120115 - Watcher Update

At the risk of having a margin call that will completely ruin my mood, I have decided to post here my latest Watcher version results.

Watcher is my grid trading robot, built on the Metatrader4 platform. For the last 2 weeks, I have been trading it live with results that match the back-testing.

As of Friday afternoon Watcher is up +42%, and I am out of the market totally until Tuesday morning, or possibly NY session on Monday if I get back early enough from my current trip. The reason for taking a break is uncertain market direction from here. Futures open interest shows large speculators very short, the usual signal that precedes a rally. 

On a side note, my DR backup server is having some problems. I am using TeamViewer7 to control it remotely, and have some issues with logging in after reboots. This trip to deepest, darkest Quezon province has provided an excellent opportunity for me to shake this out.

I have been doing a LOT of reading this weekend, and have some great ideas on how to formulate a method for evaluating grid trading systems. This will allow me to perform significantly quicker testing for any new features. I am very keen on spreadsheet modelling, and this method will allow me to evaluate new techniques before coding.

My live experience is matching exactly with the forecast, though I am only shooting for 50% of forecast. Alpha-adding moves have added about 20% to the PL. On friday, when the fall started, I moved from a 20 pip to a 10 pip grid, and doubled my take profit to 20 pips. Then I just watched it fall.When I was down to the final 2 open trades, I switched Watcher off. As the price reached the trough, my last trade closed, and I was out of the market with +42% for the 2 weeks.

Now I am sure there are bruises to come, but manipulating the parameters on this version is way better than last time i tried this, so I will move to automating the main parameters, possibly running them from global variables again, rather than risk going through the EA inputs and screwing it up. Another thing I have done is to have a script to modify all existing TPs, so I can increase them independently of the EA.

I need also to do some tweaking on the prices at which I place pending orders, making them exact multiples of the grid width, and so avoiding the few situations where I end up with a couple of trades a few pips apart, which is inefficient.