francisfinley stimpy wrote: Mon Jan 06, 2020 11:20 am
Ok lets not derail the thread but I guess its helpful for others to read and learn - Xard's system ends up on most of the other forums around the world in multiple different languages.
I am not talking about the programming aspect - you are correct that you simply take the buffer if available and line them up. Where not available you just use the indicator within the EA. As I said, its less than a mornings work.
Some (massive) issues you are going to face;
-Range/chop - if you square the circle, it will always break. The market will ALWAYS break something you think has 'nailed it'. This is the biggest problem you will face in automating - any clown can make money in trends.
-Volatility/liquidity - Similar to above this will make or break you, just from 10pm UK and thin liquidity to batshit times of volatility you cannot statically forsee this in MT4 with the above. Random spikes for no reason are happening more and more.
-News - this wasn't so much a problem before but now the algos are going fucking nuts 24/7 - check out when selerity put out the wrong news via their tweet stuff and I think it was AUD shat itself 40 pips.
-Economic events - you have to calendar all that crap in. Doable, but I have seen minor events wreck stuff.
-Hedging/Recovery - another massive topic.
-Stop Loss/Take Profit - The biggest topic of them all.
Your 'solution' for repainting is just the same as reading the buffers and them all complying. The repainting point is more about backtesting and visuals. A repainting system looks great, hell, everything looks great in MT4 until you actually come to objectively test it. It all unravels very quickly and you realise you have nothing at all in terms of automation. You will soon realise how very limiting MT4 is.
Then there is the issue of valid backtesting - MT4 is already utterly rubbish for this, let alone trying to solution repainting indicators, let alone valid data - note every MT4 brokers data is different.
In terms of professionalism you have to look at the guys who have been around for years and contemplate why they can't get anything automated to pay for their lambo's/yachts/mansions which they still haven't got.... check out Hanover (on Forexfactory.com) & Steve Hopwood (Stevehopwoodforex.com) - they are perfectly competent MT4 programmers but they have stated they have never been able to get anything 'going'. You should digest that, they are way more competent MT4 programmers than I shall ever be, they are not mladen level, but they know enough.
Therefore, its not about the level of professionalism with respect to MT4.
So is it then down to the system/method you use? Yes and no.
As I mentioned above - retail, MT4, Day Trading is a completely and utterly different world to the system/algorithmic trading world employed by the big boys succeeding at it - they won't be using MT4.
What about all the social trading sites and signal copy services that are all 200% profitable per month you ask? They aren't.... I have tested those too. Its all nonsense, mostly scams, underneath they are just martingales.
*There is always one in a forum/thread that will say Jimmy Mcwherters EA does 500% a year....
If you have never seen their withdrawal statement into their bank from their broker then you can guarantee they are lying.
MT4 can be gamed - see here, metaquotes had this removed from youtube
https://d.tube/#!/v/mt4-gets69d/QmdLEC5 ... F7iFFHhf7K
99.999% of people 'trading forex' lose, not the 77% touted by your broker. Its bascially a giant Casino teetering on Scam.
You 'can' make money in forex if you have outstanding discipline along with emotional intelligence, if you have these you can make money trading.
If you don't its highly unlikely you will ever make money trading manually - even if your system has a 100% win rate because you won't have the discipline and emotional intelligence to employ risk and money management along with sound trade execution and trade management.
Note most professional traders only win 40-60% trades, most professional traders only return 5-7% a year.
The cards are so stacked against you its pretty silly.
People have wild get rich quick dreams and try to automate what they do manually and soon realise quickly they cannot, it is a completely different journey to embark on.
So choose, are you going to be a manual trader or a system/automated/algorithmic/quant trader?
I have never been able to replicate what I can do manually, via MT4 automated EA. Why? Because what you do manually is discretionary - closer to gambling than systematic objective process driven 'trading'.
So in conclusion, of course the above can be automated - will it return you a positive return? - I can already tell you it won't, I don't even need to backtest it or forward walk it, I know what each of these indicators are and what they are underneath and the limitations of MT4.
You can take the basic system above but it would take you months to years of mucking about before you realise that MT4 is not the way to go.
All you have is price and time within MT4
(digest that point), if it was that easy, there would literally be thousands of programmers making hundreds of thousands a year. There are literally none.
People that have, have had to refactor libraries and pretty much take everything out of MT4 and just use it as the pass through to the broker.
And to finish -
those that automate STILL sit in front of their system watching their automated system to check its actually doing what it needs to be doing. Those of you with those wild dreams of making an MT4 EA so you can sit on the beach or drive your speedboat are dreaming - it will never ever happen.
This is just some late night ramblings from me, probably all bollocks when I read it back tomorrow but hopefully it helps.