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I'd like to share with my fellow MTabone members, an idea and the developing story of its realisation.

8 years ago, I was considering emigrating to New Zealand, I checked the entry requirements for settlement and soon realised I needed a degree. I started my Degree in IT with the Open University and took a course called "M206 An object oriented approach", I got 70% on my final grade.

4 years ago, I discovered forex, IIRC it was Oanda I first downloaded, I had fun crashing demo account after demo account and I didn't understand what I was doing. My interest waned and I forgot about forex for a while.

3 years ago, I discovered forums..... many forums for many of my interests from carnivorous plants to american cars and overclocking computers.

2 Years ago, I rediscovered forex, soon to be followed by.......wait for it.........forex forums. This was soon followed by MetaTrader and to my amazement EAs.
The machine trades for you, holy cow, I thought I was going to retire at 30 as a forex millionaire. I was spending in my head faster than you could click "apply to chart".
One of the 1st I discovered was a simple system by the guy who invented AshFX, it is called pipnailer, and although not profitable it did teach me a lot about forex and how things work.

I set about searching for the perfect EA, running demo upon demo with countless charts and EAs, I was soon to discover that would be working for a living a little longer.

I have tested more EAs than you can remember the name of, some work in some markets, some work in others. I'm not so comfortable that I could leave any EA on a large live account unattended 24/7. That's not to say that EAs are bad, just that money is money, whichever way you lose it. I'd rather it be on my own decisions.

So we come to the present, or rather June 2009, when I got an idea for an EA in my head. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense, the more it made sense the more excited I got, the more excited I got the more I thought about it....... ad infinitum, you get the idea.
I was distracted at work, thinking about it, I manually traded my idea soon to discover I wasn't fast enough to open trades when I should and the results were wrong. I carried on thinking about it. I asked several people on several forums to code it for me for free. No-one was particularly interested, and why should they be so interested in what this raving person is saying, another wannabe forex trader with another crazy EA.

After about a month of this, I cracked and decided to learn MQL4 for myself, what was in my head was simple, surely a few basic commands in the right order can't be that hard. I read 2 different tutorials and asked for help on tough bits on forums, after a few days of headache I got some basic code together.
I moved on to testing my EA, found a few bugs, fixed them, found more etc....More backtests and YAY no bugs. Dare I say it was even profitable on some demo backtests.
I set up a few demo accounts with different variables and set them all off for forward testing on demo accounts.
I then had another dilemma, if the EA is good, do I trade it, sell it, sell signals......
I'm not a greedy person, but a few extra quid would certainly assist towards my £200k of mortgage and debt. I have thought about this long and hard as I heard EAs lose performance as more people use them. In the end I decided I will trade the system myself and also share it with members of the site, I also think if you are too lazy to read this far then you will miss it too, I'm sure most of you are aware of the mt4stats pages and the account is updating to there daily on benscoob100100 dot mt4stats dot com and will be updating for the forseeable future. The EA I have made is not of great quality as far as programming goes, certainly not to Matt's level, but it works nonetheless. I have 2 bugs to fix before I share it with you and I will also post some instructions and default settings to try. I really hope I have not jinxed the EA by saying all this, but it has been a few weeks hard work for me and many many months of searching, only to invent it myself.

So there is my story, a chain of events that led to today. Funny how things work out isn't it.

hope to hear more of this and good luck with the bugs,if i could program I would help ,I to have being trying to learn MQL4 as well. I may never be a programmer but at lest it may help me know whats going on with the eas.

AN UPDATE:

Following my original post, Matt mailed me explaining his concerns about me releasing a "free" EA on what is actually a private commercial forum.
I agree I should have mailed him 1st and explained myself clearly, anyway, long story short, my programming is poor but good enough so show the system has excellent potential. Matt is making it into one of his polished EAs for us to play with.

Here is a chart of the system so far since I managed to fumble some code with less bugs



I have developed a method which I am sure can make a profit on a coin toss entry, many will stop reading at this point. Firstly I'll explain how I came upon the idea. I was messing around with martingale type systems and realised that you get lots of small profits but eventually and inevitably you get stuck in a trend heading the wrong way. This causes huge drawdowns and if you have a few pairs like this, it can hurt. I thought what if you could get caught with trends rather than against them, I programmed a reverse martingale method which, when caught in the right direction, would open more trades in the same direction and move the stoploss to protect what you earned already. This worked out OK but it hit lots of small losses before it caught a trend which ate into your trend's profits.
Then I thought, why not martingale with careful money management if it goes against you to remove the little losses. Hey presto, my eureka moment and the "Crazy Pyramid" and the "Stacker" EAs were combined into one EA.

I said earlier it should make profit on a coin toss entry. I believe this as which ever way the market moves you are highly likey to close for a profit. However, improving the entry will certainly do no harm, Matt suggested we could use entry rules from his other EAs, so you could have an AshFX entry signal followed by this logic and trade management. My personal favourite is a sweet little MA rule which will be added. I saw a guy using it on FF forum and liked it. Place an 80MA on your chart and when you are X amount of pips away from it you enter in the direction of the 80MA. Currently I am trialling 80 pips from 80MA and, as you can see the graph above, it seems to be a reliable entry.

That leads me on to after the trade has opened.
So your chosen entry has entered. Lets say 1 lot Long at 1.5000, the market moves with you and you find yourself at 1.5100 and you have decided at 100 pips you want the EA to lock in profit and try for more profit at the same time.
The EA opens a 2nd trade, lets say 1.5 lots at 1.5100 and sets the stoploss of both trades to your chosen value, lets say 15 pips.
Now you have 2 scenarios, the market may reverse, in which case you lose 15 pips on your 2nd trade and make 85 pips on your 1st. for a total gain of 62.5 pips @ 1 lot.
Or the market goes with you some more and at 1.5200 you open a 3rd trade, lets say this time 2 lots.
As you can see you can carry on like with with no real takeprofit set, just wait for the market to reverse and close you out, because once you reach this 3rd level you are guaranteed serious profit, if the market reverses now you close, 2 lots @ -15, 1.5 lots @ +85 and 1 lot at +185. For a total gain of 282.5pips @ 1 lot equivalent.

If the market goes against you initially, you re-enter at X pips further out, its up to you if you increase lot size or not, time will tell what the most profitable methods will be on this. Unlike martingale, you restrict yourself to how many levels you are prepared to go, thus avoiding the death trade of martingale systems.

If you look at the trade history in this format >>listed by close time <<you will see the trades are in blocks, every time a block closes it is in profit. Long may this continue.

I hope for this to become a good active thread, this EA is very versatile and can be used aggessively or conservatively depending on your style. It will be compatible with the EADA and I hope you will all download the client for that and share data so we can optimize this EA, there will be so many settings it would benefit greatly from a group effort. I will personally run around 20 clients, but after that the brokers start bumping my connection off.

I think that just about covers it, any questions please post them here for everyone to see rather than PM. If you feel impatient and want the EA now feel free to PM Matt and harass him:)

Not many people release live data for the public to see but I believe this will continue steady growth as it has been, hopefully long into the future.

Regards
BenScoobert

I think you covered everything Ben. Good job. I'm adjusting my time from the EADA to get the Pyramid completed this week. Truth is I could use a change of pace for a week.

Thanks again,
Matt

I think you covered everything Ben. Good job. I'm adjusting my time from the EADA to get the Pyramid completed this week. Truth is I could use a change of pace for a week.

Thanks again,
Matt

I hope I covered it all, I'm sure questions will come up.

Attached is my version of the EA, its rough but it works as you can see from my results and you can start to have a play around with it.

Today has been a lively day for it, 6 sets of trades, 3 closed for profit, 1 ready to close and the remaining 2 in small profit.

Attached File ( Number of downloads: 325 )
 THE_EA.ex4

A quick post to explain the inputs you can play with, but only on the version I posted, Matt's will be different.

From the top: note the format, 0.0012 = 12 pips

TP this is an ultimate tp goal, make it large if you plan for the system to reverse and close

SL This is how much the SL will move to when a trade is in profit and opens the next

initial SL is the sl before a 2nd trade opens

multiplier = when in profit next trade is this many times bigger, use 1 for same size

pips = the amount if profit you have when it opens the next trade and secures profit

ignore the rest down to dpips, all below here are for martingale when the market has gone against you

dpips is the amount of negative pips the trade is in when it opens the next

dtakeprofit is where ALL trades will close on that pair
dmultiplier is as above= so many times bigger than the last trade
extraorders is how many levels MORE you want after your initial trade

hope this helps

Thanks for the update Ben.

Here's a screenshot of what happened today.


Attached Image (Click thumbnail to expand)

And here is the trade list

Attached Image (Click thumbnail to expand)

1 image per post....thought we'd moved on since the 90's!

As you can see, it only takes a small reversal to turn a profit when the price goes against you. When we get a big move with the trade i'll post a chart, we've had 2 levels but 3 is the breadwinner.

I should have stopped the EA through the CAD news to be sensible, but I wanted to see how it responds. I post some charts later.
I am a little disappointed to see only 1 person downloaded my version of the EA, I had hoped for a better response.

Played out nice, a few levels deep and popped back a little for profit, nice.

Hey Ben,

I didn't realize you had this ea here, I'll give it a try and let you know how it goes

Hello stranger

This is a development on the thread on FF, it didn't attract much attention there despite nearly 200 downloads so I brought it here.

The system has moved on a lot since its 1st conception, I think you will like it.

Not sure which brokers my version will work on, but it works well on alpari uk for me.

I was using mt4stats for publishing my account info but it was down recently then back up, now it has been down for 2 days, I'm now in the process of switching them all to myfxbook, http://www.myfxbook.com/members/BenScoober...erts-grail/3791 , so far so good.

Could someone click that link and confirm it is working for me.

Being taken for a ride on the GBPUSD, unfortunately in the wrong direction, it will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Maybe the reverse entry would be better to avoid this, although the reverse is on a wrong ride too due to it taking the surge north before plummetting south on GBPJPY.

I guess we will soon find out, this EA has infinite settings and i can only test so many myself.

Hey there Ben, the link works fine.

Are the 4 systems listed there all running this EA? If so, what are the settings for each?

I beleive the grail original one is default with pairs with less than 4 pips spread

All pairs is as above but all pairs except scandinavian ridiculous spreads

The reverse is as above plus reverse to false

the 4th goes twice as far before opening a 2nd trade (80pips) so is more reserved there, but is more aggressive on the profit using a 3x multiplier and 40 pip tp

Hello stranger

This is a development on the thread on FF, it didn't attract much attention there despite nearly 200 downloads so I brought it here.

The system has moved on a lot since its 1st conception, I think you will like it.

Not sure which brokers my version will work on, but it works well on alpari uk for me.

I was using mt4stats for publishing my account info but it was down recently then back up, now it has been down for 2 days, I'm now in the process of switching them all to myfxbook, http://www.myfxbook.com/members/BenScoober...erts-grail/3791 , so far so good.

Could someone click that link and confirm it is working for me.

yep the link works.

I'm now set up on fxbook too.

I will be trying to get the ea to work on Fxdd again as that is my live broker.

Ben, does the EA start taking trades right away or does it wait for a signal of some sort?

I get the sense that the time frame does not matter for this EA - is this correct?

it enters around 80 pips away from the 80ma, looking for a reversal back to the ma

is you set reverse signal to false it enters with the trend away from the 80 ma

any time frame yes, low is more volotile, i use m15 for now

add it to GBPUSD it should enter right away with the state of it