Breakout trading

I thought I'd take the opportunity to discuss the peculiarities of my trading with my EA and see if I can gather the collective wisdom of any other traders out there.

Here are a couple of things I'm noticing from the results from my EA.

Sell orders are far more profitable than buy orders. I'm familiar with this as a theory for breakouts. Human psychology seems to be better suited to believing that a break to the downside will go further than a break to the upside. I think our relationship with gravity has something to do with it.

However, I'm also seeing that Wednesday is an appalling day for breakouts. Without Wednesday trading Cast Iron Man would possibly be twice as profitable. This is the one that gets me. Does anyone have any suggestions as to why Wednesday trading seems to provide weaker breakouts than the other days of the week?

Hi Steve,

Send me a PM and I can give you a valuable PDF regarding breakouts and which days are the best performers from a lot of studies.

Actually here is the link instead: It's a couple of years out of date but I believe the same principles apply.

https://www.earnforex.com/forex-e-books/trading-strategy/Forex_Traders_Cheat_Sheet.pdf

Thanks for that much appreciated.

This is an interesting document - and I'll admit I only skim read it - however it doesn't appear to provide a reason for the statistical observations.

I'm looking for fundamental truths here as I believe that only fundamental truths lead to a better understanding of the market.
Drawing conclusions simply based on statistical analysis without any firm basis is poor scientific method in my opinion and generally leads to curve fitting your trading model.

Here's an example of what I'm looking for. Cast Iron Man Aud/Jpy trades are bad on Fridays.

Why is this? It's because a lot of the trades get opened during the London and New York session on Friday and there is no following Japanese or Australian market to provide the impetus for them as they have already stopped for the weekend. Therefore trading AudJpy on a Friday is probably not a good idea.

Trading breakouts requires a good mix of fundamental and technical factors though, agreed?

From a rational point of view, I have zero idea why Wednesday is a bad day for your EA. Have you looked at the backtesting data for day by day analysis?

How has the EA fared during this strong bull run? Have shorts still been successful?

I ran a quick test this morning on GbpUsd excluding Wednesday trades and it didn't corroborate the obversation over the longer term, so maybe it's just a freak anomaly. However it's very pronounced. It's possible that it's down to news releases. I wonder what day most of the major news releases are.

Check out the daily winners profits versus losers losses on the system here.

https://www.myfxbook.com/portfolio/cast-iron-man-tradency-feed/42411

As you can see, without Wednesday there would be double the profit.

I haven't checked the longs versus shorts during the recent bull run. When roughly would you say that started?

I would say mid June is a good area to look at onwards.

I think most big data comes out Thursdays and Fridays, although don't quote me on that.

So it's conceivable that pending the big news releases the markets are naturally slower on the Wednesday.

Checking from the middle of June, the bias for shorts winning is definitely not there now. Some pairs are better long some short.
If the system was just trading shorts though it would be in roughly the same position equity wise as it it with both longs and shorts in.

If it was just trading longs it would be about $4000 better off.

It's a tough one isn't it? Hindsight always adds confusion and doubt. How many years did you backtest prior to going live? Perhaps this is just a small correction and say 6-12 months down the line, things will be normal again.

I think running only shorts is a worthwhile test though as I'm sure you'll know most analysts are calling for EU to drop back below 1.19 within 12 months.