1 (edited by hannahis 2017-09-03 12:19:55)

Topic: Create Extra Trade Management features for FSB Pro Users

Hi Popov,

I would like to propose again adding some good trade management features into our EA such as the profit protection features we discussed about long ago which got many traders excited and looking forward for these essential features that could greatly improve our trading results.

I understand your dedication to make sure that whatever features you added into the FSB Pro (as part of our EA's opening/closing conditions), they must be measurable and be applicable and reflected onto the backtesting results (quantifiable), otherwise how are you going to ensure it's "reliability".

Hence, to work a way around the important need for extra features and knowing that some of these features can't be quantifiable by the backtesting engine because of the nature of the data "structures" such as it's hard to quantify trailing by tick when the historical data are in bar format.  Hence we can only compare from 1 price open to the next price close whether the price has "trailed by" what amount.  And in between the bar, we can't get the true trailing nature of how it would behave in a real situation by just looking at the bar data.

So to strike a balance between traders/FSB users' needs and your dedication to ensure all "actions" are quantifiable by backtesting, why don't you create another "tab" below the list of selection such as "Editor", "Generator", "Optimizer" and add in "Extra Trades feature" tab whereby before we finally want to export our EA, we can go to this section and add in extra trade options to be exported/included in our MT4 EA's panel.

Users will know that this "Extra Trade Features" tab is only to add in some trade management features that may enhance our trade performance and these extra features will change/improve/cause the backtesting results to be differ from our actual results (for better or for worse).

In another words, users understand that if we were to use these extra features, we are prepared and know that it may dramatically improve or worsen the trade performance of the EA and thus we won't hold unto the FSB backtesting results as our expected outcome.  (use it at your own risk).

By providing such "Extra Trade features", you get to provide very basic and essential tools to your users and at the same time you don't have to compromise the integrity of your backtesting method.  It's a win win situations.

Suggestions for features to be added to this extra Tab.

1. Trailing Stop (classic whereby trailing starts immediately when EA opens a trade, and/or triggered at 5 targeted steps)

2. Winner Options (Scaling In) at targeted profit level, i.e. add positions when EA's floating profits hit targeted level such as 1st step at 50 pips add 0.1 lot, add 2nd at 80 pips with 0.5 lot and add 3rd at 100 pips at 1 lot etc with 5 to 10 steps if possible.

3. Scaling Out (partial close options)

4. day and time activation (which day/time you allow your EA to trade, i.e. avoid any major new trading etc, or closed on Friday etc).


I'm perfectly fine if you only have the 1st option, such as the trailing stop steps (the most essential one), the rest would be an added bonus to all of us.

I sincerely hope you would kindly consider these basic yet super essential features.

Right now I have to rely on an extra, eternal EA to manage all opening trade with trailing but it's not flexible becos I have to apply a "blanket" rule, i.e. same trailing setting for all types of open trades be it scalper, inter day EA.  And another extra EA for moving SL to different target level.  One of these EA, seem to be laggy, it can't manage the changes fast enough for the large number of trades in my MT4 terminal and hence I'm not so sure whether which trades are applied with this extra features and which trades are being left out of this features.

I'm must say you some how able to programme FSB EA to react very fast even if I'm running 50 or more EA in each MT4.  That's quite a feat.  In another software, the maximum EA can be install in MT4 is only 8 or so, anything more will cause it to miss trades, busy connection etc.  So I guess my SL EA can't handle the large amount of open trades unlike FSB EA.

In the Free EA made by FSB Online Generator project, I've initially run the EA on demo account with it's original setting.

After 2mths, I added the trailing for all the EA and I saw a tremendous improvement in the results.  EA with the extra trailing features did better than the original ones.  I'm not surprise because this is what I do for all my demo/live trades, I add trailing for all my EA because without trailing, my EA does not respond quick enough for sudden market changes. 


I believe these features are rather easy for you to add into FSB programme, knowing your programming prowess.  I suspect that only thing that held you back in the past from offering these features is, how to integrate these features into the backtesting results, which is rather "impossible" to do, if you want to ensure backtesting reliability at the same time.

However, I feel that we don't have to always trade in such as way as being confined by "technology's limitations".  Because despite not having trailing features in my FSB EA, it won't stop me from wanting to use it when I know it can tremendously improve my results/profit.  We need to be creative and think out of the box and even if it can't be easily quantified by certain backtesting tools, that should not limit my trading style/preference.

So for the success of your FSB Pro users, I sincerely beg you to kindly put more thoughts and consideration for this proposal.

Re: Create Extra Trade Management features for FSB Pro Users

Hello Hannahis,

Just a quick comment on:  I have to apply a "blanket" rule

Why not get your external EA to manage specific groups of magic number  (as to not be a blanket) - then you can run multiple MT4 , each one looking after a specific group of trading systems (then it should speed up the execution).

I have used a few different EA developers in the past that usually do things within 5 days (but that was for Dukascopy's platform , not MT4).

I know this isn't what your after initally - but I imagine it will take some time for Popov to add the extra features,

smile

PT

3 (edited by hannahis 2017-09-05 12:33:57)

Re: Create Extra Trade Management features for FSB Pro Users

Hi PT (DoCZero)

Trust me, you haven't seen Popov capabilities yet.  If he really want to implement it, it's just a matter of days or weeks (I won't be surprise he can even do it by tomorrow).

Yes, there are many other ways to get around the "blanket" rule.  If I have only a few EA and 1 or 2 portfolio, that's manageable.  But I'm running nearly 30+ MT4 terminals at a given time (in various computers) and thousands of EA at the same time.  Such grouping etc is tedious and not manageable.

Let's hope Popov has a change of heart/mind and decided to re-implement this Profit Protection Features we all have been waiting for years to come (but the project of shelved aside after rising so much hope). 

Popov, I'm looking forward to have an early Christmas present smile

Re: Create Extra Trade Management features for FSB Pro Users

Hi, few ramblings from me to add in this topic smile Order is aligned with your list

1. Now the problem is that FSB trails only after bar closing and not during bar? If that is the case you can try to lower time frame, to get more bars and trailing stop more times activated. For example if you use 1h timeframe , and MA with 10 period, go to m5 and recalculate MA period to 10 * 12 = 120 (because 60/5=12 times smaller). Is this not the same? I am wrong here? You just get more detailed chart with more bars, but MA should remain almost same. And do same stuff with all indicators periods. I can see that there will be some cases where this stuff will cause some pain, because max period limit is set to 200, but you can change it in indicators code. Also backtest and strategy generation will take longer. Sincerely I would never use trailing stop without accurate backtest, and I bet that almost everybody would not use it, because backtest loose purpose to try it out to trade live blindly.

2. Would not use it without accurate backtest.

3. In my manual trading I saw that scaling out greatly reduce risk, when taking some partial profits, it would be great to have it. But there is some work around too, so no big problem if you do not make it complex. Let's say if you want to use strategy with 2 units, one exit after 20 pips, and other after 100, you can make 2 identical EAs with different TP, and give each unit separate life. Also in this way you can find out that using some exit unit makes strategy worse.

4. About news avoidance, not sure if you can make this more beneficial than turning them off before news manually, because not all systems should avoid high volatility, like break out/trend following. So you will need to check which strategies should be off and what on. Reading high impact news from one file without some categorization is not good idea in my opinion. But it can be done like using 2 strategy categories...

Re: Create Extra Trade Management features for FSB Pro Users

Also to add, if your problem is that you can not use trailing stop and other logic to exit on the same strategy, I am fully with you to change that, because some time ago wanted to have Friday exit and other exit logic to work together.

Re: Create Extra Trade Management features for FSB Pro Users

Last post from me today smile if you are desperate to have trailing stop, without using my method using lower timeframe, you can inject fsb EA's mql4 files with some additional function what you need. Used this way to add Friday close with different closing logic and exit spread check... After exporting EA from fsb you open it with mql editor and paste some code in needed places. It takes maybe 1 minutes when code is prepared. Probably mr Popov would help you with it if you ask him nice smile

7 (edited by hannahis 2017-09-05 16:39:12)

Re: Create Extra Trade Management features for FSB Pro Users

Hi Irmantas,

1. Yes, you can't have both trailing and your own exit rules together, you have to choose either one at this current version.

2. Trailing options: either Trailing at each bar's difference (which I don't recommend but if you want to be able to backtest your results, this is the only method of trailing that is quantifiable).  Another method is to choose per broker's tick (but bear in mind FSB has a "default" 10 steps, which means it will not trailing per tick but trailing with a minimum 10 ticks movement.  You can go to the relevant users folder to change this "default" setting.  Where? I forgot, ask Popov if you want.

3. Yes, I love to trade with News, NFP etc but there are some who avoid such situations etc So when I propose, I try to keep in mind of other possible trade management preferences that others may need.  Thus a general Trade management need to cater to these difference preferences.

4. I only use Scaling in but not scaling out.  But again, I'm asking for a general trade management to cater to wider range of traders.  Personally I think scaling out is not so good but that's because I don't know how to use the tools to my advantage.

5. Won't use a particular trading strategy such as trailing features without accurate backtesting?  Firstly, there are many other ways to quantify your trading results.  Backtesting is only one of them.  Secondly, I trust demo/live trade performance results more than backtesting (it's the closest to live/real trading environment you can ever find for forward testing, far more accurate than backtesting).  Thirdly one shouldn't let "technology" limitations, limits one's ability to make money.  Most of us have encounter times in our trade observations that our winning position lose those floating profits and if only we can exit other than waiting for our EA to "react", we could have "protected those profit" for turning into loses to our great dismay.  We wished to have additional and more dynamic closing methods besides our "strict" or laggy closing rules.   

So will I limit my trading style just because FSB or backtesting methodology/engine is limited by data structure?  A backtesting tool (unless, you are using tick data) can never replicate a real trading environment.  So no matter how "accurate" you think a backtesting tool is, it is "accurate" only by measure of limitations.  Not because it is accurate and that is is able to simulate an actual real live trading.  That for sure at current FSB bar open/close method of trading, is something manual traders don't (face such trading limitations) have to subjected to such trading methods.  Don't get me wrong, every software has it's own strength and limitations that are inherent to the "nature" of how it's backtesting methodology works.  Still by far, FSB is my No. 1 choice yet it is still a distance from my ideal one.  Thus I'm here to push the envelop to make it better smile

Ps: oh I see that you are online now...thought it's going to be your last post for the day? smile

Re: Create Extra Trade Management features for FSB Pro Users

Get less steep trend and your trailing will make more harm than good. it depends on what market phase (and exact strategy) you jumped your trailing test while demoing.

It would be nice to have quick real tick data to backtest (including dynamic spread) and huge news file for accurate news avoidance for backtest and for future trading. Someone said that you can not have it all.

P.S. this one will be last big_smile