Probably all of you know the simple strategy which has been here presented in Weekly Scalping thread for over 2 years now. The basis is simple, you open one of 2 positions set at certain time, and which one gets hit, will be traded. Joel Rensink does have an advanced strategy called First Strike plus, where he sets orders according to last week's volatility. Because year 2008 has been very kind but also very harsh to this strategy and weekly scalping thread went to silence, i took a look and did some strategy modification + paper trading for year 2008, so i'd like to present you my results. Please note, i am just human and i might have made mistakes. I used IBFX chart, because i have good experience with accuracy of their charts.
The basic numbers (30 pip offset, 45SL, 135TP) were chosen after examination and statistics i did with hand (i also tried 50/100/300, 50/75/225, 40/80/240, 40/60/180 and 30/60/180).
Allright, here are the rules:
1) I did only EUR/USD
2) starting line is every Monday 06.00GMT open
3) both buy and sell orders are: 06.00GMT open +- 30 PIPS
4) If one order gets hit, the SL will be 45PIPS.
5) SL for the first order is also reverse order = if SL gets hit, we reverse position. The new SL will be again 45pips (= original first order). We do this only ONCE (so maximum 2 trades per week).
6) TP is ALWAYS 3:1 = 135 pips (3*45).
7) Money management. For the first order we use 5% of equity. For the second order we use 7% of equity. So all in all, we risk maximum per week 12% of equity. If we reach TP with first order, we have +15%. If we reach TP with second order we have +16% (7*3-5 = 16%). This is rather aggresive MM, some might consider.
- I didn't take into consideration, that if target wasn't reached, position could still be alive and in positive (or less negative). Any not-reached target was considered as full loss.
- First week starts at 7th of january 2008.
- I did round the equity results.
- The equity results are approximative, there are no commissions for trades included
- I also used exact numbers considering zero spread (which every good ECN should get you during busy hours anyway).
- They were alltogether 51 trading weeks (i didnt include the last one startin 22th of dec. 2008)
- I didn't check more back into 2007. The reason is simple, i believe that market conditions are changing rapidly and the old data don't have that much relevance anymore. 2008 was perfect, lot of ranging weeks, lot of strong trending weeks.
Results (30/45/135):
Out of 50 Weeks: 30 positive, 20 negative (60%). Out of 30 positive: 14 first order hit (47%), 16 second order hit (53%). Total number of trades: 78.
(p.s. i did some mistakes before, these are the fixed results, sorry for that)
When using DST (using 5.00GMT instead of 6.00GMT during DST):
Out of 50 Weeks: 32 positive, 18 negative (64%)
This was all done by hand and my goal here is just to show you, that basic idea of doing one or 2 trades per week starting on monday can be very profitable, if the parameters are set right. And they need to be adjusted every year. It would be interesting to code an algorithm, which would find the most profitable combination offset, SL, TP and you could also modify the open price (don't forget, i used 06.00GMT monday open). Also checking other pairs would be very intriguing and i'll try to do it in the next days. For now, i hope i gave you something to think about.
Well, life is never ideal , is it? After 2nd manual check, i did find quite a lot errors i did with 30/45/135 and the results dropped significantly. I will do some more examination also for higher offset (which basically made most positive-to-negative turns). Please excuse me, i am just human and pretty tired human for now