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How to Trade a Rate Decision?

February 8, 2016 by Lior Alkalay 4 Comments

Most traders, when hearing the combination of trading and rate decision, have an immediate reaction. That is to avoid, avoid and one more time, avoid the situation.

If you are used to trading on technical indicators, then like most traders, a rate decision becomes your worst enemy. It’s a macro event that has deep fundamental connotations.

It can hit you like a black swan, and there is no technical indicator that can help you with that. So, the best idea would be to disengage, right? Well, not exactly. Here are a few tricks that I use that can step up your game on trading interest rates.

A Rate Decision is a Game of Chance

The first thing you have to realize with rate decisions (and, of course, I mean a Fed rate decision) is that it’s completely a game of chance.

No one really knows what will happen. And no indicator in the world can tell you with complete certainty what will happen. But you can have a good indication of what is expected and the market’s possible reaction. And that, really, is just enough. But unlike the conventional wisdom, the trick to playing this information is to go against the mainstream.

If a market is certain something is going to happen, in this case a rate hike, then it’s already positioned for it. That means your upside is high.

What if the market is caught off guard and gets a decision it didn’t expect? You could be drowned by a tsunami of traders is deep fear, eager to get out of their position.

So, if you went against the market consensus and bet on a rate hike it would have played out in one of two ways. If you were wrong, you’d think, oh well, it was already priced in. It was expected and your loss is minimal because the market was prepared for that decision.

Essentially, the move already took place, before you opened your trade. But if you were right and the consensus was wrong? There would be a tsunami, of course, but you would have been on top of it, potentially gaining big. In other words, you risked little for a potential big gain, a classic risk reward trading bet.

Your Tool Box

When it comes to rate decisions by the Fed, CME has the ultimate tool called FedWatch. The FedWatch essentially created a probability gauge for a Fed rate hike within a specific month. Let’s look at the probability level for a rate hike for September.

Yes, that’s the one where the Fed did not make a move. As you can see, the FedWatch tool indicated a 25% chance for a rate hike. That also means a 75% probability of no change. Now, as you can see in the chart below, as soon as the Fed announced its decision the Dollar index fell. But it fell by roughly 100 pips, hardly a hefty sell off.

Rate Decision

Source: CME

In fact, support levels weren’t even broken at the time this article was written. Meaning? If you had taken the other side of the market consensus (with the 25% chance), you got it wrong. In the end, you got hit by 100 pips–ultimately, no big deal.

But what if the Fed had made a move? As you can see, the Dollar index was already close to its support levels. That means that traders were skeptical.

A fulfillment of the 25% chance would have caught the market off guard and would have resulted in a panic rally of the Dollar index. Get the idea? Of course this is relevant for all FX pairs related to the dollar such as the EUR\USD or the USD\JPY.

Rate Decision

Source : Netdania

When It’s Not Worth It?

Of course, there are situations where it’s not worth it to engage. For example, if we move forward to January 16, you can see the market is pricing in a near 50/50 chance that the Fed will make a move. That means the market is not sure.

That means that Dollar index, or even any other Dollar pair, might swing either way. And that means it’s impossible to make an educated guess.

But what if the chances of a rate hike were higher than 60% and the Dollar was closer to its highs? A decision not to raise rates would have caught the market off guard. For a trader, it might have been wise to take a short position before the decision. Of course, there are many more layers and nuances that can be added which I will cover at another time.

Rate Desicion

Source: CME

In conclusion, there are no guarantees in life. But if you’ve ever wondered if you can step up your game on trading a rate decision, now you’ve got my two cents.

Filed Under: How does the forex market work? Tagged With: central bank, CME, Federal Reserve, futures, interest rates

Trading Platform Limitations

October 18, 2015 by Shaun Overton 6 Comments

This post was authored by Ben Fulloon, a respected trader and subscriber to OneStepRemoved.

I developed an awesome strategy with a drawdown ratio of 13.67. Sounds amazing, right? Too bad that my trading platform overstated the results by more than double!

It’s important to learn about both your brokers and platforms limitations. Sometimes these intricacies only become apparent through time and experience. It’s so frustrating when your trading platform doesn’t function or report results as expected.

In this article I’ll point out two limitations of NinjaTrader 7, one bad limitation and one which can actually turn out surprisingly better for the trader in certain situations. However, this is more to do with the broker I’m using and not the platform itself.

NinjaTrader is definitely not the only platform that has limitations: MetaTrader, TradeStation, X-Trader, Matlab, etc. all have limitations for quantitative finance.

I’ll just be writing about NinjaTrader in this article to keep it fairly short and easy to read. I am also not intending to make out NinjaTrader as being a bad platform either. But, there are definitely some improvements that could be made to make it a lot easier and more convenient for quantitative traders to develop and trade strategies.

The first quirk relates to the broker I’m using. Specifically, it’s the day trade margins that I care about. These day trade margins end 15 minutes before the close of the session. For instance the ES (Emini S&P500) has a day trade margin of $500, which ends at 4:00pm CT that then reverts back to the full trading margin of $5060 before the session closes at 4:15pm CT. (Times stated are correct at time of Writing, The ES now closes at 4:00pm CT and the Day Trade margin ends at 3:45pm CT)

I’ll show you a screenshot of the results of a day trading strategy that I developed. This strategy trades the ES, NQ (Emini Nasdaq 100) and the YM (Emini Dow) all at the same time. The easiest way to exit on close with NinjaTrader is setting “Exit on Close” to true which will then exit on the close of the session.

All trades together in the report

According to the results the strategy makes a total of $332,771.60 with a maximum drawdown of $25,912.27 since 2008 to now. This is a drawdown ratio of 12.84. That’s oustanding!

The issue is… and you knew there’d be a problem… is that the strategy exits at 4:15pm CT. Day trading margin ends at 4:00pm CT. The strategy is therefore highly likely to get a margin call with a small account size.

It makes sense to tweak the strategy to make best use of the day trading margin. Ninjatrader offers a custom session template, which in this case I made end at 4:00pm CT. The results of the custom session template is as follows.

Day trading with all instruments together

The exact same strategy applied to the same instruments to avoid a margin call makes $335,819.30 with a maximum drawdown of $24,560.51. This is a drawdown ratio of 13.67.

I didn’t change the strategy with the goal of improving the drawdown ratio AND the profit. But hey, I’ll take it. Finding a limitation in the platform can actually benefit you in some situations.

This strategy is based on trading 3 different instruments. The ES, the NQ and the YM. The problem is that I backtested it using an instrument list in NinjaTrader. What this means is they’re all tested separately. NinjaTrader then combines the test results for you as a total result like the results of the screenshots above.

Here’s what it looks like when you test them as an instrument list. This shows the different profits and drawdowns of the individual instruments.

Results by instrument

Now at first glance it reads that the trader would have made $335,819.30 with a maximum drawdown of $24,560.51 if they traded all three instruments together. Don’t you agree?

The problem is that this is incorrect. NinjaTrader doesn’t actually combine the results like you’d think. The trader still would have made roughly that money. However, all the statistics aren’t quite correct.

To show this I recreated the exact same strategy however it will trade the ES, NQ and YM all at the same time instead of trading them separately like it does by default. These are the results when you program it into a multi-instrument strategy

Combined trading

It makes $335,915.30 which is roughly the same amount, but it has a maximum drawdown of $59,937.60 instead of the $24,560.51 it originally looked like it would be. This makes it a drawdown ratio of 5.60, which is a lot worse than the original 13.67.

If the trader decided to trade based upon the maximum drawdown of $24,560.51, they may get a nasty shock when the drawdown turns out to be twice as bad as they were expecting.

Incorrect calculations on such an important metric could jeopardize an account. You might assume that you can get away with half of the equity that’s actually required to trade the strategy. Oops?!?

The misleading statistics in NinjaTrader makes this strategy look really nice. But when the drawdown is more than double what it appeared that it would have been originally, you might get a nasty shock.

This is why it’s important to learn both your platforms and brokers limitations as early as possible. You don’t want to learn these limitations the hard way.

In a few weeks time, I’ll reveal a simple way to create multi-instrument strategies which show more accurate metrics. Stay tuned for my next article in the series.

Filed Under: NinjaTrader Tips, Test your concepts historically Tagged With: drawdown, ES, futures, margin call, NQ, portfolio allocation, YM

Trade Oil CFDs with an Eye on Futures

October 11, 2015 by Lior Alkalay Leave a Comment

For most traders, the simplest way to trade Oil is through CFDs. Oil CFD trading is deemed a less costly option as CFD contracts are minimal compared to Oil futures contracts. That means Oil CFDs are easy on the margins. Furthermore, in a CFD trade, there’s no need to “roll” (or extend) a contract.

If you trade Oil CFDs rather than Oil futures, you can still use Oil futures data to make an informed decision. Then, you get the best of both worlds, i.e. the low costs of CFDs and the insight of Oil futures (usually WTI contracts).

Watch Oil Futures Volume

The first insight that Oil futures data can give you when trading Oil CFDs is volume. Since oil CFDs are OTC (Over-the-Counter) there is no volume available. By using the CME website you can view the volume of the front month contract in WTI. With that data, you can conclude how strong the momentum of a recent Oil trend. If you get high volume, then momentum is strong and, of course, vice versa.

Oil CFDs

Source: CME

Winter is Coming

Oil demand tends to jump during winter months; that, of course, is because demand for heating amplifies the need for energy. But what does it means in practice, as a trader? Say you opened an Oil trade, either long or short, ahead of winter. Demand expectations could change the trend once winter began. How could Oil futures help you?

Once again, the CME site can come to your rescue. Let’s say you’re in August and the Oil futures contracts for November are much higher. You realize that there’s a greater likelihood that Oil will head higher over the coming weeks. Now, what if the price is more or less the same as the Oil CFD contract?  That means there is a low expectation of rising Oil for the upcoming winter.

As seen in the sample below (from the CME WTI oil contracts) December and January are roughly at the same price of $46.41 for Oil WTI contracts. And that means low winter expectations.

There is one caveat; only watch the winter months’ futures when winter is really approaching. Otherwise, the price may not be that indicative.

Oil CFDs

Source: CME

Watch Open Interest Ahead of Inventories

If you trade forex then you know all about the monthly Nonfarm Payrolls report and how it affects the major FX pairs. Well, Oil has its own “Nonfarms,” albeit in miniature. Every Wednesday, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) releases its weekly petroleum status and inventories report.

Data on future and options (where the big money is) can come in very handy. Any open buy side interest ahead of the EIA release is quite revealing. That suggests that any fall in inventories could ignite a bullish bounce. So every Wednesday, you get an indication of a potentially big move and adjust your trade accordingly.

Oil CFDs

Source: CME

Spot Reliable Pivots

Sure, open interest can help you sense sentiment but there’s more. It can also allow you to spot pivots. How? Think of it; all of the big Oil producers have a certain price below which they will lose money. When you examine the Oil open interest chart, this time from options, you can easily identify that price by a high concentration of puts. Those puts option are in place to protect producers against an Oil collapse. Then you can rely on those pivots during your day trade or when swing trading.

Oil CFDs

Source : CME

Oil CFDs vs Futures

Of course, there are many more nuances to trading Oil CFDs which can be addressed another time. For now, though, understand that Oil CFDs are the smart way to trade Oil. Having said that, however, it doesn’t mean you can’t gain valuable insight from the derivatives market.

Filed Under: How does the forex market work? Tagged With: CFD, futures, oil, pivot point

SPY Crisis Strategy Questions

October 14, 2013 by Shaun Overton Leave a Comment

Ed wrote me an email asking how he can trade the SPY Crisis Strategy. He likes the idea, but the problem is that his account balance is too small. He was under the impression that he can only participate with a futures account.

That was true several years ago. Luckily, the brokers have wised up and offer traders many more options. SPY is the ETF based on the S&P 500. ETFs are technically “Exchange Traded Funds”, but you can think of the SPY as a stock. You would place SPY trades in the same way that you buy or sell any stock in your brokerage account. Wikipedia offers a great ETF explanation if you’re new to the concept.

The returns that I posted for the strategy assumed that you were trading SPY without leveraged. If you’re a forex or futures trader, there are a few options available:

Forex traders can inquire if their broker offers index CFDs, especially if you want to trade the idea from MetaTrader. A CFD stands for “Contract For Delivery”, but don’t worry. Your broker has no desire or interest to make deliveries on oil or the S&P 500 CFDs. CFD is a legalistic creation where the broker promises to deliver the object traded on a certain date. In reality, the contract is perpetually rolled 2 days into the future. The position allows you to hold the spot price of the S&P 500 without needing to purchasing any stocks or resorting to the futures market.

The best option for futures traders are the e-minis (Symbol: ES). You should trade the front month contract for all signals. This is certainly the most efficient way to trade the idea. The only reason I stuck with the ETF is that I don’t have to dive into messy backtesting assumptions with continuous contracts and rolling open positions.

NinjaTrader is a great option regardless of the instrument that you trade. It’ll handle any market that you select: CFD, futures or the ETF.

Filed Under: MetaTrader Tips, Trading strategy ideas Tagged With: CFD, continuous contract, e-mini, etf, forex, futures, S&P 500, SPY, stock

SPY Crisis Strategy

October 11, 2013 by Shaun Overton 3 Comments

Yesterday’s musings on an S&P 500 doji strategy led to a general discussion of stocks and market crises. I promised to analyze a price-moving average cross strategy and to analyze the performance in times of exceptional volatility.

The results are in and they’re exactly what I predicted. I’m shamelessly tooting my own horn on this one – it’s so rare where strategies do exactly what I predicts.

SPY Crisis Strategy Returns

The direction of the returns matches any traders definition of crisis and regular trading periods over the past decade

SPY Crisis Strategy Rules

The trading rules only initiate short trades. No long positions are allowed.

Enter short next bar at market when:
The price crossed and closed below the 20 day SMA on the last closed bar
The trader believes that a crisis environment either currently exists or is about to exist

Exit an open short trade when:
The price crosses and closes above the 20 day SMA on the last closed bar

The position size is equal to a fixed dollar value divided by the current share price. As an example, SPY currently trades at $169.24. If you wanted to control a position size worth $1,000, then the number of shares is the floor of $1,000/$169.24 = 5 shares.

This strategy is intended to be timely for the current trading environment. Based on all of my proposed definitions below, most of the crisis alarm bells are ringing at the moment.

Defining a crisis

The most difficult part of this type of strategy comes from defining a “crisis environment” quantitatively. Crises don’t happen very often by definition, so I don’t think it’s a worthwhile endeavor to try to quantity the crisis bit. That said, a few obvious crisis indicators come to mind based on basic market mechanics.

PE Ratio

The morons on Tout TV (CNBC and company) keep on screaming how cheap stocks are. I’m not a fundamental trader, but the PE ratio contains useful information. Even the most hard core technical analysis buff would agree that companies generating huge positive cash flow and earning growth have to appreciate at some point. The argument isn’t about if that type of stock will rise; it’s just a question of when.

I don’t see how anyone could possibly look at the current PE ratio of 19.3 and argue that stocks are cheap. They aren’t. Stocks are currently very expensive based on a historical comparison.

VIX

VIX is a CBOE benchmark index that allows traders to compare the price of front month options traded on the S&P 500. A more detailed explanation of the VIX is available on Wikipedia if the concept is new. There’s nothing magical about the 20 level. It’s my general experience that most traders consider that number the one to watch. They think of VIX < 20 as "normal" and VIX > 20 as a severe market move.

VIX danger level

Most traders regard a VIX above 20 as a dangerous level.

Put-Call Ratio

Options are effectively leveraged bets on market movements with fixed downside risk. When traders load up on puts, they’re expecting the market to fall. When traders buy more calls, they’re expecting the market to rise.

The put call ratio is simply the number of put contracts traded / the number of call contracts traded. A number > 1 means that more puts were purchased that day than calls, indicating an expectation of a market drop.

Theory has it that short term traders are wrong, making the put call ratio a contrarian indicator. I see the put call ratio as more of a lagging indicator.

ES Put call ratio

When a move is real and already happened, traders react too late and buy protection that they no longer need. The 2008 financial crisis a great example when the ratio spiked to 1.5, a wild number. Just in the past week the ratio went as high as 1.3 before settling back down. The volatility in the number indicates a panicky crowd in my opinion.

Margin debt

Leverage is a two way sword. The theory is that it’s a way to multiply returns by risking debt in the market.

Most traders, and especially retail traders, wind up using leverage as the rope to hang themselves with. Stocks are most commonly purchased with cash among investors. Unlike forex and futures where almost every trader enters a position with leverage, the average retail stock trader enters a position using only the cash present in his account.

An increased willingness among traders to move from cash to margin debt is typically a sign of froth, bubble fever or whatever you want to call it. The chart of margin debt from Business Insider and Zero Hedge show that stocks are currently trading near historical highs.

margin debt business insider

Margin debt Zero Hedge

Conclusion

The 20 day SMA price cross strategy is a great way to run account protection whenever market warning signs are going off. The warning signs may not predict the precise market turning point, but the strategy can function as an effective form of insurance.

The strategy would roughly break even over time if someone were foolish enough to run it that way. Say that you mistime the crisis. Big deal. This type of strategy can run for months without causing irreparable harm to the account.

The signals can run in the background. If you’re only a little bit right with your crisis predictions, the risk reward ratio is massively in your favor. If you’re wrong, the consequences appear to be slow losses that lose a couple of percentage points per quarter. If you’re feeling edgy, I think it’s a great strategy to run in the background to calm your mind.

Filed Under: Trading strategy ideas Tagged With: contrarian, dot com bubble, ES, etf, financial crisis, forex, futures, margin debt, moving average, Put call ratio, risk reward ratio, S&P 500, SPY, stocks, VIX, volatility

Donchian Channel

January 16, 2012 by Shaun Overton Leave a Comment

A Donchian channel measures the highs and lows of the price over a certain period in time. A lot of traders use this concept in their trading, although they are not familiar with the name Donchian.

Most Donchian channel expert advisors attempt to catch breakouts. I almost never see people use it with a ranging approach. Most traders want to ride the excitement of an ever-increasing market. The price, especially with the forex majors, often strikes the previous high or low. The price surges for a minute, only to retrace to well within the previous channel.

The hazard of using Donchian channels as breakout strategies is if you jump too early, you risk making a big fuss over nothing. If you jump too late, then you miss the move. I have not found any method for predicting when these moves will happen. My experience with fractal markets is that the period of a new movement, big or small, is totally random. The condensed trading time and low liquidity make it extremely difficult to try catching a move as it happens, at least on an intraday basis.

I have not done any testing on this, but I suspect that a ranging approach might work better. Most momentum traders are weak hands. They only play when there’s action. As soon as the action disappears or reverses itself, they all tend to leave the party. The dominance of retail traders favors a contrarian approach.

Most traders look at similar points to decide when momentum is truly occurring. They use Donchian channels, although different traders tend to use different periods. The important take-away is that the precise price that they care about tends to vary ever-so-slightly based on the period selected. The Donchian price is more or less the same, regardless of the period.

As an example, you might choose a lookback period of 55. The Donchian channel would consist of the highest high that occurred within the past 55 bars. The high could have occurred on the 55th previous bar or 10 bars ago. Time is ignored. The channel’s low corresponds to the lowest low in 55 bars or periods.

Turtle Traders

The most famous Donchian channel method comes from Richard Dennis and his Turtle traders. Dennis and friend argued over whether good traders were made or born. As wildly successful traders, they had several million dollars at their disposal to settle the bet.

The system used the 55 period high and low to determine the entry. When today’s price strikes the highest daily high in the past 55 trading days plus one tick, the trader enters at market. The system focused on commodity futures.

Most people tend to focus on the methodology that they used to pick the market direction. The original turtles argued that their success came from the unique money management and portfolio selection methodology that they used.

As a winning trade increased in value, the Turtle Trader added a second trade to his floating winner. They used recent volatility and their own risk variable, called N, to determine how far or near the second entry should occur from the original. They would do this up to 4 times, eventually letting their massive winners ride for months.

The system worked extremely well through the 1980s. My understanding is that the performance degraded towards the end of the decade.

If you’d like to read through the entire list of the Turtle rules, I suggest that you read through the Turtle Trader PDF that’s been floating around the web for years.

Filed Under: How does the forex market work?, Trading strategy ideas Tagged With: breakout, contrarian, donchian channel, forex, futures, ranging, Turtle trading

Expert advisor versus manual trading

December 29, 2011 by Shaun Overton Leave a Comment

A client from Malaysia emailed yesterday asking about the merits of trading with EAs. He went through the usual motions of buying “quite a number of EAs [that] promised to make millions and ended up crashing or losing my live accounts.” He is not the first, nor will be the last to experience the roller coaster.

He watched a number of videos on YouTube that emphasize the importance of discretionary trading over automated forex robots. They claim, correctly, that a human being understands subtleties that computer programs miss. They then stretch the argument even further and say that EA trading is a fallacy. Given his bad luck, he wondered to what extent that I agree with the argument.

The wrong people are involved in selling EAs (usually)

The argument oversimplifies a difficult concept. Many of you know that I’m a self-confessed math geek. I like numbers. They are logical and they do not vary. What appeals so strongly to me about trading is that you can take a complex process and mold it into a set of logical rules to follow. It’s a wonderfully challenging problem. You’ll never crack it entirely, but I know from experience that you can develop something that works.

My gripe with most commercial EAs is that the people selling them are not traders. They are internet marketers that stumbled into a highly profitable niche industry. They tick the right boxes for their audience.

Most US forex traders are white men between the ages of 40-65 with an unusually high tendency to earn six figure incomes. The marketing gang knows that themes of financial security and the idea of an job that’s not miserable sells well. They focus more on getting that message across than developing a decent product.

EAs are only as good as their designers. OneStepRemoved has designed 1,000+ EAs. I’ve never seen anyone accidentally create a profitable strategy. The ones that do turn out well almost always have years or even decades of trading experience. The rules that they propose usually include subtle distinctions that differentiate between various market conditions and types of volatility.

Those types of people are not marketers. They spent their career trading. It’s part of the reason that the meagerly stocked talent pool of traders does not get come into contact with the marketing crew. The other problem is that the guys coming up with strategies worth selling have no incentive to do so.

Unless you’re FAP Turbo or MegaDroid, the potential income for most trading robot oriented business is six figures. I’ve worked with several multimillion dollar trading educators. They seem to do better in the long run owing to the relationships that they form with their customers. They are the exception rather than the rule.

Now look at how much a truly profitable trading strategy can make. Millions. No marketers or affiliates required. No web site. Just a computer and a server. There’s no effort required beyond passive monitoring. If you had a trading system that generated blockbuster returns, would you even bother with trying to form it into a business? I wouldn’t.

Traders like this do exist. It’s just that they’re about 0.01% of the trading population. I know this from my brokerage experience because once in a blue moon I fielded their phone calls. They were the perfect clients. They traded all the time, rarely called (only people losing money call their broker) and when they did, it was for some routine matter like withdrawing profits.

The only thing that stood out about them was their account balance. These people are the source of the dream, and they’re what keep the remaining 99.99% of algorithmic trading developers going.

Knowing how sweet the setup is if you have something worth selling, and also knowing that the financials really don’t make sense for selling a blockbuster system, I honestly would not consider purchasing an EA from the internet. I would never yield control over my account to something that behaves in a manner that I don’t understand.

When the drawdown inevitably comes, I would have no way to feel comfortable that the strategy is actually viable in the long haul. I would suspect that the end is nigh and that I better shut down the account before the losses accumulate. How anyone can make an informed financial decision with strictly marketing material is beyond my understanding.

What most expert advisors miss

Trading rules restrict discretionary traders in a way that I find beneficial. It cuts down on their tendency to over-trade, forcing them into situations where patience more often that not wins out.

Todd over at Triple Threat Trading runs a trading education business. He loves to go on and on about how he makes customers quantify their approaches as a set of rules. It’s easy enough to lose money in forex or futures.

The rule based approach minimizes those hazards. Following rules eliminates many of the unknown variables from your performance evaluation. Knowing that you followed the rules and still lost reduces the blow to the ego. It’s easier to say “the rules lost” instead of “I lost.”

The logic naturally flows into the idea of automating the strategy. The chief advantage is that the computer does not fatigue or tire. It follows the rules blindly. So long as a human remotely monitors the execution, the semi-automated approach often works well for established, rule based traders.

Making a trading robot does create new problems like deciding whether to only trade during active sessions or to leave the expert advisor on 24 hours a day. These are usually problems that resolve themselves with a few months of hands on experience.

The main lesson that I learned while running my forex account up this year with a gray box EA is how important it is to stay patient. Most of the systems that I trade personally tend to eat losses way too quickly. I have yet to determine how to quantify patience in trading terms, despite my love for quantifying things.

Certain rules do work dramatically better during different market conditions. The key is to separate the conditions, then apply the strategy selectively. Most expert advisor designers try to develop a strategy that works all the time.

It doesn’t work that way. When the EA starts to hit a wall on the design, the trader responds with new additions and tweaks to force the performance to improve the general performance.

What I’m working on now is a set of rules to identify various market types. I like to think of it as “don’t compare lawn mowers when it’s raining.” There’s a time and a place for each approach and behavior. The trick isn’t so much the rules, but deciding when to apply them.

Categorizing the market helps make the strategy selection process far easier. If the market is highly volatile and ranging, then select a scaling strategy that works well in ranging markets. If the market is trending quietly, then perhaps a basic trend strategy would work perfectly well.

Filed Under: MetaTrader Tips, What's happening in the current markets? Tagged With: discretion, EA, expert advisor, forex, futures, gray box, manually, robot, trade, volatility

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