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Showing posts with label understanding. Show all posts
Showing posts with label understanding. Show all posts

Friday, April 29, 2016

Trade Asirikuy Systems Risk Free The New Challenge Account Restoration Fund ~ forex trading jobs in kenya

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Today you will be witnessing one of the most important decisions I have taken within Asirikuy history. Several months ago I decided to create a fund called the micro-account stimulation project (MASP) which had as an objective the donation of 100 USD to a random Asirikuy member every month so that the selected member could create a challenge account and trade an Asirikuy system of my choice within it. The selected member would be given the 100 USD with the mere condition of running the EA on a VPS for two years and allowing me to monitor the account within Asirikuy. I was full of hope with this project and I hoped it will encourage people to open up mini accounts to try out Asirikuy systems and truly commit to their trading. However I was wrong about this. Today I will talk to you about the fate of this MASP fund and what will now be done with the money I have been putting aside for this project.

So what happened with the MASP ? People simply were not interested in my offer. During the past 5 months I have been contacting random Asirikuy members every month to tell them that they "won the prize" and would be given a free 100 USD from me to start their own micro account to trade an Asirikuy system. However the few who answered never really created the account or emailed me the details and the truth is that most members didnt even bother to contact me back. I also informed them they had won on the newsletters, the forum, etc and almost all the time I simply did not receive any reply.

I think that the reasons for this may have been several. Perhaps people are reluctant to receive money from a stranger (could be ?), perhaps they didnt want to open an account with any broker offering mini cent accounts, they didnt have a VPS or perhaps the price of the funding for the broker they wanted was too high. For whatever reason, the truth is that my very well intended Micro Account Stimuation Project failed and I now have 500 USD saved which clearly had a purpose they no longer have.

The solution ? I will now be changing the MASP to a project called the Challenge Account Restoration Fund. From now on I will be adding 100 USD to this fund every month (plus the 500 USD currently there) and the collected money will be used to restore the account of a challenger who reaches worst-case scenario levels within his or her account. Every system and every portfolio has a worst-case projected level and if this level is reached, I will send the owner of the account money from the Challenge Account Restoration Fund to replace their lost capital. Of course, the funds capacity is limited and it will cover older accounts and accounts with less initial trading capital with a higher priority. Up until now no account in Asirikuy has reached a worst case scenario but all current challengers can now be assured that if they reach such a case, there will be some insurance waiting for them :o).

The idea of this project is to provide challengers with some degree of compensation for the risk they are taking and to spend this money I was already looking forward to donate to Asirikuy members in a more efficient manner. This effectively means that people can now participate with cent accounts in Asirikuy in a Risk-free manner since the fund will obviously be able to cover the 30-60% worst-case scenario for small 100-200 USD accounts. As you see, I do this because I truly believe in my systems and I believe that a worst-case scenario for them is unlikely - although possible - and I want people to have some benefit when they take a risk with any new Asirikuy EA.

So now I can say that I am doing something no person involved in trading has ever done - to the best of my knowledge- I will be returning money lost by traders who use my systems if they reach certain draw down levels (provided they are Asirikuy challengers). I hope this encourages many traders to join Asirikuy and possibly some Asirikuy members to join with challenge account in this quest towards long term profitability :o).

If you would like to learn more about my journey in automated trading and how you too can trade automated trading systems with a high like hood of long term success please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or joining Asirikuy to receive all ebook purchase benefits, weekly updates, check the live accounts I am running with several expert advisors and get in the road towards long term success in the forex market using automated trading systems. I hope you enjoyed the article !

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Monday, April 18, 2016

The Indicator Series Understanding Bollinger Bands ~ forex trading jobs from home

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If you have been involved with almost any form of technical trading you may have heard and probably used Bollinger Bands. This technical indicator named after its creator - John Bollinger- became one of the most popular tools used by traders during the 20th century. Today I am going to dedicate this post to a description and analysis of this indicator and how it can be used to create successful mechanical trading strategies. I am going to talk about the calculation of the indicator, what it tells us about price action and how we can analyze it to find different types of market inefficiencies. As always the objective of this post will be to teach you how to understand this indicator better and how to design effective systems that tie its logical relationship with price in a rational manner.

So how is the Bollinger Bands indicator calculated ? This is one of the simplest technical indicators available to modern traders. It is formed by two parallel lines plotted around an X period moving average. These lines are distanced from the MA by a certain number of standard deviations. The value of the standard deviation is calculated at the same number of periods as the X period MA. To sum it up the indicator is formed by the following line :

upper band = X period MA + Y times the standard deviation
lower band = X period MA - Y times the standard deviation
central line = X period MA

But what does it tell us ? The standard deviation is simply a measure of how much price moved away from its average. A high standard deviation implies that price moved further away from the central average while a low standard deviation implies that price remained more rangebound and close to its average. When this value is low, volatility is low, when it is high, volatility is high. The plotting of the traditional Bollinger Band indicator with the moving average and standard deviation calculated on close prices over 20 periods is shown below. The upper and lower bands are placed 2 standard deviation measures away from the central line.
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The problem now seems to be to find an exploitable ineffiency using the above indicator. We must therefore find a behavior related to the standard deviation that will produce a forecast of future market movements with a positive mathematical expectancy over a long period of time. However when you attempt to do this you will find that most of your attempts will be frustrated by the fact that volatility related behavior - which is what the standard deviation of price tells us - does not appear to have a relationship with any particular inefficiency. In particular, attempting to capture volatility breakouts using Bollinger Bands is very difficult in forex trading and such a strategy does not hold a positive mathematical expectancy on most currency pairs.

Contrary to popular belief, there is also no clear statistical tendency when evaluating price "touching" the Bollinger Bands. If you attempt to create a strategy to profit from bounces from one side of the band to another you will find that profitable periods will exist but unprofitable periods in which the market will not bounce, but follow a particular band will happen. The same happens if you attempt to do the opposite. None of these approaches seems to give you a positive mathematical expectancy and in the end they do not lend themselves to the creation of mechanical strategies.

Is it not possible then to create a profitable system using this indicator ? Of course not ! Certainly there are ways in which this indicator might be exploited to give entries with positive mathematical expectancies. For example, statistically we might expect price levels outside the bollinger bands to be quite rare and in fact, significant price moves outside the bands might prove to be signals that price is moving decisively in that given direction. We could therefore use these signals to exploit both a short term retracement and a longer term trending movement, expecting price to return within the bands but to continue to move in that direction. Overall entry rules based on this approach have a positive mathematical expectancy meaning that they do provide us with a way to create Bollinger Band-based long term profitable systems.
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As you see it comes down to understanding the meaning of the standard deviation and how price movements that are statistically rare can be exploited to signal - with positive accuracy over the long term - price movements in a given direction. Bollinger Bands are therefore a simple indicator that may not prove to be as useful as traditional technical analysis wants it to be, but it does lend itself to the creation of profitable strategies both on its own and as a compliment to others indicators as shown by the Gods Gift ATR trading system. I am currently developing a few strategies based solely on Bollinger Bands. Will I succeed to make a long term profitable system out of this ? Stay tuned to check it out :o)

If you would like to learn more about automated trading and how you too can create your own systems to achieve success using expert advisors please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or joining Asirikuy to receive all ebook purchase benefits, weekly updates, check the live accounts I am running with several expert advisors and get in the road towards long term success in the forex market using automated trading systems. I hope you enjoyed the article !

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Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Getting Ready for the Future Metatrader 5 ~ forex trading jobs in bangalore

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Finally on June the first we saw the first official release of the Metatrader 5 trading platform which has the mission to replace one of the most popular and widely used trading platforms in retail forex trading. Definitely the task for Metatrader 5 is not easy since its predecessor is very powerful and has become the "industry standard" when dealing with automated trading systems for the regular investor. On todays post I want to talk to you about Metatrader 5, some of its pros and cons as well as the journey that I will be taking to produce mql5 versions of all Asirikuy trading systems. Is there anything good about Metatrader 5 ? Is it bound to be a great improvement over metatrader 4 or are we talking about a windows vista Vs XP type change ? Keep reading to find out.

I have to be honest with you and tell you my honest opinion about this new trading platform. I think that the people at metaquotes have done a good effort but I think they have neglected some key aspects that needed to be changed which could have brought an enormous benefit to the retail trader and their platform. Definitely there are several features I wanted to see on metatrader 5 that never got to be implemented like renko charts, tick charts, etc but perhaps the most important feature that wasnt implemented was real tick data logging and accurate backtesting.

Certainly the Metatrader 5 backtester has significant advantages over its current Metatrader 4 counterpart. Amongst these are the fact that data is downloaded and update automatically, there is support for several cores (multi-threading) and there is the ability to remotely login into your computer to see the progress and results of your backtesting results. Overall this will make the Metatrader 5 backtester much faster and robust, however the fact that tick interpolation algorithm is still used will make exploitation of backtesting reliability problems still a significant issue, we will probably still see the regular 97 USD expert advisor based on unrealistic profit targets taken from absurd backtests. However I have some hope in the sense that the interpolation algorithm was actually improved with the objective of removing these problems but we are still to see if this will or will not be true. The ability to use multiple pairs on backtesting- something that was previously not possible - is bound to be one of the greatest advantages of the Meatrader 5 backtester over the current backtester implementation.
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I am also excited about the Metatrader 5 new language- mql5 - and the included debugger within the Metatrader 5 platform. Any serious developer out there will tell you that the mql4 editor was a piece of garbage since no debugger was included and an extensive use of the Print function was needed to see where things were going wrong. However, the new debugger will make developing much easier and the actual addressing of problems in coding much easier. However I think that it was a very big and absolutely awful mistake not to include back compatibility with mql4 in Metatrader 5. Even though the new mql5 language is much better, including support for previous code seemed like something important to do since many people already have their strategies or efforts coded on the language of Metatrader 4. People will now have to pay to have their experts recoded or go through the process of learning a whole new programming language to be able to trade with the new platform.

So is Metatrader 5 a huge improvement over Metatrader 4 ? I would have to say that regarding automated trading the answer seems to be - we still dont know. We need to have a few live brokers that will accept this platform so that we can start testing mql5 systems. We will also need to first translate some systems into mql5 to compare backtests and see the actual quality improvements we get when changing from one strategy tester to another. I can tell you that I am excited abou the possibilities and I hope that the Metatrader 5 backtest will be all that it has been promised to be. I think that obviously our evaluation speed will be increased and our ability to use our systems on other currencies will also be expanded.

During the next few months I will start the porting of all Asirikuy systems to the new MQL5 language so that we can start to see some of the characteristics of the strategy tester and some comparisons between the simulations obtained with both backtesters. You can certainly expect some hopefully interesting blogposts about this during the next few months. If you want to learn more about automated trading and how you can develop your own long term profitable systems using sound trading tactics please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or joining Asirikuy to receive all ebook purchase benefits, weekly updates, check the live accounts I am running with several expert advisors and get in the road towards long term success in the forex market using automated trading systems. I hope you enjoyed the article !

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Wednesday, April 6, 2016

It is NOT Only About the Spread Understanding Market Depth ~ forex trading jargon

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Maybe the first thing that people new to forex learn about brokers is the fact that better brokers have better spreads. Since the spread - the difference between the bid and ask price - is the fixed cost per transaction then any given broker that offers you a better cost per transaction will ultimately be better from a profit wise perspective. This becomes critical when you are using systems that take profit in areas lower than 10 times the spread since the contribution of the market spread to your trading costs is very significant. However what traders often fail to notice is the fact that the spread is not enough to tell a brokers quality from another, often new traders will get involved with brokers who have "the best" spreads only to find that their execution is no where near what they expected. How can you judge the quality of different brokers besides the spread ? On todays post I want to talk about marketp depth, the nature of order execution and what you should look for within a broker besides an excellent spread level. This article will also further pinpoint the difficulties in achieving long term profitabilities with scalping systems and why great care is needed when choosing a broker for such systems.

What ? I thought that the spread was the only cost per transaction, determining broker quality - you might be thinking. However reducing broker performance to their spread level is simplistic and does not give you a full picture about the whole quality of your brokers trading operation. When you buy a given contract in forex trading, you are - ideally - filling a transaction from someone who wants to sell their previously held contract. For example, if you want to buy EUR/USD at 1.2345 you are actually buying a contract from someone who is selling it at 1.2345+spread. The dealer hands the contract over to you and keeps the Bid/Ask difference -the spread- as a comission.

However the problem comes when you realize that the number of contracts available at any given price level is not unlimited. Of course, not everyone wants to sell EUR/USD at a given price level or buy it at another and therefore the amount of liquidity available in the market is very limited. The consequence is that you might have a broker with a GREAT spread but it might have a very dry liquidity pool so you might be unable to get your orders filled at the price levels you want.
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Of course, the problem now comes to the difference between brokers with and without dealing desks. When a broker has a dealing desk it will try to fill all your orders, regardless of liquidity but it might not want to fill your orders at a certain price level if your orders are too large or too fast for them. The solution of the broker to this exposure you cause it is to simply requote you until you get a price level in which the broker has enough liquidity, hedging positions from other traders, etc. The end result is that you feel absolutely tricked because you are unaware of the true causes of why all this requoting has happened.

On the other hand, ECN brokers allow you to have second level market depth, which means that you are able to directly see the orders that are being placed and you can actually SEE how much volume is available for you to get. Of course, there are simply no requotes on ECN brokers because the transactions are done from peer to peer and everything is much more transparent to you (of course, someone can beat you to a transaction but then there is no requote but simply you "failed" to capture the transaction first) . Using an ECN broker allows you to see exactly how the market is moving and what volumes at what price levels are available for purchase.

For systems that need to trade fast having this added volume information and having transparency over execution is absolutely vital to have any chance of long term success. The fact that liquidity at different price levels is limited also points out why scalping systems may not have such a great chance at achieving long term profitability. Many people are fighting for very narrow price ranges with very limited volumes and the people who fail to get their desired price levels will definitely lose a significant portion of their profits. However, systems that swing trade and use very wide targets might no be affected by this fact simply because they can have a lot of flexibility around their entry points and deviations of +/- 5 pips are not bound to cause any disastrous effects in the long term.

So to sum it up, the quality of a broker is not only given by its spread levels but by the quality of its liquidity pool. When you use a regular dealing desk broker you will not be aware of this pool while on ECN brokers you will see all the action directly through second level market depth. Having brokers that allow you to see deeper is vital for people who trade scalping systems while it adds little value for traders who use swing and longer term systems. Nonetheless traders who use long term strategies but trade high amounts of volume may also need to see their brokers liquidity pool to catch better entry and exit points.

If you would like to learn about mechanical trading systems and how you can code your own automated trading systems with sound trading tactics to achieve success in forex trading please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or joining Asirikuy to receive all ebook purchase benefits, weekly updates, check the live accounts I am running with several expert advisors and get in the road towards long term success in the forex market using automated trading systems. I hope you enjoyed the article !

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