Ready to die ?

It worked as designed - closed the basked at 30% DD - it just hit the unlucky grid basket this time. It is inevitable with this strategy (grid/martingale) - you have to be willing, and capable, to float the insane drawdown - like -2500 pips in this case. The only way not to blow up is to trade very small compared to your account size. Eventually it usually comes back up. Now I wonder if this would work if the money management was changed. He made over 700 pips for end of Feb + Mar, and 400 pips in April; He was at around 200 pips for May before this basket went bad. Before this 30% blowout, the worst floating drawdown was less than -200 pips (-185 I think). What if the DD limit was around -200 pips (whatever account % that would be, like 2-3%, instead of 30%)? Then the worst case scenario would only be a basket loss of -200 pips (about 2 weeks of profits) instead of a -2000 pips blowout. But then maybe they happen more often, eh? If the winning % supports it, it would still climb.

Found another good grid+hedge+martingale EA. https://www.regnow.com/checkout/cart/add/38372-1?affiliate_id=599738 It's currently the TOP EA.

I was using gridmeupfx also but the current market conditions are just not for it.

Hi Brenden,

I am a former professional CDS trader, using GMU 3.7 for a couple of months now.
As I get into forex, EA programming and getting accustomed to your system, I have a few comments and questions that, I believe, might be of interest of the community:

- what are the main indicators you found useful to decide when to get in or out ? I am not asking for your secrets or how they mingle with each other, but just the few raw basics indicators you use.

- The question has been asked previously, but can we set precise threshold (absolute or relative) which supercedes everything else, which triggers the closing of all trades and stop the bot, until manual intervention. I experienced drawdown and I am ok with them with proper risk management, but I would appreciate a firewall, if market goes unexpectedly crazy one day.

- GMU does not trigger position during news, which I like very much, but carries existing positions into news time. So potentially a very strong adverse news can affect us. Moreover what does it open new grid trades when existing trades have been losing because of news effect ?


- Last but not least, there is no 'gain over the target' management. When the target is reached it is automatically triggered.
When I traded credit, we had trailing stop automatically adjusted according to our algorithm which were going up as trades got more into profit. Such sytem will set you up for (rare) big wins at a cost of a few bp in target profit. In credit it had a very positive expectation. In forex, I believe it may too. Have you looked into it all ? I have ideas and experience about it if you want to discuss.


Thanks Brenden for the quality of your EA and to have priced fairly enough to attract interested traders into the forex universe.
Regards,
David


  

Yes grid trading is a dangerous activity but if managed correctly then it can be profitable. Choose the correct pair, withdraw profits regularly, limit the number of orders raised and don't make the lot multiplier too aggressive. Backtests have proven profitable over the last 5-6 years (Dukascopy tick data) and time will tell if it survives longer term in a LIVE environment