Here's this weeks results from the most promising of our robots currently being tested, and one that has been reviewed regularly on this site for a few months now - the Inside Bar robot.
A pretty crappy week, with this robot being down $135. Last week wasn't too pretty either.
This is how you want things to go!
Looking at the market, many pairs haven't moved much the last few weeks. Everyone was waiting for - wait for it - news from Europe. Combined with August holidays or something, which is seen as a low volume month.
Then when prices finally do start moving, they move rapidly, and this robot caught a nice AUDUSD move.
This move was seen across many currency pairs, and many of my other robots - which had been sliced and diced the last two weeks - caught this move as well and ended up either in profit or at least recovering a lot of their losses.
This reinforces the idea that "systems" don't matter all that much. Keeping out of choppy price action and setting appropriate stop loss and take profit levels can make much more difference.
Big price moves will happen eventually. Price will go up, or it will go down. Many systems will get you into trades. But keeping out of the chop the rest of the time is really more of a skill than catching the big moves.
Think of it as being on a sailing boat. There's no problem when the wind is blowing strongly and you're way out in the ocean. It's when the wind isn't blowing and you're close to the coast trying to avoid the rocks that will test your skills (and patience).
I have 3 other Inside Bar systems I'm trying at the moment, too. Two automated, and one manual. The manual system was doing extremely well, but also suffered this week due to chop. In retrospect, I should just have stopped trading, but was trying to follow the rules of the system and take trades when they were available. It was pretty easy to see, however, that, for example, the USDCAD was flat, and the buy and sell stop levels offered by the inside bar where above/below past candle wicks, and any orders were likely to get stopped out. And they were.
The automated systems have been posting losses for the last few weeks. I'm not sure why. They missed several good trades for some reason. Also the spread can make a big difference. Currently these systems are trading on 8 currency pairs, and the spreads can be quite large. Reducing the pairs traded to just a few low spread ones, figuring out how to filter trades in a flat market, and also why they are missing trades are the things to fix in these systems.
