Meta-Trader - Almost time for Reset

Welcome back, Meta-Traders.

With 2012 drawing rapidly to a close, its a good time for some strategy and planning.  Clearly, it has been a disappointing year for our Automated Forex Trading experiment.  We are approaching the end of year 3 of my 5 year plan.  After putting together a 16.94% return in 2011, we have taken about a 25% hit in year 3. I started the year with about $20,000 under management and as of today, I an down to about $15,000 so I have taken about a 25% loss overall for the year.

What's more disappointing is that the losses have come nearly across the board with nearly every account taking a shellacking.  And the only ones which did not get crushed are the ones which I stopped after initial losses. What's even more depressing is the fact that the losses I have taken this year wiped out my profits from year One and put the entire Automated Forex Trading experiment into the negative.

But nearly all asset classes have losing years and that's why we hit the Reset button once per year when managing our assets.  This allows us to wash our hands of whatever worked, or didn't work for the prior year.  It also gives us a chance to take stock of our situation, and re-balance funds as needed.   So between now and the end of the year, we will plan our asset allocations and get the funds lined up so we are ready to start trading the 1st of the year.   This is key since the first 10 days of the year are often explosive in Forex Trading capturing a disproportionate amount of the year's gains.

As for Equities this week, Apple had a big move on Friday trading down to as low as 505.75 intra-day, then (along with the rest of the market) staging a dramatic V-shaped reversal at about 11:30 AM.  This was right about when congressional leaders emerged from a meeting with the President with conciliatory language all around indicating the 2 sides were perhaps not so far to agreement to keep the US from falling off the fiscal cliff.  Also, notice from the chart that this is the 8th weekly down bar for Apple computer, and as Oliver Velez points out, things often happens in 5, 8, 13 and 21 bar patterns.  So Apple and the entire market are more that a little oversold, and discounting the worst case scenario from the fiscal cliff negotiations.  I used this opportunity to pickup a small amount of shares after having sold a few weeks back at about 608.

This coming week I'm going to start live trading 0.01 lots of my 5-minute intraday scalper system.  For more information on this system, see my post from a few weeks back 5-Minute Bar.  Along these lines, I uploaded to my blog these 3 files in a single file called 5-Minute-Bar.zip as follows:

Fx-Ma-Cluster.mq4 - Place into .\experts folder
MA-Cluster.mq4 - Place into .\experts\indicators folder
Triple-Ma-Template - Place into .\Templates folder

This system is based on the premise that you can do semi-automated intra-day trading on 5-minute bars on active pairs, EUR/USD, USD/CHF, AUD/USD and USD/JPY.  Check back next week to see how that worked out.

That's all, enjoy the rest of your weekend and have a great week ahead.