Former MANAGED Account Diskussion

This account is running my self-made EA, “YenMastX”, two years in the making (and still under minor development). I was going to run both my EA and Primeval 2.1 on this account and then separate the 2 EAs on the charts. I will do this IF I continue to run Primeval. But at this point I feel it may be better to just trade Primeval 2.2 on Primevala’s managed account and run my EA here. All profit growth at this point is from my EA.

It’s easy to tack my EA as I am running only Euro/Yen and latter will add Pound/Yen (two pairs that Primeval does not trade). So, in short, look for the separation of these two EAs in the future.

My trading privileges cannot be verified by ATC as they cannot (or will not?) allow this due to their servers being unnecessarily taxed as they claim. I don’t like it, but I do like the speed and dependability of execution with ATC, so this is the more important issue.

Cheers
Wayne

As of November 17 I am no longer running Primeval 2.1 on this account. I only ran it for about a week and actually lost about 70 dollars. I will try version 2.2 on Primeval’s managed account, but I do not have faith in this earlier version. So it is all my EA “YenMastX” from here on out.

My EA will prove the test of time as I have been developing and testing it for 2 years now. At the time of this post my drawdown is only 3.3% but as back testing and forward testing has showed me the drawdown will be around 15-20% which I consider acceptable. I can run on certain setting which will take the dd down to 10% but profit will be greatly reduced. I like the present settings.

Wayne

Looks good so far. Do you plan to sell the EA at some point?

Thanks for your interest, Jprize,

Unfortunately I won't be selling my EA but I do plan to use it for account management once I establish my track record. I am also working on a couple of features that will add more profit, pinpointing spots in which to multiply my trade size for scalps in addition to the bigger profit targets. Gains are steady, but not being maximized like I believe they can.

Thanks again
Good luck trading
Wayne

Frustrating night. I have a 'breakout' feature that should have caught the move up in EuroYen. Checking my journal i see it did not work at all. I will have to get with my programmer and find the bug. I also cut the EA off 1 hour before ADP (ADP and NFP are the only times I will cut EA off as potential volatility is too high) my goal is to keep DD to a minimum. Shot myself in the foot today.

Wayne,

That is a sexy graph, your efforts will make you rich :)

I wish you luck on getting clients, I have only been able to get them in person.

Hey Damon,

Thanks for the complement. Let’s hope we can both keep are charts looking sexy in the long run. We always hate the down times, but it’s the ability of an EA and/or a trading system to recover profit lost that is the basis of a true sexy chart here, right? Focusing on what pair(s) or strategy(s) work best for you is hopefully a key to success.

Fight the good fight


Well done Wayne,
Hope there will be more like you in MFxB.

Hi Wayne,

If you are interested you could open a managed account at my brokerage, as much I would hate the competition :) I would love for my clients to have good investments, and not all their eggs in my basket. One basket is not diversification. I would also like to diversify myself. Most of my clients are friends and family so this would be greatly appreciated.

My Managed account just took a massive hard stop draw down, after investigation it seems that money going in and out of my account screwed up it's logic (Actually froze it's logic as it was outside parameters, I did not have this same drawdown, in my personal account in the same brokerage. A very hard lesson learned as I could not have learned anywhere but in the PAMM account.

If you are new to PAMM, put in code that resets logic when balance changes. This is what I have had to do to never have a logic freeze again. Mine previously would look for change if trade happened, if no trade happened it would not check balance.

I am very embarrassed about my graph now. My hard stops are not meant to be hit, they are for very VERY bad case scenarios like a war breaking out. My real stops hidden and dynamic so brokers don't hunt them. I hope you can avoid my mistake.

Thanks for your kind words, Solar. We all need to keep positive and keep learning in this difficult business of forex.

Thanks also Damon for your account of how a changing balance might potentially effect EA operation (at least within a PAMM account). This is definitely something I will talk with my programmer about and research further. Very sorry to hear about your bad luck. You'll get back the loss.

Happy Holidays
Wayne

December 28TH – The Day of the DrawDown

I feel I must document this event for future reference.

I am quite depressed today and feel like a total idiot. About 30% of the time I manually cancel pending orders issued by my EA or take profit or losses early. This is not particularly bad in itself, though based on my experience so far doing so has actually decreased my profits as seen on this account.

Last night, however, I crossed the line, and took out manual positions against the signals of my EA. After Euro Yen ran up last night and then “pulled back” I was sure another run up was coming and I was mad my EA missed the run up (price moved too far too fast). Since I am moving my manual trading money to a second managed account at FinFx (where I planned to do manual and EA trades together only on that account) I had no funds to manual trade with except my EA accounts. But, hey, it was a sure thing, right?

Not long after entering my long positions my EA actually issued sell orders which I immediately canceled (since I knew better). I then turned off the EA and let my positions ride with TP and SL. I woke up to devastation of my profits and to a lesser extent loss of my investor profits (as I was not risking as much there). It was a big sell off.

I hope this lesson has hit home that (for me) manual trading that does not follow technical indicators is too risky and should only be done on a separate account and with very limited exposure. This one act has ruined my chart, made my EA look like a failure, and lost profit for me and my investors on my managed account.

When I get my funds in my new manual trading account I will only do manual trades there, but I had already promised no to do any manual trades on my managed account, so I don’t expect I can be believed. Maybe my honesty of admitting what I have done will pay off a few months from now when I will hopefully have an account to demonstrate where I am doing my manual trading and 2 EA accounts to demonstrate where the EA is trading.

The only solution I see is to get my manual trading account funded and never do another manual trade on any account other than that one. I have a strong urge to manual trade when I think I see opportunities, but I have not proven that I can be successful over the long term from this. My EA has a much better track record.

ERROR COST ME TODAY I was happy to see my EA was on its way to recovering its losses when I saw the EA (on ATC account) close out a position I was only down 30 and 50 pips on due to an error in the code. I see the error reproduced on backtesting as well so it must be something my programmer is responsible for from his latest work.

I simply will not trade money for anyone until I am satisfied there are no more errors of this kind. I can’t stand losing 3% of an account from errors like this. (luckily, I was able to cut the EA off on the FIN FX position before that trade was closed out as well).

The good news is I know exactly what feature is responsible for this and I was planning on modifying the feature anyway. This EA is still a work in progress.

A Note on the Different Activity Between the ATC and FIN FX accounts:

Numbers are deceiving. My profit has been going up on the ATC account the last 2 days because I have been cashing in on a couple of hedges I was forced to take because I got stuck holding 1 mini-lot of a long on euro yen. I took a gamble on my personal account and before I knew it I had to hedge to save a big loss.

I have certainly disappointed my investors on the managed account at FIN Fx as we have made almost no profit off the sell off in the market. I have had the EA off the last two days because I was afraid the BOJ would intervene (around the 80 level) on dollar yen, and as I was caught on the wrong side of the BOJ intervention the last time, I know how quickly price can rocket against the short here. Once again my reasoning cost us profit which my EA would have cleaned up on. I am going to try to take some steps to keep this situation from repeating.

I realize that until my EA produces spectacular results on backtests (though it does produce good results) and can handle every possible situation I have reason to be conservative with my investors’ money and intervene when I think situations are dangerous. At the same time, I realize my EA continually outperforms my conservative actions so I cannot justify my over-riding things so often.

MY SOLUTION will be to run TWO instances of mt4 splitting up the account equity (this does not mean creating two separate accounts – still one account). On one platform I will use a small risk amount 2-3% of the account to let the EA run with no manual intervention (except in the most extreme and obvious case) and on the second platform I will use a larger risk size, 3-4%, which I will allow my conservative manual intervention in (such as cutting the EA off, taking profit early, canceling pending orders, etc.).

If I am not risking much of my client accounts by letting the EA run itself I can sleep better and we should produce higher overall profit.

At least we have been making profit, but 4-5% a month is certainly below what my EA can produce.

Any comments or PMs are of course always welcome. I will also send a private email about this next step soon.

Best Wishes
Wayne

Hello Friends,

I am happy to announce the beginning of my new managed account at ATC brokers. I have been tracking my individual account with ATC for almost 5 months now, and now that account has been moved into a block trading account (and will continue to be monitored) and we should be up and running Sunday evening.

What I am particularly excited about is that given the larger equity in the managed block I will implement a strategy of splitting my normal trade size in half and leaving one half of the trades alone, allowing my EA to do everything. The other half will be mainly EA initiated trades that I will allow myself the latitude to cancel pending orders, take profit early, cut losses early, etc. as I have been doing thus far.

For the most part (in the last 5 months) I am not helping profits by my interference (far from it) but because backtesting shows me that if I don’t ever intervene with EA trades there can be rare events (2 or 3 in a year) of as much as 2 or 3 worst case scenario trades (-5 + %) in a row, and the only way I can attempt to prevent this is to intervene when I think I should.

Draw down has been kept from 7-12% so far and I believe this max level can be held here.

I am also so excited that my intense study of my EA’s logic and features is resulting in some new features I am developing that I believe will take the profit potential of the EA to new levels. I am frankly disgusted at the amount of missed trades by my EA but as I am overall continuing to make profit I have to go with it.

I honestly believe we will do a lot better in the near future.

I think my investors will see a new level of profit return within 1-2 months as I am very close to solving what I believe are some core issues relating to my EA’s ultra conservative operation that generates stability and modest profit return but misses too many good opportunities.

The future will be very exciting and rewarding for us all I believe.

Best Regards Everyone
Wayne

Friends, last week, as the yen pairs were slowly grinding upward, I was disgusted that my EA was not catching many of the opportunities in front of us. Moves that don’t pull back much keep certain indicators I use in the extended zones and we missed some of the trades. I’ve dealt with this issue for some time but I was not sure how to solve the ‘problem” without degrading profit overall (I created a couple different features that failed in backtesting so I don’t use them).

After more intense study, however, and some creative luck, I believe I have for the most part solved this core dilemma. My programmer has coded my main solution/new feature and backtesting has shown the most significant jump in profits I have ever had (as much as 35% increase with up to 20% reduction in Drawdown losses). I am so excited about this development I had to share it!

Today was another case of the type of missed opportunity I speak of. We caught the initial move up, but then stood on the sideline watching the market run away (my one weekday to be away at work was bad timing or I would have put us in manually).

The point is I believe my complaints about missing these types of trades will be finished soon and we will catch more of the action.

I have also just now implemented the dual platform approach (on ATC) where I will split the trade size in two and let my EA completely handle at least one half of the load. The other half will still be EA initiated trades but I will allow myself latitude to cancel orders, take profit early, etc.

I wish my timing was better as the market has ran up to extreme levels already, but we are doing long term trading here anyway.

The future will be good for us
Wayne

Hi Wayne,
Thumbs up for the good results.
Just wanted to give you an advice I consider very wise - if something's working fine don't change it.
We cannot have everything, we cannot catch every move. We're lucky if we have profit at all and you have it.
My quests for larger profit has always spoiled the initially good idea and transformed in some form of Frankenstein after the n-th change for 'good'.

Wish you luck.

For anyone curious about the different results today between fin fx (where we made 2.2%) and atc (where we lost 1.2%), I am reluctant to share the answer, but I like to keep an honest communication.

In short, I was running backtests on atc with my EA also running, as I have done 100 times before, and the only effect of this is that the backtesting can make my EA wake up from sleep mode when asleep from volatility, etc. (my programmer confirmed this to me tonight).

When I woke up this early afternoon I saw the EA was in sleep mode from volatility at fin fx, but the EA was not sleeping at atc and had put me in short on euroyen. I could have exited the trade, but we were up 25 pips when I left my house and the market reversed quickly when the BOJ further downgraded the outlook for the Japanese economy (this in combination with the EU comments that more rate increases will be coming). The former news release came after the move as is typical.

The bottom line is I will have to run backtests on a separate platform, but I have never had this event happen like this (my EA does not sleep that much). I apologize for the loss today. The good news is the new feature I spoke of – just added to the system – is working fine and is mainly responsible for the gains recovered tonight. The EA got us in quicker than we would have without the new feature.

We will get back this small loss and go on to news highs soon.

Best Regards
P.S. Thanks for the post Forexma, I will respond soon. I have been overworking the last couple days.

Hello Everyone,

I want to document the date of a change in things regarding my risk management on the managed accounts, and then share some exciting news. As of May 4, I reduced overall account risk from 6% to 3%. I hope to accomplish three things by this, 1) consistently hit a minimum monthly profit target of 5%, 2) reduce my stress from trading with sizes too large, and following from this second point, 3) To completely stop manual trading on the managed accounts.

I believe a clear picture of how I can successfully manage larger equity over the long term is now in focus. I need to reduce overall account risk so I will stop interfering with my EA and trying to manual trade. I was not doing this a couple months back.

In one sense I have been pulled into manual trades, and equally important, manual interference with my EA because I’ve been risking too much and I keep trying to hedge positions, scalp, and close out EA trades before my stops are even close to being hit. This has just been a reaction to risking too much and stressing out over losing too much of the account in one series of trades (remember I only trade one pair so risk is based on one series of trades, main order and pullback position(s).)

I have to allow the space of my stops to go negative 150 pips as I do in back testing, because this is what both back testing and forward testing has shown will ultimately produce the most profitable trades.

Reducing risk size, so I am not stressed when we are down 100+ pips will, I believe, produce the profit my EA and strategy is well capable of producing. I’m also destroying my charts and distorting my statistics with a slew of manual trades that I often close for a loss when I’m down 5-10 pips. I have now moved this “It has to go my way early on” manual trading strategy that is not working very well to my fxopen account. I’ll track it at some point.

So one final time I ask for your patience as I implement this new risk management strategy, that I must say, feels right. Since reducing my trading size I feel very comfortable with leaving things along and can actually sleep at night (instead of waking up every 2-3 hours to look at my monitors). I’m happy that I’m finally figuring out how to reduce stress and stop manual interference with this career path I’m trying to walk.

I know it’s not a smart business move to share that I have been struggling with the issues I have cited, but I will always be known for honesty if nothing else. Soon, I hope to be honest about the great accomplishments we are achieving. This brings me to the exciting news I want to share.
---------
First though, parenthetically, I have to note that we missed the short today only in the FIN FX account because in changing my settings a key feature was inadvertently cut off and the trade was missed (I have over 80 inputs in my EA and I messed up, sorry). A move like today is just the type of move my EA loves.

The exciting news is that after almost a year of frustration and continuous work trying to figure out how I can get my EA to catch the bigger moves like today without putting me into bad trades by ignoring the rules that keep me out of what I call extended trades, I believe I have figured out the answer to this dilemma.

It was a little over a month ago that I realized I could measure the speed of ema movement and create features using this information that would make the EA realize the strength of a movement in a new context and accordingly know when to ignore certain key rules that keep me from being put in extended trades.

Today I believe I have concluded my long term study and have figured out the features that will allow us to catch powerful moves in the market and even multiply trade size when such moves are taking place. Any currency trader knows this is when you make the important money, when big moves are taking place. This is when pips come the easiest.

I estimate in about 2 weeks from now we will see my EA coming into its own and producing more profit than ever before. Stay tuned for the future.

Thanks for reading my friends
Best Wishes to us all

Wayne

Last Update: May 13 at 04:41