I’m providing some updates on my algo.
This morning, during a news release, the USD/JPY live and USD/JPY demo algos entered a profitable bullish trade as expected.
Since I did not want to tinker with the working algorithms, as I’d mentioned in the previous post, I did not fully update these algos with the new ‘stop override’ parameter.
However, there was another mistake that was intentional, but caused an issue.
The demo was set to check two things: if the size of the 5m candle was too small, and if the distance between last_close and stop was less than the stop_override, or 5 pips. In this case, it was. the last close was 144.687, with a low of 144.678. Thus, with a distance of only about 1 pip, the stop was moved to 144.628 on the demo.
However, on the live, it only checked if the size of the 5m candle was too small. This was not the case. So the stop remained at 144.668, one pip below the previous low.
The stop was not the issue, though. After this first check, the profit target is then adjusted to 2.5 times the stop. If this new profit target distance is less than 10 pips, there is yet another adjustment, to set the profit target to 22 pips. On the demo, this changed the profit target to 2.5 times 6, or 15 pips. On the live, because the 5 minute candle check did not return true, it multiplied 2.5 by the stop distance of 1. Thus, the profit target on the live was set to less than 10 pips, being overwritten a second time to 22 pips.
The live account set its profit target to 144.908, with the demo setting its to 144.838. The market reached a high 144.86, earning a profit on the demo, before getting stopped out on the live. It’s Friday, so it’s been only a week, but I am going to update the live to now match the demo account in its secondary check on the stop distance.
Both accounts are still one step behind the other demos in updating, but since they are still profitable (the live is no longer above $0 due to the inconsistent deposits skewing the dollar amount of the results), I will continue observing next week.
Futures
Futures is going exceptionally. I think the strategy works well. Some things need to be addressed, however.
I allowed 2 $600 moves to work against me today, ending the day with essentially no profits.
In the first case, the 1m made a great bearish reversal off of a 34 burst, early in the morning, straight to new lows. In the other case, the 1m made a perfect 34 reversal, but fell short and I ignored the big bearish bar that rejected the price near the highs.
Even though the first trade can be seen as a home run, I must take those profits and be more diligent. My focus was off today, costing me more than $3,000 in easy setups.