Krakoukas saying hi.

[krakoukas]

Well, I really enjoy reading Jack's posts, so I figured I'd register and say so here.

As for me, I haven't done a single live trade yet.
I'm a software engineer. I started looking into FX around mid-2009, playing around with MT4, EAs and demo accounts. I lost interest about a year later, mostly out of feeling discouraged at my overall inability to find an edge, with a fair bit of exasperation at MT4's limitations (if you suck at something, why not blame the tools..)
I filled up my spare time since with a little startup that went nowhere. I stopped doing that a few months ago.
Then I was playing around with my financial accounts recently, and remember about FX.
In retrospect, it seems like I wasn't that far off.
So I'm giving it another shot. I'm primarily interested by automated strategies.
MT4 has a handy highly customizable UI and a reasonable trading API, so it makes sense to leverage that for the time being, but I'm going to write the meat of my EAs elsewhere, using a fairly agnostic bridge to MT4 (keeping my options open to migrate to FIX later maybe.)
My most controversial attitude at the moment is that I'm not really interested in staring endlessly at a chart hoping to develop some "trader's intuition", partly because I suspect that's just not going to work for me, and partly because I have a busy day job.
I do have a number of ideas that could turn into an edge, so the plan is, beyond building a flexible trading framework, to try each of them thoroughly and see if any of it passes mustard.
( which doesn't mean it has to work "now", in my mind. A method that would have worked great 6 years ago still has value. It just can't be deployed blindly. Part of the fun is going to be to figure out when to apply which method.)

 

[jack]

Well, I really enjoy reading Jack's posts, so I figured I'd register and say so here.

Thanks! And welcome!

As for me, I haven't done a single live trade yet.
I'm a software engineer. I started looking into FX around mid-2009, playing around with MT4, EAs and demo accounts. I lost interest about a year later, mostly out of feeling discouraged at my overall inability to find an edge, with a fair bit of exasperation at MT4's limitations (if you suck at something, why not blame the tools..)

Firstly, given you were trying to create 100% automated systems, it's good that you approached the market trying to find an edge first before going live. Most people jump right into real dollars and proceed to pay market 'tuition' for the learning experience.

(To qualify the automated systems clause, I do believe that discretionary traders should go live sooner than later, but do so trading with as minimal risk/size as possible. The screen time and feeling of real money is required. This just doesn't quite apply to programmers who aren't going to take discretionary trades, as with writing algos, all that matters is finding an edge and exploiting it the best you can before the edge goes away...and the tools are available to test if the strategy works in advance before going live.)

I filled up my spare time since with a little startup that went nowhere. I stopped doing that a few months ago.
Then I was playing around with my financial accounts recently, and remember about FX.
In retrospect, it seems like I wasn't that far off.
So I'm giving it another shot. I'm primarily interested by automated strategies.
MT4 has a handy highly customizable UI and a reasonable trading API, so it makes sense to leverage that for the time being, but I'm going to write the meat of my EAs elsewhere, using a fairly agnostic bridge to MT4 (keeping my options open to migrate to FIX later maybe.)
My most controversial attitude at the moment is that I'm not really interested in staring endlessly at a chart hoping to develop some "trader's intuition", partly because I suspect that's just not going to work for me, and partly because I have a busy day job.
I do have a number of ideas that could turn into an edge, so the plan is, beyond building a flexible trading framework, to try each of them thoroughly and see if any of it passes mustard.
( which doesn't mean it has to work "now", in my mind. A method that would have worked great 6 years ago still has value. It just can't be deployed blindly. Part of the fun is going to be to figure out when to apply which method.)

I agree with your earlier comment about the frustrating limitations of MT4's API. MQL4 leaves so much to be desired.

That being said, there are other options for the more advanced programmers:

MultiCharts .Net edition for C# for instance, you can plug dukascopy, LMAX or InteractiveBrokers into it and the starter edition is free so long as you're not tracking more than two symbols at one time.

My main broker is about to release cTrader, and the cAlgo suite that comes with it is also C# based. So I'm looking forward to checking that out too..

--

Feel free to share your thoughts and ideas as you put your strategies into code. Neat libraries, coding tricks, and ways to get around MT4's limitations are always interesting to me and would help others out a lot who are in the same boat.

Plus, we have a good group of people here, so don't be afraid to puts around the community chat area or give you opinion in the trading threads.

Cheers!

 

[Piper]

Whohooo!Another software engineer,welcome..Altough its kind of a bit hard to adjust yourself to the probable mindset,instead of the mathematical always will work one(i had to leave that behind,yea its hard)

.. I'm primarily interested by automated strategies.
..

I tried that,without much sucess,except for some parts..Since the markets are ever changing,the automated strategies would fit the past,but the future(they usually fail)? Well i hope you will succeed better then me in that department...Best wishes in your trading..And remember,persistence..Persistence and persistence!No great result ever achieved without great effort!
Best of luck!