What to do…

Got a spam email from FXCM about a contest on some new platform they’ve built (themselves it seems). It is called Strategy Trader and after a quick download I must say that it actually “feels” quite interesting. FXCM is of course claiming that it is much better than anything else on the market and goes on to “compare” features with MetaTrader 4. We all know that MT4 is old, so the comparisons are a bit unfair. MT5 is already out, even if it hasn’t gotten too much attention yet. I can’t say if ST is better or not, but at least it feels new and fresh. I’ve just looked around it for 15 minutes now thou.

The Strategy tester is multi-threaded so backtesting their complementary Grid trader was quick. They brag about 1 year of 1M data for free in the platform, but that doesn’t impress as we’re all hooked on tickdata from DukasCopy. A nice feature is that it is possible to test with both ask and bid prices.

The contest they’re arranging comes with a $10,000 first price, so it might be worth it to try and port some of my MT4 EAs to the Strategy Trader. Considering that I haven’t had time to do the same for the MT5 contest reality probably is that I won’t make it in time for the deadline thou…

Check it out: http://www.fxcm.co.uk/automated-forex-trading.jsp#Overview

Update: After messing with the platform for a few hours now, including downloading a few sample strategies from their forum I must say that I am impressed. I will certainly try to get a scalper strategy of mine ported from MQL4 to C# and the Strategy Trader. I’m planning to do so in steps. The first step will be to move functions from the MQL4 code to a C# written DLL. I can then verify that the converted code gives the exact same behavior as the original since I can call the functions in the DLL from a wrapper EA. I can then use the same file with function in a new C# wrapper in Strategy Trader (and call the DLL from MQL5 if I want to also).

The platform is different to work in as MT4 really been the only tool I’ve been using for a long time and gotten very used to, but everything is starting to fall into place. Some things I like (reports for example), other are still confusing. The speed is undeniable, everything is very responsive and the backtests are lightning fast.

Just woke up and excitingly checked my EAs performance during the night. Found this (on both my JadeFX and The Collective FX accounts):

That is some seriously unlucky stoplosses. Out of the 9 positions that were taken 7 just hit their stoplosses before EURGBP returned to make the remaining two positions take profit. If this had happened at a non-ECN (and just one) I would be very tempted to think about stophunting. But as it happened at all my brokers I guess I was just very very unlucky.

So, 10% lost of the JadeFX account, resetting the account to 0% growth during September.

Quick update on the performance on my main scalper account at JadeFX during August. I’ve previously posted about the excellent results during July. August was also good, but I had one day that basically all trades went to stoploss for a negative hit of 551 pips or about 15% of the account (which also corresponded to my risk-appetite right then). It was inevitable to happen of course, and it will happen again. I didn’t change any settings after the “crash” and the losses was made up the coming 10 trading days. Excellent.

Other than the massive losing day (17th of August) I had two more days with negative pips. Overall the account made 742 pips which amounted to 18%. I am very pleased with that, considering that the maximum loss scenario was realized.

Going forward I have changed the setup a little. During July and August I have been experimenting somewhat by running three different setups of the main moneymaker EA here. Now it is clear which setup I will use going forward. It is very stable (if I had only used that one on the 17th the drawdown would have been much smaller).

I have also introduced a new EA from the Funyoo forum on my live account on the 1st of September that I’ve been optimizing with Dukascopy tickdata. I’ve been trading it with great results on demo for the past two weeks, and so far it seems as good on my live account (only had two trading days yet, but the trades are identical with demo trades taken).