I want to draw upon the inspiration of others who have come before me and had spent their selfless time, energy and effort to craft up Trading Diaries.
I purchased this EA (
https://www.mql5.com/en/market/product/49187) at full price after doing a barrage of tests on it and will in due course be posting up some screenshots and reports. I plan to update this blog for a maximum of 3 months to give it a fair shot, with a target of at least 1 update a week. I might not answer every request for 'how is this EA doing now' because I have other commitments to attend to, but at least I've set out my target and if you don't see any update from me for 10 trading days (outside of the time when I'm off trading for Xmas), ping me!
Why I picked this EA to purchase and run live:
* Controlled SL - ratio of TP to SL is around 1:4
* FileSize of EA = 104kb; which suggests to me that it's more real code than 'custom historical data for backtesting' built in.
* Dev provides a signal for me to compare trades with:
https://www.mql5.com/en/signals/734610#!tab=history
* It trades probably around 3-4 times a week, but when ATR is truly low, there may be lull periods of up to 2 weeks or so when you won't see any trades.
* Average trade time is around 5 mins - with any luck this means that I can stop in time for XMAS and other big dates without too much grief.
* While BTs report that some months will see losses, the wins in a year *should* far outstrip the losses. Historically for the last 14 years or so at least, there are at most 1, maybe max 2 months of losses in a year, while several years see no monthly losses at all.
* I have done the BTs based on a variety of tick data sources including Dukascopy, TrueFX, Darwinex, Alpari ECN1 and Histdata. They all report fairly similar behaviour.
* I have optimized the risk settings and found that I'm most comfortable running this at risk of 2.5% for a very low risk strategy.
* The reported STR Quality Number and SQN Score based on my backtests exceed 15. Anything above 7 is regarded as truly good.
* It should return a CAGR of around 18% a year. Of course this isn't crazy high, but it beats my high street bank anytime. And can be a proper source of diversification of forex strategies.
There is always a risk that I am beginning the journey on a 'loss month'. That's why I opted for 3 months and of course the aim is to come out net positive. I will stop for Xmas at some point and resume around Jan 11th in any case. So there will be some weeks of low activity. History also shows that if it's running around Dec 26-28, it will take losses during that time; so follow the good old wise rule of not trading too close to Xmas when liquidity is low and spreads are high and flash crashes are looking for you, and you should be OK.
Wish me luck (and my favourite green pips)!
whisquer
