Something about every unsuccessful (yet) strategies/EAs

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itsaquestion
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Something about every unsuccessful (yet) strategies/EAs

Post by itsaquestion »

These days I'm thinking about one thing: We have many, many unsuccessful strategies/EAs, what will happen if I “reverse” these strategies, make buys become sells, sells become buys? Can a failed EA become a successful one by this way?

So I recoded some steve's eas, and ran lots of backtests and tried many parameter combinations, and I found the answer is NO.

This long-term loss always roughly equal to the total transaction costs (trades X spread), nomatter you use the original strategies or the reverse one. This means an unsuccessful strategy itself is neither batter nor worse than a series of ramdon trades, like tossing a coin.

The only good news is if you found some strategies killing you account faster than the transaction costs, reverse it, you may discovered a goldmine.
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Jemook
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Re: Something about every unsuccessful (yet) strategies/EAs

Post by Jemook »

A trader friend of mine and I have been having a bit of fun with this concept with some interesting results. We setup a trade copier on one account which sends the opposite trade to the other account. When the master account loses, the slave account wins.

1. The strategy is always trading against the trend.

2. There is a 2 pip limit to any trade on the master account so our biggest win is limited. Of course the biggest loss on the slave account is also now limited to 2 pips.

3. When price runs against us we add to any losing positions.

4. When we catch a trend that goes against us all of our losing positions create a huge DD and we get margin called on the master account and the slave account is closed in big time profit.

So, why don't we just skip the opposite-copying and buy instead of sell and sell instead of buy on a single account? Because it's more fun to blow an account on purpose than to see consistent gains LOL.
Please note I am no longer affiliated with Global Prime. I've moved on to my next adventure with Afterprime.

Catch me here: https://www.afterprime.com
garyfritz

Re: Something about every unsuccessful (yet) strategies/EAs

Post by garyfritz »

You can reverse some systems to turn them into winners, but that's fairly unusual. It depends on the system.

Imagine you have a trade with a 50 pip SL and a 100 pip TP. When you enter a signal the market goes against you 60 pips, then runs up 120 pips to +60, then goes back to your entry.

Both the "forward" and "reverse" trades will lose, because both of them hit the SL and not the TP.

If you run without any SL, it's a lot easier to reverse losers into winners. But if you're trading without stops, you probably won't be trading very long...
IamTHAT
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Re: Something about every unsuccessful (yet) strategies/EAs

Post by IamTHAT »

This topic has been discussed at length at FF at various points of time.
Reverse strategy is also as random as original.
There are hundreds of EAs not working, which one can one reverse and be successful?
itsaquestion
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Re: Something about every unsuccessful (yet) strategies/EAs

Post by itsaquestion »

The most interesting part is ,we do a lot of works on EAs and systems but in a long run we will still end up with some kind of random trading. We cannot event make it worse, just random.
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snowy
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Re: Something about every unsuccessful (yet) strategies/EAs

Post by snowy »

interesting thread, actually since a couple of weeks i'am testing around with some ea's and the trade copier "invert" system, as described by jemook earlier.

@gary: with this system u don't need a tp or sl on the receiver, the receiver-account is just reacting on entries and exits of the sender.

i'am testing this with nanningbobs autotrader "badly" configured on lower timeframes. on the m15 tf i have some success. :)
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