Version 8

After watching my expert advisor in live mode, I had a few thoughts about modifying the take profit calculation, whick became the 8'th version. 

a report is available here.

An analysis of the results in terms of monthly profit factor and amount of trades is given:

Second week summary

This week the opened trade from last week was closed  in profit, and another trade was opened with low risk. The low risk mechanism is used to detect low risk situations, and then the expert advisors uses the low risk in the money management considerations. The low risk trade is still open.

First live week summary

Due to money transfers the expert advisor started only on Wedensday night. It started with two positive trades, which lasted about 36 hours. Afterwards another trade was opend.

The trading week is over.

Initial deposit: 21K$.

Status: Balance=23.3K$, equity= 24K$.

New version - 7

While I am getting ready to the live activation of my expert advisor I performed a few last (so I thought) optimizations, and a settings mistake led me to different settings with completely different results. The setting result was large targets. Since my expert advisor has special logic for closing the trade it compensates in cases of targets that are too far.

Since the change is far targets, I understood that trailing stop loss is  essential. That's how version 7 was born.

The new results are available here. Those results are remarkable, and I wish it will stay like that. 

Since I need more time to fine tune the settings, next week I will start live trading.

Last descisions before moving to live trading

I decided that I am going to run my expert advisor in live mode to trade automatically, without MBTrading. Why? I found a bug related to MBTraing API and it looks suspicious. If I, a simple API user, found a bug, it might be a sign for the future to come. I have a problem with Metatrader brokers (for example read it), but since my expert advisor has long targets it will be very difficult to bypass the market rates in order to make me lose. 

Also I chose an American broker since there are a few new limitations that protect the customers. I added a Skype dll to my expert advisor that will SMS me each time a trade was made or closed. I added global variables support in order to recover from shutdowns. 

That's it. I opened an account at the chosen broker, and I am going to start trading one week from now.

Launching in ten days...

It appears that there is a bug with MBTrading demo accounts, which was related to my problem. They SDK support guy told me how to bypass it and it works. The robot is working. I added a Skype plug-in to my robot, in order to send me SMS every time an order is closed, or being opened.

I decided to use Alpari at the moment as my signal supplier, and an optimization is being run in order to find the best set.

Next week will be used to final tests and checks, and afterwards the robot will be launched for the first time.

Metatrader platform difficulties

In the last 3 days I was busy debugging the MBTrading robot application. I had a problem related to closing the trades, and I am still in touch with their support team. Except that, the robot is ready.

I noticed a problem related to back test with Metatrader platforms - The Metatrader platform from Metaquotes is very fast, and very comfort to back test, unlike the Alpari platform. I compared them and Alpari is much slower. The second problem is that Alpari has different performance with the same data.

I need a signal supplier which is reliable, and it's platform will be able to conduct my optimizations rapidly. I am examining different brokers in order to find a good signal supplier for my robot.