Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Doubleplay v.4.5 Expert Advisor, A new Beginning...

A few weeks ago, the new version of Doubleplay, which is version 4.5, was made available for download to all Doubleplay customers. I received the new program with both excitement and a little bit of concern as Doubleplay's money managment system was changed for a supposedly better one.

Backtesting results of the new version, available at halcyonfx.com (which is the developer's website), show the expert advisor being tested on the GBP/JPY pair for a period of 2 years. This backtests somehow increased my concerns. Even though the equity curve does seem much cleaner than before, with I have to say, increased profitability, there is an obscure risk factor surrounding this new money management system.

The system basically builds up position size as losses are incremented, which clearly makes recovery from losses much faster. But I cannot help to ask myself, what if the expert suffers too many continuous losses ? Will the expert drive the account to a margin call ?

The tests did show this troublesome issue to some extent, on all of the test, Doubleplay did experience periods of sharp draw down, that, although not available in the presented data, amount to almost 50% of the account by visual inspection. The ea did recover all losses and drew a nice equity curve on all of the graphs but... What if the market conditions had been worse ? Is the expert going to cause a margin call ?

I have never considered an expert with such a high level of draw down acceptable, so I should not consider Doubleplay v 4.5 as one merely because of this fact. I must say, I have run Doubleplay v4.5 on a live account since March the 17th and it does show me a clean advance with a gain of almost 5% on my account until now.

But what about those dark market times ? The ea seems to kind of protect itself by limiting the scaling of positions sizes with a top, but this does not keep me from worrying about such a high draw down in bad market conditions. I would have to say, there are other options, better options, out there right now. As always, time will tell if the expert has a high enough win:loss ratio as to keep our accounts safe from a kill. Don't forget to check out my ebook that explains expert advisors and reviews several commercial experts !

Monday, March 17, 2008

Ebook to be realeased soon !

I have been writing an ebook concerning expert advisors. The ebook will be available at a price between 10 and 20 USD, it talks about a few subjects. Ways to distinguish profitable experts from unprofitable ones, also reviews 10 very popular commercial experts advisors based on forward testing results and also talks about main expert characteristics and ideal expert advisors amongst other subjects. Stay tuned for the release !

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

God's Gift EA, 2 months, finally ... A loss !

First of all let me apologize for the diminished amount of posts I have published for the past month. I have been very busy with other projects so I haven't taken much time to write articles, on the other hand, I don't have many experts to review as I currently have only 2 in forward testing.

Now to the God's Gift expert advisor results... I have to say, I like this expert advisor a little bit more every day that I see it trade. It caught twelve profitable trades in a row, over a little bit less than two months. It has shown great accuracy with it's trades, only risking a moderate amount of pips (70) on each trade.

The ea attained it's first loss yesterday when it hit a stoploss on the GBP/USD after taking a dramatically wrong sell order just before 5 consecutive positive hours for the pound. I have to say, I am in part relieved by the expert starting to take some loses, I really want to see if the expert can live up to it's back testing results and provide a maximum draw down smaller than 15%. Currently, maximum draw down is 3.9%.

Well, I will review this expert again the following month when I hope we will have a better idea on the amount of draw down. If it exceeds 15% I will stop the expert advisor, if it does not, I will continue forward testing it until it does or until we have 2 years of forward testing. Best luck to you all on your trading !

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