Should I go live?

Hi,
First of all.. I wanted to make this post only after a month of constant gains and thought it would be a lot shorter.. If you want to answer my question but don't want to read all my 'story'.. go to my system page, check it out and live your impression.

To answer my question you need to know about me and my system.
About me
I first become interested in, let's say economy, about 2 years ago when economy became a constant subject on the news and it also coincided with my first job, so now I had money and had to give a thought about how to 'invest' them. So I started reading about stocks and thought that the only way to win a market is with a fundamental approach, after a few months I started a demo account on Investopedia and played around with stocks, made a 8% in a few months but it was not as dynamic as I expected it to be so I lost my interest and quit..
after a few months I saw a forex broker advertisement so I thought I should revive my interest in market and start playing around with forex.. looked for a demo account and found Oanda FXGame got used with a forex platform and started fooling around with different technical strategies, changing them day after day, building helper programs to get quotes from the internet and signal trades but I always lacked timing in my manual trading
so, one day, being frustrated that I cannot really test my strategy relying on my manual trades, I went to Alpari and got their MT4 and built my first EAs based on hedging/grid which continued to fail as there were still times when they were not online to trade.
About my system
So I thought of a new concept (based largely on volatility), implemented it, backtested to choose the best parameters and started running it on EURUSD, GBPUSD and USDJPY, after 3 days I thought it's better if I hedge it by running it with different parameters on some pairs, so I renounced on USDJPY and added GBPJPY and EURJPY with a different setup. Yesterday I just realized that my implementation is not the best (programming wise) and I reimplemented it differently. The new implementation is not exactly the same but it shouldn't give much different results, however on the backtests it gives different results so that's why I'm not replacing it and I'm currently running it only on USDCAD with the same params as on GBPJPY and EURJPY but it seem to lack the volatility it needs to compare it.
Also
I inted to start with 500$ (which are not a problem for me to lose, but I wouldn't play them only with the scope of learning, I want first to have a good chance at winning and only then go live). Do you think my system would perform differently on live (Alpari UK), are there regulations against intraday trading that would prevent the kind of trades I've been doing on demo?.
If you don't mind, I will keep this thread updated with the process till I go live.

I see the performance starts at March 23rd? So you've traded the new system for only a week?

If so, then I would wait to have at least a month of trading before going live, in order to have a bigger sample for the statistics of your system.

Also don't forget to test your EA for all the situations, since by your post I guess you're a novice mql programmer - in which case you need to make sure your program works exactly as you except it to - it's just too easy to wipe your account with a badly programmed logic.

Thanks for your answer aj but it's 8 trading days past already, not only a week :D
I know it's a little, for this strategy I would feel confident only after a month but I'd like you to try to see the trading stile of my EA, been trading equally in both directions on all currencies so it's not following a trend or something to change after a bit of time.
About programming, it's only a few lines of code, noting that complex to rise many scenarios in which bugs could happen, my EA must have got all situations already and did according to my intention.

honestly? trade it for at least one year.

nice moves in the market, took some hits that made me realize my settings for EURUSD and GBPUSD are taking big hits when the market is going mad like in the last hour which I don't like and so I'm going to change the settings for this two from Monday :D

Listen to to_ul - I have had several sequential profitable months and then still experienced failures. Learning more, making changes, being stupid 😁


Fortunately I have only been trading demo accounts. Keep you money and your hair 😭

There is an enormous amount of information to digest. I feel the only way to safely shorten the learning curve is to have a good mentor.

Bets of Luck!

You need to realize that there are many factors to the Forex marketplace.

In the simplest terms, the exchange rates are based on 'the fundamentals' (interest rates and the strengths/weaknesses of the various economies). Those factors are inviolate and drive the exchange rates over the longer time-frames.

There are many technical indicators (moving averages, support/resistance lines, trend lines, fibonacci's, histograms, channels, &c, ad infinitum) that will assist you in tracking (and hopefully predicting) the movement of the various pairs - based on the time-frame that you wish to trade and the s/l and t/p positions that you are comfortable in utilizing.

Economic (and world) news can temporarily disrupt/destroy any technical indicator that you wish to implement. Economic news announcements, even if the figures come in as predicted, can still have a major impact on the exchange rates; these news announcements have varying impact on the markets, ranging from infinitesimal (Italian used-car sales) to 'nuclear' (BOJ, ECB, FOMC, unemployment figures, &c). BOJ has been known to purposely buy/sell huge blocks of JPY just because they don't like the current exchange rate - if you get caught in one of those moves you'll make/lose extreme amounts of money! Unexpected world news (look back to the effect on the Forex markets on the weekend when Saddam Hussein was captured) can also have a very temporary, but disruptive, influence on the exchange rates. Ignore news announcements only at your own extreme peril.

There are Forex-investors who trade the news announcements - that's not for me. That usually requires a huge 'war-chest' and involves 'straddle trades'. Again, you can win/lose really big in a matter of seconds. EUR/USD can move 100-200 pips in less time than it takes to blink - just hope that you are on the right side of the trade. If you are not, even your s/l position can be over-run by 50 pips (or more) because the trade platform and the moving spread can't close you out fast enough.

So, in an attempt to bring this rambling to a close, can your EA factor in all of the above - plus a myriad of other factors that I haven't yet mentioned? EA's, really do only one thing well - give an indication of when to enter/exit a trade, over-riding the 'emotion' factor. Properly programmed EA's can make money - but I contend that there still isn't a better EA than the one sitting above your shoulders; alas, it too must be programmed correctly.

Good luck with your trading,
G'Jim c):{-

A couple of points that I failed to cover in my previous post:

Forex is a zero-sum/minus game - compare this to playin' high-stakes poker at a Las Vegas casino. For every hand (trade) there is a winner and a loser - and the house (broker) takes a percentage of the pot. The house (broker) always comes out ahead, regardless of the outcome of the hand (trade) - only the players (traders) win/lose.

The Forex game can also be compared to swimming with the sharks; you just need to make yourself so small, and inconspicuous, that you don't become a tasty morsel to be consumed. Get your little share of the feeding frenzy, but don't become part of the meal.

A scalper's motto: 'Take your 10 [pips] and run away, live to trade another day'.

G'Jim c):{-

# Profit: -$288.10

why go live? :/