Welcome back, Meta-Traders.
Summer gave way to fall this past week in North America and sent the kids back to school and brought the big money back from the beach. This simple change of season seemed to flip a switch which lit the forex markets on fire. And after a long and listless summer season full of drawdown, I say bring it on!
Speaking of fires, we had some massive wildfires in the state of Texas as shown in the photo on the left. Texas has had a brutal summer with months of 100+ plus temperatures and no rain. Meanwhile, we have had so much rain in New York, I need to drain the swimming pool. The weather, like financial markets, have been dominated by extremes lately.
Monday was the Labor Day holiday and I used a good part of the day to get migrated to a new laptop platform with all my live accounts on one laptop and demos setup on a separate machine. I also revisited the parameter settings for some portfolios and made a few minor adjustments.
Tuesday morning brought some shocking news that the Swiss National Bank decided to massively intervene to weaken the CHF. "With immediate effect (SNB) will no longer tolerate a EUR/CHF exchange rate below 1.20 CHF. The SNB will enforce this minimum rate with utmost determination and is prepared to buy currency in unlimited quantities."
This shocker caused massive moves in EUR/CHF and USD/CHF. Fortunately, Atipaq went long USD/CHF just an hour earlier in 3 separate accounts at about 0.79 with a take profit just under 0.80. When the news hit, USD/CHF gapped about 300 pips to the upside and I took profits at 0.82 in both Atipaq Full Portfolio and Atinalla #3. Interestingly, I got taken out of the same trade in Atinalla #4 at exactly the take profit of 0.80044!
The difference in this case was the broker. Forex.com let me have the extra 200 pips, but FXDD took me out at exactly the TP. I went back to look at the FXDD trade history, and I found in nearly every case on winning trades, FXDD took me out exactly at the TP, with rarely any slippage in my direction. But for losing trades, there was nearly always some slippage against me, and rarely any slippage in my favor. Very interesting indeed and shows you why I will always have at least 2 different Forex brokers. Its also probably worth a chat with FXDD who seem to be taking a "heads I win, tales you lose" position on order handling.
Wednesday brought a nice rally in the equity markets and I took the opportunity to sell to open some September 130 calls in OIH for $4.5 against the position I entered last week in the low $129's. Come hell or high water, I'm going to book $450 in profit in each account next Friday. Sometimes writing options seems like taking candy from a baby, particularly if you are willing to assume the risks of a long stock ownership. Also, I'm coming to appreciate what a great trading vehicle OIH (Oil Service Holders) is. It is wonderfully volatile instrument with 11 points of range last week or about 8%. And its a pretty good bet that energy service companies underlying the ETF are not going out of business!
The rest of the week was all about the Euro which decisively broke out of a 4 month trading range to the downside. The breakout-based systems from Asirikuy handled it beautifully.
Atinalla #1 had a banner week rising about 8% with solid contributions from all 3 embedded systems. The best system of the 3 (Teyacanani) brought in a massive 445 pips on short EUR/USD position opened on Tuesday and closed on Friday.
Atinalla FE went on a tear last week and has now booked 7 straight profitable trades bringing in +453 pips. Recall this is a free expert advisor can be downloaded here Atinalla FE.
My own system FX-Regression took a string of profitable trades and gained about 4% for the week.
The only real bummer of the week was Megadroid Live which took a 6% loss on Monday evening. I also took a loss in a short AUD/NZD trade recommended by Andy Bush from CNBC's Money in Motion currency trading TV show.
Regarding demos, I have removed the demo accounts for COATL which I attempted to restart this past week, but ran into some technical problems. Also, I decided I don't really like the way COATL trades in the sense that it opens up many positions and keeps them open for days and weeks. I think sometimes causes it to get into position and less than optimal times and ties up capital for entries at better times, something Daniel calls "Startup time dependency."
Finally on Friday, the Equity Markets sank in a depressing fashion, losing nearly 3% for the day. At this point, I'm almost inured to the volatility. It seems like the market is pricing in a bad recession and accompanying drop in earnings. Yet is the end, its not clear that the earnings will suffer that badly. Also, bear in mind that the dividend yield on stocks will provide a support for good companies. So I'm continuing to bet equities will beat bonds and cash and expect I will be right if I keep I just wait out the volatility.
That's all for now, get some rest and enjoy your weekend.
PS - If you have some time this weekend, check out FXCM's on-line Expo Live at:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.fxcmexpo.com/live.
Hi Chris,
ReplyDeleteThanks for another great update :o) I just wanted to mention a few things :
- Yes, it is true that some brokers will never slip in your favour (only against you) this is why F4 experts will implement an internal TP feature which will only close trades when above or at the real TP this will ensure we get all the "juice" from gaps that may play out in our favour on news/weekends.
- Sunqu is being backtested extensively and we still haven't defined which settings should be used for demo testings. I would encourage you to run 20 year backtests (and at least run them five times to ensure reproducibility) before running this EA on demo. If you lack the time and/or computer power to do this I would advice you to wait until we finish this system's development before testing it on demo :o) (as testing settings which haven't been backtested doesn't make any sense).
- You need to give Coatl systems time as they usually take a few months to normalize due to potential startup point dependency. Coatl portfolios demand patience - as any other long term profitable system - and you have to let them trade through their cycles with a focus on long term statistics :o) Remember not to focus on short term results!
Thanks again for the updates and keep up the great work! :o)
Best Regards,
Daniel
Daniel-
ReplyDeleteThanks for reading and for the comments.
Looking forward to the F4 expert and I think it will result in some price improvement when closing trades. The only downside is that the resting TP with the broker is a fail safe if the MT4 platform goes off-line for whatever reason.
Regarding Sunqu, I did a 10-year back test. The only thing I changed was the committee size from 40 down to 5. I found the system to be profitable, though not as much as your other systems. Much work still to be done and testing is CPU intensive to say the least.
Regarding the COATL Demo's, I will restart them. I restarted 2 of the 3 last weekend and I just need to get the third one fixed.
Thanks again for the comments and congratulations on a great week for Asirikuy systems!