What to do…

I am currently, since just a few days, trying a free EA that I’m actually quite excited about, the Gartley EA. It trades price patterns instead of just indicators and does very well in backtests. Very refreshing to see. There are a few different versions, but I’m actually trying the first one (v 1.01). The newer ones incorporate a special MACD indicator to filter trades and a news reader. I’ll try those versions later.

As for the other free EAs I’m running in demo there was a update for Quik DBS v2 this week that seems to behave very nice. It is a daily breakout trader by QuikSilver that I’ve written about earlier. If this weeks performance continues for 2-3 weeks more I’m very tempted to put it live actually. Of course I would only trade it with micro lots to start.

I’m also trying a free scalper found here: http://volatily-scalp.blogspot.com/. Seems quite good actually. Of course I have scalpers already (FAPT, FAPT Evo, MD and MD Pro) but I wouldn’t mind running another profitable one. Diversification is always very important.

Last but not least I’ve actually written my own EA, called TrendEAr, that I’m forward testing with quite good results this week. I had a few duds that I will try to filter out by adding a RSI indicator to gauge overbought/oversold market. It is a trend trader (I know, such a overused word) that tries to catch the bigger movements. In backtests the most profitable trades are open for days following the big trends. It is very heavy to run backtests with it because of the indicators used, so my optimization runs take about two weeks right now. As always I am struggling with the proper timing to enter and exit the trades, but it is starting to work nice I think. I’m currently demo’ing it on EURUSD, GBPUSD, GBPJPY and EURJPY using M30 timeframe.

With the disappointment, for me, with the new version of the GridBot I’m also considering restarting my AutoHedge EA that i wrote some time ago. I think I can make it into a hedged grid trader in a matter of hours. I’m thinking of a number of different approaches (pivots, Keltner channels (ATR), Fibo levels and so on) to adjust the grid positions and sizing. Since I will be writing a hedged trader I won’t have to worry about trends as much (since we’re trading with the trend also). The market movement that we will try to catch is the 100% retracement of course, then we make money both on the up and down movement with a hedged grid. I’ll keep you posted.

So, all in all I really think there are some high quality free EAs. But of course one have to run backtests and forwardtests before running them live. And when live, better start out small. I’m seriously thinking about funding a micro account and put them on soon. I’m tired of all the commercial EAs BS sales pitches and phony results.

Just a quick post about two free experts that seem interesting enough to start demo trading with. Both are written by Quicksilver. Perhaps the most interesting of the two is called Quik MACD as is based on the LMT trading system (that is praised on some forums I hang around on). The other one is based on a break-out trading system and named Quik DBS.

You can get the EAs here:

http://www.forexnirvana.com/f27/quik-macd-hot-770/

http://www.forexnirvana.com/f27/quik-dbs-v2-802/

I will start a new demo account at Alpari UK for them and register a MT4Stats page. I’ll post it when it’s done here with a update. There are links to statistics in the threads posted above. Perhaps nothing really convincing, but that is not surprising since these are long term strategies and this is just released. Backtests are very convincing, but as we all know that is not the same as a profitable EA, but of course it is a good start at least.
I really would appreciate finding a EA that is trading long term. All the short term EAs I have (that is supposed to be in the market for a few hours at most) are very sensitive to spreads and data stream quality. This makes them very broker sensitive and some of them erratic in their performance. Orders with the LMT system can be open for weeks if I understand it correctly. But we’ll see how the EA does, hopefully we have enough trades in a month or so to at least draw some conclusions.