Robot Results March 5th-10th

This is quite fun, reviewing robot results running on demo charts from week to week. Last weeks post and results are here.

The code for these robots is not available at present.

Generally my robots don't do very well. Out of the 30 or so I've been testing recently, they showed some success weeks ago, went through a period of poor results, and then in the last two weeks many have had fairly good results again. I would even call them optimistic, except I know their performance is just a result of market conditions, and once the market changes again they'll give their profits back.

So I've been reviewing 3 robots - Inside Bar, Pending Reversal Candle, and 4 Hour Break-Out Box. I'm going to add two more just for comparison - Daily Close Breakout, and Open-Close Bot H4.

Inside Bar

Last week this robot made $34.79 profit over 1 trade. This week it's down $314 in two lost trades. Interestingly, it only detected one inside bar. It placed trades above and below and got whipsawed out of both of them. I gave the code a quick look over looking for bugs, but I didn't see anything obvious. I might try running this on another currency pair next week.

Pending Reversal Candle

This robot places a pending trade only in the direction of an arrow, waiting for a reversal. Only two active trades this week, for $66.91 profit. Considering the leverage this robot uses, this is really quite low. I did close both trades manually, however, and the second one would have made a little more profit if I had left it. The first one could have been stopped out for a loss if I hadn't closed it, though. 

Also, it draws a red box around the last few bars, and actually places the trade above this box. The box drawing seems to be delayed and I'm not sure it's placing as many trades as it should. I'll need to review the code for this robot also. 

4 Hour Break-Out Box

This is a system and EA available from Forex Factory here. I'm allowing the EA to place trades (using 0.01 lot size), but am also trading it manually (using a lot size of 1). This week I added AUDUSD to the currency pairs I'll trade with this robot.

Last week it was up 53% with $2,669 profit. This week it didn't do so well, giving back almost all of it's profit. 

The problem was the market whipsawed like a crazy witch around the weekly open line, which this system uses to draw it's break-out box. Also, the 1st 4 hour candles of the week were very small so the breakout box was small.

This system could have avoided it's losses had break-even been set early after trade activation. I believe the EA does this, but not soon enough, apparently. Also, I wasn't consistent in setting orders. It could have recovered a little of it's losses from EURUSD on Friday had I set an additional pending SELL-STOP order, but by then I had pretty much given up trying and didn't think EURUSD would be able to descend that far.

Also, AUDUSD took off shortly after the week open and I completely missed an opportunity to capture any pips on that pair.

I still have hope for this system. Since I'm now trading 3 pairs, I should reduce the lot size and also monitor it a little more closely. I had pretty much neglected it this week. Or perhaps it's better to focus only on one pair?


Daily Close Break-Out

 

This EA performed great in back-tests until I discovered a serious bug which meant it wasn't actually working how I thought it was at all. The bug is fixed, but now the back-test results are horrible!

I'm fully expecting this robot to fail, but was very surprised by this weeks results. Up $812. 

The complete list of orders won't fit on the screen, but you get the general idea.

Open-Close Box H4

Once I coded a very simple robot which opened a BUY trade if the current bar opened higher than the closing price of the bar before it. It had a 5 pip stop-loss, and made over $100,000,000 in a 2-year back-test on EURUSD.

It was shortly after that I discovered just how screwed up my back-test history data was. Quite sad. I was very excited for a while.

This robot is based on that design, but it adds a moving average and runs on the H4 time-frame. When I first started back-testing it some months ago, it performed great for a few weeks, then started sucking. The demo account expired and I created a new one, and it's been performing poorly ever since - until last week.

It was down to about $4,000, but in the last two weeks has made about $1,800. There has been some chop  on the EURUSD, but apparently prices have trended enough for this robot to catch some good trades.

I closed a couple of trades manually in this last week, when I noticed the price beginning to lose momentum.