Psychological trading help needed
Posted: Tue Jan 06, 2009 5:57 pm
Hi,
over the last few weeks I wrote my own trading simulation/optimization tool using data from http://ratedata.gaincapital.com
I don't trust the MT4 optimizer since ticks sometimes seem to be "synthetic" plus I cannot play with different spreads. And I cannot tell MT4 what to do during data gaps.
Well, the reason for this was, I had some "problems" trading TRO ideas manually and I wanted somehow understand the statistics behind it (my way of understanding things is often to program/reproduce them myself b/c I need very clear rules).
I have no doubts it is working, but I have doubts that I understood it all well enough (for example the exact meaning what a "stalling price" looks like).
I wrote a strategy that would go long when price crosses a 0.0025 line in positive direction (talking only about EURUSD here) and go short when it crosses it in negative direction AND H1 and D1 agree with that direction. I played with several (i.e. many thousand) combinations of TP and SL, but in the end there always was a loss.
On the other hand, I found that, doing the complete opposite (going long when H1 is red) can result in small profits if done right... no, this is no sign error in the code (I checked that even with MT4).
I am completely confused.
There must be something else I didn't consider, right? Maybe it's just the lack of trading experience (some unconscious thing that prevents you from trading in some situations).
May I go long twice during an hour? For example if price crosses 1.3925 upwards and then 1.3950 in just a couple of minutes? Or is the second order prone to be a loser? Of course I could just test this. But it is only an example for the things that I might just have overlooked.
over the last few weeks I wrote my own trading simulation/optimization tool using data from http://ratedata.gaincapital.com
I don't trust the MT4 optimizer since ticks sometimes seem to be "synthetic" plus I cannot play with different spreads. And I cannot tell MT4 what to do during data gaps.
Well, the reason for this was, I had some "problems" trading TRO ideas manually and I wanted somehow understand the statistics behind it (my way of understanding things is often to program/reproduce them myself b/c I need very clear rules).
I have no doubts it is working, but I have doubts that I understood it all well enough (for example the exact meaning what a "stalling price" looks like).
I wrote a strategy that would go long when price crosses a 0.0025 line in positive direction (talking only about EURUSD here) and go short when it crosses it in negative direction AND H1 and D1 agree with that direction. I played with several (i.e. many thousand) combinations of TP and SL, but in the end there always was a loss.
On the other hand, I found that, doing the complete opposite (going long when H1 is red) can result in small profits if done right... no, this is no sign error in the code (I checked that even with MT4).
I am completely confused.
There must be something else I didn't consider, right? Maybe it's just the lack of trading experience (some unconscious thing that prevents you from trading in some situations).
May I go long twice during an hour? For example if price crosses 1.3925 upwards and then 1.3950 in just a couple of minutes? Or is the second order prone to be a loser? Of course I could just test this. But it is only an example for the things that I might just have overlooked.