of the performance of the WinPro bot that I have been using since October using the Trade Analyser package also supplied by Easy-EA.com
The first thing that I spotted was that one of the currency pairs I had been using it for (GBPUSD) appeared to have lost money and dented my overall profits. That was quickly addressed by removing that particular chart from the setup. Analysing the results on the remaining pairs the results are as summarised below (bear in mind that WinPro implements 3 different strategies per pair, each of which is analysed by use of a separate magic number).
The impressive thing about this EA is that when one pair/method combination is weak, the slack is taken up by one of the others, and where one currency is inactive the other can be reaping profits. A 400% net profit in less than three months deserves to be shouted from the rooftops in any case, so consider this my contribution towards doing so.
In every other market or game I have been involved in during 2009, I am pretty sure that my outlay on bots, VPS and buy-ins has been greater than the amount of any cashouts. The net losses have not been catastrophic, but I definitely need to proceed with more caution during 2010. Despite this, there are many reasons for optimism in 2010- which I will enumerate more fully at another time, as my toddler has just awoken and demanded milk….
Hi Mark,
It’s good to see your account making headway and it would be nice to think that you have moved now to a point of some safety. As you know, we were initially concerned that a starting balance of £17 or thereabouts was too low and that the drawdowns from just trading the microlots could easily have taken you out. Long may the good run continue, although I don’t think you’ll be really safe until your balance is up to around £150.
The main reason for my post, however, is to say just because the performance on GBP/USD may not have been so great recently, that shouldn’t be reason enough to remove it from trading. All of the symbols demonstrate a profitable equity curve but you need to make sufficient trades for the sample to be representative. Just because GBP/USD performance is currently below the mean value of the equity curve, it doesn’t mean that it won’t rise back above it again sometime soon. Similarly, there are symbols that have outperformed recently and they are possibly vulnerable to drawdown.
To highlight my point, maybe I can just draw your attention to your own comment in the posts which reads “The impressive thing about this EA is that when one pair/method combination is weak, the slack is taken up by one of the others, and where one currency is inactive the other can be reaping profits.”
Hi Jeremy, you’re right of course, I should take the rough with the smooth, both in terms of different sub-strategies within WinPro and across the sets of currency pairs. I guess my minimal account size is making me take a bit of a short-termist apporach. Also I have been going against your recommendations until now by running both GBPUSD and EURUSD pairs at the same time. Having done the analysis it was easy to see which to go with under current conditions. Happy New Year to you and yours and many thanks for the quality of your products and the support which goes along with them.
Mark,
Regarding our previous stance on using both GBP/USD and EUR/USD together, I have to say that we have had a change of heart in recent weeks.
Our initial apprehension was based upon a suspicion that both pairs would probably take the same trades at the same time, therefore simply doubling the risk unnecessarily. In practice, our concerns have proved unfounded and we have witnessed each pair take a set of completely different trades.
Our recommendation now is that both pairs can be used safely together with the same level of risk.
There is a SIGNIFICANT update due within days and we will ensure that the instruction manual is altered before release to reflect our revised opinion.
Regards,
Jeremy
I understand. I had noticed that they weren’t particularly correlated over the past few months. I’ll add GU back into the mix after the upgrade. May need to have two Trade Analysers running though, as I’ve run out of slots for currency pair/magic number combinations!